Harry and Morality

[psychic_serpent]

No: HPFGUIDX 57361

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, Troels Forchhammer 
<t.forch at m...> wrote:
> The border-line case is the open breaking of the law as
> a political statement - like the sit-ins you mention.

I'm not sure why this is 'border-line.'  This is exactly the sort of 
thing Harry does when he frees Dobby.  To bring this back to the 
Harry Potter books, in one of the schoolbooks, Quidditch Through the 
Ages, a letter is quoted that is supposed to be from a witch who 
couldn't vote for the Minister of Magic.  (Something like, "If I had 
a vote, he would have lost mine."  Forgive the paraphrase.)  This 
implies that there was a time in wizarding society when women were 
disenfranchised.  While we don't know how or when that changed, it's 
quite possible that it occurred after law-breaking similar to what 
occurred in Muggle society: women chained themselves to the gates of 
Parliament, among other things, to protest their not having the 
vote.  There were some violent crimes as well, which are not 
something I condone at all, even in pursuit of an unjust law being 
overturned.  But breaking that unjust law--a woman attempting to 
vote while that was against the law--doesn't hurt anyone and brings 
the society closer to change.  I'd love to get more background on 
the history of Magical Britain from JKR.  She's spoken of writing a 
sort of encyclopedia of this sort.  I hope it would include 
information about things like this!

> The point I wish to drive home is that it is /not/ up
> to the individual itself to decide which laws should
> be broken because they are unjust. Allowing that leads
> to a justification of all sorts of reprehensible acts.
> One simply cannot, IMO, build a moral system on the
> idea that it is OK to do A if the person agrees with
> oneself, but it is punishable if the person doesn't
> agree with oneself.
 
I reckon we'll just have to agree to disagree on this.  IMO, it is 
indeed up to the individual to determine when he/she has had it with 
being complicit in injustice and to take action.  Sometimes people 
who are punished for breaking unjust laws are ahead of their time 
and become martyrs to the cause, which doesn't get resolved for 
years.  The zeitgeist of the era will determine whether the time is 
ripe for the sort of change the originator of the idea is trying to 
bring about.  As I said, while some violent acts were committed by 
women trying to change the law so that they could vote, their goal 
did not, in fact, justify what they did.  Nothing is a justification 
of violence or terrorism, and in fact, it is likely to damage the 
reputation of the movement and make it less likely that change will 
occur in the near future, as sympathy is more likely to lie with the 
victim(s) of the violence.  It is self-defeating.  

If Hermione put Cruciatus on anyone who owned a house-elf, that 
would not be justified by her desire to free them.  For one thing, 
by doing that, she is not breaking the law that permits people to 
own house-elves, which is the immoral law; she would be breaking 
laws against attacking people magically, and specificially, 
performing an Unforgivable Curse.  Dumbledore mentioned that Aurors 
during the first reign of terror under Voldemort had to power to put 
the Unforgivable Curses on suspects.  IMO, that was immoral, because 
even if the end desired was to apprehend a dangerous Death Eater, 
the law against putting those curses on people exists, I should 
think, because it is in general a reprehensible thing to either kill 
someone, to torture them, or to take away their free will.  Just 
because a law is passed saying Aurors can do this doesn't make it 
moral.  It means that the Aurors have sunk as low as their 
counterparts if they give in and do the same thing as the people 
they are fighting, which would only produce a Pyrrhic victory in the 
end, in which they have beaten a Death Eater but lost their souls.

--Barb

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