I believe Harry considers some punishments completely out of bounds, too severe for anyone. Certainly I do. The following may have no connection to the real reasons for this; but even without Many-Worlds you have a non-zero probability of personally suffering any possible punishment. Legally allowing a given punishment for anyone seems to produce a non-zero increase in this probability (even in a world without Polyjuice). Some possible punishments may have such negative utility for you that a course of action which avoids such increases, but which almost certainly leads to your death, would still have positive utility. Azkaban seems like a good candidate for such a punishment.
The following may have no connection to the real reasons for this; but even without Many-Worlds you have a non-zero probability of personally suffering any possible punishment. Legally allowing a given punishment for anyone seems to produce a non-zero increase in this probability (even in a world without Polyjuice).
On the other hand, reducing the deterrent for potential dark lords, increases your probability of winding up living under a dark lord at which point your chances of suffering horrific torture, either in Azkaban or somewhere else, is greatly increased. Assuming you don’t consider being wrongly punished in Azkaban under the current administration vastly worse then being punished and/or tortured under a dark lord, you can’t simply declare certain punishments out of bounds.
Another way to think of this is that any government that fails to provide sufficient deterrent to prevent successful overthrows will be overthrown. This process will continue until you get someone who is willing to be sufficiently brutal. So it doesn’t matter how nice your ideal government would be; if it can’t prevent overthrows, you won’t get to live under it.
That certainly seems like the relevant Star Goat probability. (I speak of the One True Star Goat, braise His mane, who will devour the souls of all who believe in God and make them stew in His Holy Bile for eternity, not the vile worship-demanding blasphemy proposed by the Restored Church of the Star Goat.) The Anti-Pascal’s Wager argument may not work here, though.
The part of your argument that deals with Dark Lords overthrowing each other until we reach sufficient SP assumes that some possible deterrent will stop them—although canon!Voldemort clearly did not fear Azkaban after enlisting the dementors’ aid, and he allegedly altered his own mind, ensuring himself another dreadful fate if he lost. The argument also seems to assume an inexhaustible supply of at least minimally competent Dark Lords. It may further assume that said Lords themselves can make a subjective distinction between ‘different’ people who’ve altered their own minds, repudiated their original names/origins and left bits of soul strewn around the countryside, since otherwise Voldemort would have no rational reason to object if some ‘other’ Dark Lord of this kind tried to possess him. More on that later.
In practice, the ambiguity in the term “Dark Lord” makes it hard to show that reducing deterrent increases the probability of Azkaban or some other torture >= Azkaban. Offhand I don’t recall canon!Voldemort personally doing anything worse than kill people, give them brief though intense pain or try to use the Imperius curse on them. I just realized something that makes our disagreement seem silly, but I’ll finish for the sake of completeness: while canon!Voldemort used dementors against Muggle-born wizards in a horrific way, I don’t believe we know if he favored prolonged happiness-free death such as we find in Azkaban. So wrongful punishment of the sort we find under the current wizard administration could easily seem far worse, for individuals, than canon!Voldemort’s version. A lot of Fudge’s victims might have living friends and relatives who would have died under canon!Voldemort, but the victims themselves wouldn’t remember.
Now, as I say, while I wrote this response it took on a certain deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic feel. Because it turns out the dementors, once they’d accepted canon!Voldemort’s offer, started multiplying (“like fungi”, according to J.K. Rowling, which seems compatible with the hole-in-the-world theory) in anticipation of having more victims to eat. As I understand it, no single Patronus works very well against dementors that attack from behind, from above and possibly from below you as well as in front of you. Nor can you shoot them in the head. If genuinely immortal predators multiply enough I think “deterrent” and “Dark Lords” cease to matter. So a non-Azkaban version of your argument might hold true with a vengeance if not for the plausible claim (by MoR!Voldemort) that the Ministry keeps increasing the use of dementors precisely to give the impression of grasping deterrence to the nominal decision-makers, and the established fact that Dolores Umbridge sends dementors after canon!Harry while serving the elected government. She didn’t seem to care if the evil creatures killed Muggles, whose population far exceeds that of Muggle-born wizards. The set of Muggles who nobody would miss probably exceeds Muggle-born wizards in number. Assuming Azkaban continues to exist indefinitely, what probability would you assign to the claim that nobody would ever try sacrificing them in order to enlist the aid of dementors for personal gain? Even if people who want to stop the ensuing disaster catch the culprit, the culprit can’t go to Azkaban, because we’ve already established that dementors can agree to release people in return for more victims. Going back to Dolores Umbridge for a second, we know she seems eager to join in the possibly apocalyptic Holocaust once canon!Voldemort takes over. This brings me to the last of my original points:
MoR!Voldemort can possess people. It seems likely that he plans to create and possess a dictator. If the government he secretly takes over will do whatever it takes to deter normal usurpers, people may not notice the change. Except that MoR!Voldemort might have a greater chance of shutting down Azkaban and finding some relatively certain way to avoid an existential threat. All hail the savior, MoR!Voldemort.
