The intended murder of Pettigrew and moral corruption (Was; Vengeance on Snape)

[justcarol67]

No: HPFGUIDX 116089


I (Carol) wrote:
>  > <big snip> I don't know what I want, exactly, except that I don't
want Harry motivated by the petty and ignoble desire to punish or get
even, whether the enemy (or perceived enemy) is Snape, Draco, or
Voldemort. We saw that ignominious motive with Sirius Black's vicious
crusade to murder Peter Pettigrew. What chance Black had to grow and
develop as a character occurred only because his quest for vengeance
failed and Harry prevented him from tainting his soul with murder. 

dzeytoun responded:
> Well, first of all I'm not sure we did see Sirius grow and develop 
> much as a character. 

Carol again:
True. I should have said "what *little* chance he had."

dzeytoun:
>  Secondly, I think a good case can be made that not killing
Pettigrew was a foolish mistake taken at the behest of a 
> naive and overly sentimental child.  Without Peter, Voldemort would 
> not have been able to inact the ceremony in the graveyard.  Yes, he 
> might have been able to return, somehow, but it is nevertheless the 
> fact that Harry's mercy led to Voldemort's return, and thus to 
> Sirius' death.  Thus Sirius' soul remained "clean" at the expense of 
> his life.  Which was better?  To live after killing a traitor who 
> richly deserved it, or to die with clean hands leaving your godson 
> torn and in pain from his part in your death?  Would Pettigrew's 
> death have been a greater evil than that of Sirius?  These are  
> religious questions, I admit, and not ones on which we will ever 
> reach consensus.  Nevertheless, the arguments for punishing this 
> character or that are extremely complex, and different opinions can 
> easily be justified using similar moral systems.  But most of all we 
> should probably remember we are dealing with a book primarily 
> valuable for its entertainment value, not some modern annex to the 
> King James Bible.

Carol responds:
I'm not a particularly religious person and am certainly not trying to
interpret the books in relation to the King James Bible. What I'm
trying to do, with some difficulty thanks to real or apparent
inconsistencies in the books, is to have the characters act in
accordance with JKR's own morality as it appears in the books. She has
said (admittedly in interviews rather than in the books themselves)
that Dumbledore is "the epitome of goodness." He, as we've been told
since SS/PS, is "too noble to use" some of his own powers. IOW, too
noble to use the Dark Arts, including illegal spells--or murder. And
the Killing Curse, Avada Kedavra, is an Unforgiveable Curse. that is
JKR's distinction, not mine. To take a life, to torture, to deprive
another person of self-determination: those are the three curses she
has chosen to present as thoroughly evil, as requiring evil will to
cast, as corrupting the user. (See Voldemort, Barty Crouch Jr.,
Bellatrix Lestrange to see what a person who casts these spells becomes.)

To return to Sirius (and Lupin): Harry may have been protecting them
on the "sentimental" grounds that his father would not have wanted
them to commit murder, and I admit he knows nothing at this point
about the Killing Curse, but he instinctively realizes that they would
have been guilty not of killing someone in self-defense but of
murdering, two against one, an unarmed man. And the fact that that man
was the betrayer of his own parents was immaterial at that moment. It
was wrong to murder him, whatever he had done. You don't, in a
civilized country with laws intended to protect the people, take the
law into your own hands. You don't perform an act of vengeance that
lowers you to the level of the person you're killing. You allow the
person a trial, (theoretically) impersonal justice in a court of law.
Harry didn't want their consciences to be stained. (Or their souls,
which is a term JKR does use--the Dementors suck the *soul* out of a
person and deprive him of an afterlife.) I have no idea how the sins
("wicked deeds," if you prefer) a person commits are dealt with in the
afterlife in the WW, but I do know that JKR and her sometime spokesman
Dumbledore, approve of Harry's action here. He has prevented his
father's friends from doing an evil deed that would ruin their lives
(not that Sirius's isn't already ruined) and makeit impossible for
them to live in peace with themselves ever again.

To be sure, Sirius at this point is very nearly deranged and has been
trying for months to commit this very murder. Had he succeeded, he
would probably have found that vengeance is not sweet. It is only the
prelude to having his soul sucked by a Dementor. That, I'm sure, is
exactly what he expects. He thinks that his vicious quest, and his
miserable life, are over. As for Lupin, equally willing to kill his
former friend for betraying the Potters and framing Sirius, it's hard
to understand his motivation. Solidarity with Sirius? Or is he once
again afraid to stand up and do the right thing? Evidently, he has to
be shown what's right by a thirteen-year-old boy. And what of his
future? Endless guilt and remorse or a soul corrupted by the AK so
that he, like Barty Jr. and the young Tom Riddle, is on his way to
becoming irredeemably evil? At best, a lonely existence in Azkaban
with Dementors for company and his own monthly transformations into a
werewolf with no wolfsbane potion to soothe the pain.

What would Pettigrew's death have accomplished, besides a momentary
satisfaction of the lust for vengeance? Granted, Pettigrew got away
and through him Voldemort was restored, but that was not a necessary
consequence of Harry's mercy. Pettigrew was chained and got away only
because Lupin turned into a werewolf. What Pettigrew did afterwards is
not what mattered. What mattered is that two grown men did not murder
another man in front of three children, setting them a terrible
example by indicating that vengeance and murder are acceptable
solutions. We might as well throw away the law and let the DEs and
their enemies fight an endless series of feuds, one murder spawning
another till the WW drwons in a pool of blood.

Carol, who still can't figure out *what* Lupin was thinking