I suspect the Unbreakable Vow is being parsed here as adding high-level terms to someone’s utility function, and that that’s being interpreted as equivalent to erasing the previous personality.
I’m not so convinced, myself, neither that that’s the right way to look at the spell nor that values are that tightly linked to… not sure what I want to call it. Personhood? Unique agency? Whatever we actually care about when we object to murder, anyway.
EDIT: Never mind, after looking through a page or so of DanielLC’s comments I think that sentence actually expands to “[presumptively] giving people the death penalty [for breaking their Vow] with no way to ask for [...] exemption[s..., etc].” Pretty sure that’s not how the Vow works in Eliezer’s world, though, after reading the bit where Harry undergoes it.
I interpreted it to mean that people could no longer kill in self-defense, and there was no guarantee that they could be safe without ever killing in self-defense.
″...so shall it be,” Harry repeated, and he knew in that moment that the content of the Vow was no longer something he could decide whether or not to do, it was simply the way in which his body and mind would move. It was not a vow he could break even by sacrificing his life in the process. Like water flowing downhill or a calculator summing numbers, it was just a thing-Harry-Potter-would-do.
Don’t follow. You see “making an actually binding promise” as equivalent to dying?
I suspect the Unbreakable Vow is being parsed here as adding high-level terms to someone’s utility function, and that that’s being interpreted as equivalent to erasing the previous personality.
I’m not so convinced, myself, neither that that’s the right way to look at the spell nor that values are that tightly linked to… not sure what I want to call it. Personhood? Unique agency? Whatever we actually care about when we object to murder, anyway.
EDIT: Never mind, after looking through a page or so of DanielLC’s comments I think that sentence actually expands to “[presumptively] giving people the death penalty [for breaking their Vow] with no way to ask for [...] exemption[s..., etc].” Pretty sure that’s not how the Vow works in Eliezer’s world, though, after reading the bit where Harry undergoes it.
I interpreted it to mean that people could no longer kill in self-defense, and there was no guarantee that they could be safe without ever killing in self-defense.
No. I’m saying Unbreakable Vows kill people who break them.