Although for him to know this would work he might need, say, a dictator with a known propensity for trying on Horcrux-ed rings, or a dictator who contained a Horcrux from the start.
MoR!Voldemort can possess people. It seems likely that he plans to create and possess a dictator.
We don’t know if he can possess people against their will. In canon, Quirrel allowed Voldemort to make use of his body. Even if he can, He’s claimed that he’s trying to set Harry up at the ruler of the country, and Harry is one person he almost certainly can’t possess.
In canon, Voldemort did possess people against their will, including Harry (despite his mother’s protection) in the climactic Ministry scene in Book 5 (although it was a struggle that Harry shortly won).
He inhabited Harry briefly, but it’s not clear that it afforded him a useful degree of control over Harry’s body, and as Dumbledore noted, inhabiting Harry caused Voldemort excruciating pain. Considering the way their magic has been shown to interact in MoR, I’d think any attempt to possess Harry would turn out even worse in this canon than that one.
wrongful punishment of the sort we find under the current wizard administration could easily seem far worse, for individuals, than canon!Voldemort’s version.
Furthermore even if one is a pure consequentialist, there may be a case for acting like a deontologist in some cases. While a perfectly rational entity can properly weight costs and benefits, people can’t. Chances are if a person’s moral code says “it’s a good idea to subject some people to mind rape for decades” that person has made a mistake, and one should account for that.
I believe Harry considers some punishments completely out of bounds, too severe for anyone. Certainly I do. The following may have no connection to the real reasons for this; but even without Many-Worlds you have a non-zero probability of personally suffering any possible punishment. Legally allowing a given punishment for anyone seems to produce a non-zero increase in this probability (even in a world without Polyjuice). Some possible punishments may have such negative utility for you that a course of action which avoids such increases, but which almost certainly leads to your death, would still have positive utility. Azkaban seems like a good candidate for such a punishment.
On the other hand, reducing the deterrent for potential dark lords, increases your probability of winding up living under a dark lord at which point your chances of suffering horrific torture, either in Azkaban or somewhere else, is greatly increased. Assuming you don’t consider being wrongly punished in Azkaban under the current administration vastly worse then being punished and/or tortured under a dark lord, you can’t simply declare certain punishments out of bounds.
Another way to think of this is that any government that fails to provide sufficient deterrent to prevent successful overthrows will be overthrown. This process will continue until you get someone who is willing to be sufficiently brutal. So it doesn’t matter how nice your ideal government would be; if it can’t prevent overthrows, you won’t get to live under it.
That certainly seems like the relevant Star Goat probability. (I speak of the One True Star Goat, braise His mane, who will devour the souls of all who believe in God and make them stew in His Holy Bile for eternity, not the vile worship-demanding blasphemy proposed by the Restored Church of the Star Goat.) The Anti-Pascal’s Wager argument may not work here, though.
The part of your argument that deals with Dark Lords overthrowing each other until we reach sufficient SP assumes that some possible deterrent will stop them—although canon!Voldemort clearly did not fear Azkaban after enlisting the dementors’ aid, and he allegedly altered his own mind, ensuring himself another dreadful fate if he lost. The argument also seems to assume an inexhaustible supply of at least minimally competent Dark Lords. It may further assume that said Lords themselves can make a subjective distinction between ‘different’ people who’ve altered their own minds, repudiated their original names/origins and left bits of soul strewn around the countryside, since otherwise Voldemort would have no rational reason to object if some ‘other’ Dark Lord of this kind tried to possess him. More on that later.
