How so? So far as I can tell, in this war, nobody has died, and since we don’t know it’s a war against Voldemort again, we don’t know that it’s part 2 of a war where a lot of people did. Now, there’s a good chance that the war will result in deaths, but “I should go around killing innocents if needed to win the war” is a pretty extraordinary statement, and I won’t fault him for requiring fairly ordinary evidence to make it.
A war means people risk death, Voldemort or not. The last plot tried to have Hermione die in Azkaban, and (since Harry doesn’t believe Quirrel did it) seemed designed to kill Draco right away; the next plot may succeed. And people are dying in Azkaban all the time, second by second.
Pre-edit Harry was unwilling to commit to killing as an acceptable instrumental goal given a sufficiently high payoff. Making a goal sacred and of infinite value, while also wanting to balance it with other terminal values, is a contradiction. Harry realized this, and did it anyway, and that is a rationalist sin. He disobeyed the rule that “if you know what you’re going to think or do later, you should think or do it now”.
Post-edit Harry is willing to commit to killing if that’s what it takes. He asks Moody not to harm the suspect if possible, but he doesn’t say they should not attack him if they expect to have to harm him. He is both a better rationalist and a better person.
Harry’s discussion with Moody in 86 didn’t bother me. I’m referring specifically to the old version of 85. And remember that the vast majority of conflicts in the world don’t turn out to be “war”—thus far, we’ve had one attempted murder and a jail that’s basically a worse version of a stereotypical third-world oubliette. That’s well within the realm of things police deal with on a regular basis. Police don’t generally give themselves license to, say, burn Narcissa Malfoy alive.
(Anybody have a copy of old-85? I’d like to see the exact phrasings of it if possible, for continuing this discussion)
(Anybody have a copy of old-85? I’d like to see the exact phrasings of it if possible, for continuing this discussion)
“What’s that, Lassie? Somewhere a LWer is wishing they had made use of my archiving system so they could pull a particular page out of their local cache and upload it to Dropbox? Then we’d better hurry!”
The thing is that people aren’t perfect rationalists, and part of being a good rationalist is acknowledging your own flaws and limitations.
If you accept to kill, you’ll kill, even in situations where killing wasn’t necessary, because you’ll stop searching the hypothesis space when you find a solution that involves killing. Or because you’ll estimate that killing one will save two, but your estimation was flawed—you killed one, and yet the two still die. And it’s also something you should know about the way humans work, that once you did something once, it’s easier to do it again—and the killing curse seems to model that quite well.
Harry putting himself a “I’ll not kill” rule is him forcing himself to find solutions that don’t require killing. Especially when you see how his “dark side” work, finding solutions to “impossible” problems when really pressured to do it, it doesn’t seem irrational from him to test the hypothesis that he, with his rationalist training, and his “dark side” creativity, can find solutions that don’t involve killing. And that only if that hypothesis is falsified, he’ll resort to killing.
How so? So far as I can tell, in this war, nobody has died, and since we don’t know it’s a war against Voldemort again, we don’t know that it’s part 2 of a war where a lot of people did. Now, there’s a good chance that the war will result in deaths, but “I should go around killing innocents if needed to win the war” is a pretty extraordinary statement, and I won’t fault him for requiring fairly ordinary evidence to make it.
A war means people risk death, Voldemort or not. The last plot tried to have Hermione die in Azkaban, and (since Harry doesn’t believe Quirrel did it) seemed designed to kill Draco right away; the next plot may succeed. And people are dying in Azkaban all the time, second by second.
Pre-edit Harry was unwilling to commit to killing as an acceptable instrumental goal given a sufficiently high payoff. Making a goal sacred and of infinite value, while also wanting to balance it with other terminal values, is a contradiction. Harry realized this, and did it anyway, and that is a rationalist sin. He disobeyed the rule that “if you know what you’re going to think or do later, you should think or do it now”.
Post-edit Harry is willing to commit to killing if that’s what it takes. He asks Moody not to harm the suspect if possible, but he doesn’t say they should not attack him if they expect to have to harm him. He is both a better rationalist and a better person.
Harry’s discussion with Moody in 86 didn’t bother me. I’m referring specifically to the old version of 85. And remember that the vast majority of conflicts in the world don’t turn out to be “war”—thus far, we’ve had one attempted murder and a jail that’s basically a worse version of a stereotypical third-world oubliette. That’s well within the realm of things police deal with on a regular basis. Police don’t generally give themselves license to, say, burn Narcissa Malfoy alive.
(Anybody have a copy of old-85? I’d like to see the exact phrasings of it if possible, for continuing this discussion)
“What’s that, Lassie? Somewhere a LWer is wishing they had made use of my archiving system so they could pull a particular page out of their local cache and upload it to Dropbox? Then we’d better hurry!”
The thing is that people aren’t perfect rationalists, and part of being a good rationalist is acknowledging your own flaws and limitations.
If you accept to kill, you’ll kill, even in situations where killing wasn’t necessary, because you’ll stop searching the hypothesis space when you find a solution that involves killing. Or because you’ll estimate that killing one will save two, but your estimation was flawed—you killed one, and yet the two still die. And it’s also something you should know about the way humans work, that once you did something once, it’s easier to do it again—and the killing curse seems to model that quite well.
Harry putting himself a “I’ll not kill” rule is him forcing himself to find solutions that don’t require killing. Especially when you see how his “dark side” work, finding solutions to “impossible” problems when really pressured to do it, it doesn’t seem irrational from him to test the hypothesis that he, with his rationalist training, and his “dark side” creativity, can find solutions that don’t involve killing. And that only if that hypothesis is falsified, he’ll resort to killing.
I think Harry’s mistake is that he has left himself no setting between, “no killing” and “all bets are off”.