Harsh Morality - Combined answers
pippin_999
foxmoth at qnet.com
Tue Jan 4 17:28:48 UTC 2005
No: HPFGUIDX 121115
--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214"
<dumbledore11214 at y...> wrote:
>
> Del replies:
>
> huge snip.
>
> That's precisely the crux of my problem. DD can and does do
wrong, and yet the only Good thing to do is to believe him and
follow him without hesitation. Whoever doesn't do that is wrong.
Bummer.
>
>
> Alla:
>
> I still think it is consistent with Platonic-cristian morality as
we discussed earlier.
>
> Dumbledore carries many roles in the books. As human being
he is indeed imperfect, BUT as personification of the Principle of
GOOD, he is just form and therefore indeed PERFECT,
therefore indeed the only good thing is to follow himas
PRINCIPLE of GOOD without hesitation, but we can question
his decisions as human being. Am I making sense?
>
Pippin:
You know, some people ::waves at Nora:: are going to spill their
coffee when they read this, but I think this Platonic morality
business is needlessly complex. I think Dumbledore is good
according to the old-fashioned Golden Rule. "Do unto others..."
Now of course that leaves us having to explain why he tolerates
the behavior of Snape and the Dursleys and so on. Again, the
standard answer: "He believes in free will."
The trouble is, most of us don't. A belief in a deterministic
universe in which our behavior is wholly governed by physics,
heredity and behavioral conditioning doesn't seem to leave
much room for it. Obviously people can make us do
things--we're constantly bombarded by messages, including
those from JKR herself, trying to influence our behavior. Surely
Dumbledore with all the magic at his disposal can do as much.
But on the metaphysical level, we can argue that we haven't
made people moral just because we've made them behave.
In Dumbledore's world, IMO, this is how free will operates. No
one can make people be good. It's metaphysically impossible,
like bringing back the dead. He *knows* he can't. Forced
goodness is a guaranteed imitation.
On the other hand, and this is where the Potterverse
understanding of free will diverges from the classical definition, it
*is* possible to make people be bad. Dumbledore knows that
too. So he uses force very gingerly, only as a last resort and only
in direct defense of the innocent. He doesn't use force at all
except under very specific conditions: when only he can help,
and when he believes permanent damage will occur if he
doesn't.
Other people in the Potterverse haven't reached Dumbledore's
stage of enlightenment, and think they *can* make people be
good and even that it is their moral duty to do so. Hence
Hermione tries to manipulate the House Elves into seeking
freedom and tries to curse people into being loyal to the DA.
Crouch Sr. and Snape also enforce Draconian penalties (okay,
maybe we can't make people be good, but we can sure as hell
make 'em sorry) and Sirius tries to force Kreacher to be loyal to
the Order. All of them fail.
Dumbledore is goodness, that is, IMO, he makes all his
decisons according to the Golden Rule, limited by his concept of
free will.
He is also limited by his occasional inability to imagine himself
completely in someone else's reality. In OOP, he failed because
he assumed that Harry had his patience, and Snape had his
resilience.
Dumbledore's limitations make him imperfect, but he is still
good, as far as he is able. Even when he is wrong, he is making
his choices, as someone said up thread, according to good
principles, for sincere reasons and with an expectation of good
consequences. That is the most one could expect of a human
being.
It's funny how we ask the same questions about Dumbledore as
we do about God. Why does he let evil exist? Does he have a
plan? If he knows so much, and he's so powerful, why does he
let bad things happen? But Dumbledore is not God and is not
responsible for everything that happens, even at Hogwarts.
Del, I don't think the narrator is the voice of goodness. The
narrator speaks from Harry's point of view and from Harry's
stage of moral development, which is normal for his age. People
are either on his side, in which case they're good, or they're not,
in which case they're at the very least part of the problem. But I
don't think that's the way JKR or Dumbledore see things. Harry is
still learning to recognize his own limitations; he isn't ready to
accept that other people, especially those he is meant to
respect, have limitations just as he does.
I think the images of breakage which recur in OOP are a
metaphor for how, if goodness is innate, people can still turn to
evil. Human goodness is held within a fragile vessel, like a
potion bottle or a prophecy orb or a bowl of essence of murtlap. If
the vessel is damaged, the essence can vanish or drain away.
When Harry was destroying Dumbledore's possessions, what
he really wanted to break was himself. He wanted to get rid of
his inner goodness, because that is what made him feel pain
when bad things happened to others. From Dumbledore's/JKR's
point of view, anyone who is still capable of feeling that pain and
responding to it is not wholly evil. But it is possible, in the
Potterverse, to destroy that capacity or to utterly deny it. That
denial, I think, was Voldemort's last act as a human being.
Pippin
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