Jeremiah Compson Morality

Just played this side mission, and like a lot of other people, I'm pretty confused on the overall morality or honor of it. While I didn't kill him, I've read you get honor for killing him. While I've felt most of the game's honor/dishonor is pretty on point, this doesn't sit right with me.

For those who don't know, spoilers, you meet a man in Rhodes named Jeremiah Compson. He's depressed and drinking because he says his life was ruined following the Civil War. He lost the home his family built and all his belongings, and he asks you go to the abandoned house to retrieve three things for him. In the process you learn about his life and how after the war it spiraled downward fast. In the end, you find a ledger he wanted, which reveals he hunted and returned escaped slaves in the prewar days. When the player returns, they tell him that that legacy should be forgotten, and his ledger gets scorched. The player can then leave or kill him.

The guy is an old man, unarmed, on his knees crying, and you're considered good for murdering him? All because he tracked down escaped slaves 40-something years before the game start? Granted, you do gain honor for helping him, but gaining more honor on top of that for murdering an unarmed old man is bizarre.

It's compounded by the fact that throughout his house you see his memories and momentos. The letters and portraits build him up as a poor guy who lost everything, whose family hates him, and whose entire way of life, awful as it was to modern-day sensibilities, was ripped right out from under him, leaving him with absolutely nothing. It was a somber experience and while I can understand Arthur or John, men who've been raised as borderline anarchists roaming the wild frontier would take issue with someone supporting slavery, I can't understand why they'd decide it's a morally righteous decision to kill the guy.

Reading people talking in pretty enthusiastic ways about how they set him on fire or stabbed him and shot his corpse or dragged him around screaming behind their horse, it just doesn't sit right with me. There was even a VG247 article where the author talked about how it was justified to kill him because he was a bad man and to let him live would be a disgusting action, while in the same article they decry players attacking or killing the suffragettes and making videos as also being disgusting and despicable. Indiscriminate murder is justified when it's someone who had different socio-political ideas than you decades ago? Do these people also gun down the Confederate veteran in Rhodes when they see him too?

So yeah, I dunno what to say really besides this side mission left a little bit of a sour taste to me. The game's been very consistent up to this point: do good things, be kind, gain honor. Do bad things, assault people, kill without provocation, lose honor. Here, though, you gain extra honor for killing an unarmed, unaggressive man, whose only crime against the player was drunkenly trying to shoot a broken gun they already knew didn't work.

Anybody else got thoughts on this?