Earlier quoted context omitted.
when he decided to "order a hitman." I doubt he was ever that serious about hiring one. I'm not sure what's more horrific: - Someone who orders murders. - Someone who orders murders and doesn't think that seriously about it .
Doesn't matter. The condition will short-circuit at murder:)
Thoughtlessly ordering someone else to commit a murder is definitively worse than ordering someone else to commit a murder after careful and deliberate consideration, presuming all other factors remain equal.
In my view, killing someone just because it benefits you in some way is worse than killing someone because you truly believe that they deserve it--even if the thought process that led to the latter conclusion is provably flawed.
Not all murders are equally bad. The condition only short circuits at murder if your ethical framework has discrete values rather than defined intervals on a continuous spectrum.
Of course, ordering a murder in a stage production where no one actually gets killed is hardly even bad at all. It's almost like doing a mission in Grand Theft Auto, or doing a shot-for-shot remake of the baptism scene from Godfather II. Or perhaps it's the inversion of Ender's Game, where rather than the ethical burden being lighter because you didn't realize it was for-realsies, it is heavier because you didn't know it was fake.
RU may be an ass for trying, but the facts remain that no one died because of him, nor was anyone at any risk of dying from his actions. The cops put him inside a fake situation, and he acted according to his assumed role as though it were real. If I were judge or prosecutor, I wouldn't want to untie that knot either.