Richard Bartle on WoW Torture: The Art of Persuasion

So, there is a quest in WOTLK which involves torturing a guy. Or, at least, that's how Richard Bartle would describe the situation. I, on the other hand, would say that the quest The Art of Persuasion involves finding an NPC (Who is a pain in the ass to locate, by the way) and using the Neural Needler on it three or four times until the NPC says a line of dialog and the quest is completed. This quest apparently pissed Richard Bartle off because, well, Richard Bartle just can't help himself. In assessing his "argument" of "zomg torture bad" I have two points.

1) Fuck you, Dipshit
As I recall when I did this quest I obtained the item, sought out the location of the NPC using Questhelper, went to the NPC's location, used the item, and then completed the quest. You'll note that my account of the quest leaves out the whole "torture" issue because not only did I not read the fucking quest text but there were also no acts of torture involved. Given that this is a NPC in a fucking video game the entire enterprise can be condensed down to a mechanicalistic account of the acts which occur to complete the quest. I found the NPC, I used the item. Quest done. No torture. Fuck you, dipshit.

2) Killing > Torture means we raise a shit about Torture?
This is the part of Richard Bartle's "argument" that perked my interest:

yes, killing is worse than torture, but that doesn't mean that if you kill people then torture is fine.

What the fuck are you talking about, Bartle? If, as your brilliant little hierarchy suggests, Killing > Torture in terms of the "worseness scale" then why the shit cocking hell aren't you raising a stink against the issue of killing? I'm just a Master's Student, but it seems to me that if killing is worse than torture then...wait for it...KILLING IS WORSE THAN TORTURE!

There are a metric fuck-ton of quests in WOTLK that involve "killing". Hell, there's one quest that involves blowing up 60 something monsters by exploding other monsters around them. Yet is this problematic? Well, of course not. Because, you see, torture is somehow quantitatively different to Richard Bartle, ethical fuckhead. Killing things is terrible, but as long as we simply kill things rather than torture things we're good to go.

Here's the point: If a logical and coherent reconstruction of one's argument is "It would have been ethically better to have killed the NPC rather than tortured and killed the NPC" then the argument fails. That's it. We don't need to debate or discuss it. We don't need to be any more deeply engaged in the conversation. Richard Bartle is arguing that the Art of Persuasion quest would have been less ethically problematic, less morally problematic, if we had simply killed the NPC.

SORRY! You fail.

And I'm not going to buy into your distraction of "When I signed up to play WoW I knew it had fireballs, so I expected killing." You don't get to argue for a moral high ground AND say "killing is fine because I expected it".

This shit is why I hate ethics. Because fuckheads like Richard Bartle stumble into situations which irritate them and then they try to articulate coherent arguments utilizing ethical hierarchies, baseless appeals to contradictory legal/moral/ethical systems, and false equivalency to try and pass off a half-assed, poorly construed, subjective amalgamation of bullshit and stupidity as a reasonable position.

Except it's not reasonable. It's not coherent. It's not intelligent. It's just Richard Bartle, shithead, saying "zomg torture", "Geneva Convention", and "child sex quest" within various rhetorical frameworks in the hope that we'll all be too distracted by his stupidity to focus upon the real question this whole debate raises: WHO THE FUCK IS RICHARD BARTLE?!