Ethics and Choices (was: On Power)

[psychic_serpent]

No: HPFGUIDX 56489

Susan Fox-Davis <selene at e...> wrote:
This is a quote that came to me from a "Positive Quote of the Day"
mailing.

"Power is the ability to do good things for others. -- Brooke Astor"
 
As it applies to this list, this is the kind of ethics they need to
emphasize to Slytherin students. Why isn't "Magical Ethics" seen in 
the Hogwarts curriculum?

Me:

Slytherin students are hardly the only ones who need this.  (Don't 
know why, but I don't trust some of those clever Ravenclaws, and 
I've long suspected that Crouch, Jr. was in this house, not in 
Slytherin.)  If only the 25% of the students deemed to be at highest 
risk for darkness get ethics lessons, that would probably just 
exacerbate the problem--you'd either get Slytherins rebelling just 
for the sake of rebellion, or a student in one of the other houses 
would fail to be reached by some very necessary lessons.

We don't know for certain that the students won't get lessons of 
this sort before they finish all seven years, as we've only seen 
Harry go through four, and his PoV gives us most of our 
information.  (We didn't know about Hogsmeade visits for third years 
and up until Harry was a third year.)  The most logical place to 
teach ethics, it seems to me (and this will not be a shock to anyone 
who's read my fanfiction) is in the DADA class.  It seems to me that 
the first way in which you must learn to defend yourself against the 
dark arts is to prevent yourself from being seduced by the lure of 
power--conquering the darkness within.   

This would mean, however, that the DADA teachers would, at some 
point, need to be more than they have been thus far.  Quirrell, at 
the time Harry started school, had been teaching at Hogwarts for a  
while, but had the reputation of jumping at the sight of his own 
shadow.  And if he'd been any good at resisting darkness, he never 
would have become Voldemort's pawn, so he evidently wasn't in a 
position to teach ethics.  Lockhart probably taught his most 
important lesson to the students inadvertantly--don't believe every 
blowhard you come across or everything you read (Lockhart's books).  
He was also rather dark, having been living a lie and taking credit 
for what others had done, and he had no compunctions about just 
taking people's memories from them so that he could continue his 
comfortable life of lies.  He wouldn't know ethics if one came up 
and bit him on the arse.  Lupin was a good teacher, and even seemed 
like he could have given the students some lessons in ethics if only 
he hadn't been hiding a rather large secret about himself (there's 
his inner darkness, in spades).  And the ersatz Moody certainly 
wasn't interested in teaching the students to be ethical, as if 
Barty Crouch, Jr. would know what ethics are any more than 
Lockhart.  (Killing his father, who helped him escape from prison, 
in addition to all of the other things he did, including 
participating in torturing Neville's parents when he was only a 
young man.)

I hope that in the sixth or seventh year at the latest, the students 
begin to confront some of the ethical dilemmas that come from having 
the kind of power they do.  I expect that we will see more good 
characters tempted to grasp more power than is wise, even Harry.  
However, I'd like to see his choice whether to succumb or not--or 
any character's similar choice--be a real choice, rather than 
something that seems ingrained in the character and therefore 
inevitable.  For a series that has given us a wonderful message 
about choices being more important than abilities, that message 
sometimes seems doomed to disappear under a morass of Harry-is-just-
too-good-to-do-wrongness that starts to get annoying.  I'd dearly 
love to hear about a mistake Dumbledore made, for instance, and the 
consequences of it.  So far all we have is Harry urging Cedric to 
take the cup with him, which, in theory, shouldn't have had an 
adverse outcome.  If Harry doesn't make a true mistake at some 
point, how is he going to learn from it?

--Barb

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Psychic_Serpent
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