Motives Over Ends (was: Intrinsically good magic)

[abigailnus]

No: HPFGUIDX 59370


<snip Innermurk and Amy's discussion about consequence and 
fault, and my example involving two cars and pastry>

Innermurk wrote:

> I still cannot agree to your reasoning.
> The fact that you failed to yeild is the *only* deciding choice that 
> casued your accident. Any of the other choices can happen 
> independantly of that one and no accident would occur. That 
> particular choice could have occurred on any other corner with the 
> same results.

I think you've just made my point for me.  Since I've already exposed 
myself to 7000 lurkers as a bad driver, let me share a little more.  
This isn't the first time I've failed to yield the right of way on a left turn.  
I've even run a few yellow lights in my day.  And yet, in three years that 
I've been driving, this is the only time I've ever been in an accident.  If 
my choice not to yield the right of way was, as you say, the only factor 
determining whether or not I would be in an accident, then I should 
have had an accident every time I failed to yield the right of way or ran 
a yellow light.  

What you're trying to say, I guess, is that all things being equal, it was 
only my choice to make a left turn when I had no right to do so that 
caused the accident, but you're apporaching the situation as a given 
tableau, and not taking into consideration all the elements that brought 
it into existance.  Once I arrived at the intersection there was indeed 
only one possibility - I would choose to make the left turn and have an 
accident, or I wouldn't, and presumably I wouldn't collide with the other 
driver.  However, the situation at the intersection was not created out of 
whole cloth.  It was the result of billions of tiny choices and 
circumstances that led myself and the other driver on a collision course 
with each other.  

I'm a limited human.  I can't perceive all the reprecussions of delaying 
my departure from the shopping center by a few minutes.  I can 
perceive, because I was carefully taught so, that failing to yield the 
right of way can have disastrous results, which is why my choice to 
ignore that possible outcome makes the accident my fault.  My choice 
to buy pastry is morally neutral, but it led me to a situation in which 
I had the opportunity to make a choice not to yield the right of way.

But let's forget about buying pastry for a second and go a little bit 
further back to my choice to go to the bank in the first place.  This is 
also a morally neutral choice -  a person can do any number of things 
in a bank, good or bad.  Can there be any doubt that, all other things 
being equal, had I chosen not to go to the bank that morning, I would 
not have had that particular accident?  The accident, therefore, is a 
direct result of my choice to go to the bank.  Let's go further back, 
three years, to the day my mother gave me a set of keys to her car and 
the permission to use it.  This is also a morally neutral act.  Once 
again, there is no doubt that, all other things being equal, if I were 
unable to drive my mother's car, I would not have been in that 
particular accident. And what about the other driver?  He made many 
choices that morning, including the choice to be in the same area as 
I was, the choice to get in his car and drive down the same street that 
I was turning into at the exact moment for me to run into him - all 
morally neutral choices.  And if he hadn't made those choices, I 
wouldn't have collided with his car.  

Now, it's possible that if I hadn't gone to the bank, I would have 
walked to the supermarket and accidentally knocked down an old 
lady.  It's possible that if I didn't have my mother's car, I would have 
taken a cab and been in a worse accident.  It's possible that if the 
other driver had been somewhere else when the accident was to 
occur, he would have run over a pedestrian.  We have no way of 
knowing these things, and when I, my mother and the other driver 
made our choices, we had no way of foreseeing the consequence of 
the accident, which is why there is no blame attached to those choices.  
It is only when I arrive at the intersection and choose a course of 
action to which there is a forseeable negative consequence that the 
choice becomes evil, and blame is attached.

Let's move away from my accident for a minute, and go back about 
a year to a bus in Jerusalem.  Grandma is sitting on the bus with 
her two grandchildren when a man comes aboard.  Grandma 
doesn't like the look of him, and suspects him of being a suicide 
bomber.  She therefore decides to get off the bus with her 
grandchildren one stop ahead of her destination, and walk the rest 
of the way.  On their way home, they walk past a supermarket just 
at the moment at which a suicide bomber blows himself up at the 
entrance, and are injured.  Had they stayed on the bus, they would 
have been perfectly safe, as the bus passed the supermarket minutes, 
or even seconds, earlier.  

Did grandma make the wrong choice?  Yes.  Was there any way in 
which she could have perceived that this was the wrong choice?  
No.  Was Grandma's choice a direct cause of her being in the path 
of a suicide bombing?  Yes.  Is grandma, or in fact anyone other 
than the suicide bomber and the people who sent him, responsible 
for her injuries and those of her grandchildren?  Of course not.  
Will grandma, nevertheless, spend the rest of her life feeling guilty?  
Probably.

So, to return, finally, to the topic of this discussion.  Lily chooses 
to sacrifice her life for her son.  The only perceivable consequence 
as far as she, or in fact any human being, can see is a good one 
(actully, I've argued that Lily knew that her sacrifice was pointless, 
and that it is the very fact that she preferred to die rather than 
watch her son die and live herself that stamped Harry with a mark 
of the highest kind of love, but that's another discussion entirely).  
However, one of the many consequences of that act is Cedric 
Diggory's death.  A million other factors go into bringing him to 
that graveyard where he is at the mercy of Voldemort and Pettigrew.  
The fact that Harry insisted that they take the cup together.  The 
fact that he became a Triwizard champion.  The fact that he was 
raised to be such an upstanding young man as to be chosen as 
a Triwizard champion.  The fact that he didn't drown in his 
bathtub when he was 2.  What Amy and I are trying to say is that 
while Cedric's death, in this particular manner, is a result of Lily's 
choice, it is not her fault.  Amy is trying to point out that there 
are a million consequences to every act, and most of them can't 
be anticipated.  Even the most selfless sacrifice can lead to evil.

Haggrid writes:

>>I think that the group is being too deterministic, to "Newtonian", in 
 their analyses of the what-ifs. I think you can make a case that 
 there is a good measure of quantum physics-like properties in all 
 these "shoulda-woulda-coulda" scenarios, including something akin to 
 Heisenberg's uncertainty princile. It is not necessarily so that the 
 choice to buy the pastry as a good deed in any way altered the 
 destiny of the automobile paths. The actual outcome may have been 
 floating around in quantum heaven until it became concret, with no 
 causality involved. The "good deed" of buying the pasty stands on 
 its own, unalloyed by any blame for the ensuing fender bender>>

As I understand the uncertainty principle, and by no means am I 
claiming that I do, the claim that any possible consequence is 
floating about in mid-air can only be made about undetermined 
events.  Once an event has occured, a definitive chain of causality 
does exist, and it is only our limitations that prevent us from 
tracking it exactly.  In other words, while it is impossible to predict 
that, had I not bought pastry, I wouldn't have had the same accident 
(I could have met an old school-friend, for example, and been 
delayed by talking to him for the same exact amount of time that I 
would have been delayed at the bakery), once the accident has 
occured, all other possibilities have collapsed, and the chain of 
causality points directly to my choice to go into the bakery as one 
of the steps that led to my accident.

I think we've come full-circle here, as this discussion once again 
has little to do with canon.  If either of you want to continue it, may 
I suggest that we do so on OT-Chatter or in private e-mails?

Abigail