In practice, the ambiguity in the term “Dark Lord” makes it hard to show that reducing deterrent increases the probability of Azkaban or some other torture >= Azkaban. Offhand I don’t recall canon!Voldemort personally doing anything worse than kill people, give them brief though intense pain or try to use the Imperius curse on them. I just realized something that makes our disagreement seem silly, but I’ll finish for the sake of completeness: while canon!Voldemort used dementors against Muggle-born wizards in a horrific way, I don’t believe we know if he favored prolonged happiness-free death such as we find in Azkaban. So wrongful punishment of the sort we find under the current wizard administration could easily seem far worse, for individuals, than canon!Voldemort’s version. A lot of Fudge’s victims might have living friends and relatives who would have died under canon!Voldemort, but the victims themselves wouldn’t remember.
Now, as I say, while I wrote this response it took on a certain deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic feel. Because it turns out the dementors, once they’d accepted canon!Voldemort’s offer, started multiplying (“like fungi”, according to J.K. Rowling, which seems compatible with the hole-in-the-world theory) in anticipation of having more victims to eat. As I understand it, no single Patronus works very well against dementors that attack from behind, from above and possibly from below you as well as in front of you. Nor can you shoot them in the head. If genuinely immortal predators multiply enough I think “deterrent” and “Dark Lords” cease to matter. So a non-Azkaban version of your argument might hold true with a vengeance if not for the plausible claim (by MoR!Voldemort) that the Ministry keeps increasing the use of dementors precisely to give the impression of grasping deterrence to the nominal decision-makers, and the established fact that Dolores Umbridge sends dementors after canon!Harry while serving the elected government. She didn’t seem to care if the evil creatures killed Muggles, whose population far exceeds that of Muggle-born wizards. The set of Muggles who nobody would miss probably exceeds Muggle-born wizards in number. Assuming Azkaban continues to exist indefinitely, what probability would you assign to the claim that nobody would ever try sacrificing them in order to enlist the aid of dementors for personal gain? Even if people who want to stop the ensuing disaster catch the culprit, the culprit can’t go to Azkaban, because we’ve already established that dementors can agree to release people in return for more victims. Going back to Dolores Umbridge for a second, we know she seems eager to join in the possibly apocalyptic Holocaust once canon!Voldemort takes over. This brings me to the last of my original points:
MoR!Voldemort can possess people. It seems likely that he plans to create and possess a dictator. If the government he secretly takes over will do whatever it takes to deter normal usurpers, people may not notice the change. Except that MoR!Voldemort might have a greater chance of shutting down Azkaban and finding some relatively certain way to avoid an existential threat. All hail the savior, MoR!Voldemort.
Although for him to know this would work he might need, say, a dictator with a known propensity for trying on Horcrux-ed rings, or a dictator who contained a Horcrux from the start.
We don’t know if he can possess people against their will. In canon, Quirrel allowed Voldemort to make use of his body. Even if he can, He’s claimed that he’s trying to set Harry up at the ruler of the country, and Harry is one person he almost certainly can’t possess.
In canon, Voldemort did possess people against their will, including Harry (despite his mother’s protection) in the climactic Ministry scene in Book 5 (although it was a struggle that Harry shortly won).
He inhabited Harry briefly, but it’s not clear that it afforded him a useful degree of control over Harry’s body, and as Dumbledore noted, inhabiting Harry caused Voldemort excruciating pain. Considering the way their magic has been shown to interact in MoR, I’d think any attempt to possess Harry would turn out even worse in this canon than that one.
As far as Harry goes, I agree, but possessing some other dictator would be much easier.
Hear, hear!
Furthermore even if one is a pure consequentialist, there may be a case for acting like a deontologist in some cases. While a perfectly rational entity can properly weight costs and benefits, people can’t. Chances are if a person’s moral code says “it’s a good idea to subject some people to mind rape for decades” that person has made a mistake, and one should account for that.