Favorite Snape Scenes - He's such a lovely professor, no really.

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 122547


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "justcarol67" 
<justcarol67 at y...> wrote:

<snip>

> Carol:
>
> But what I'm interested in here is not defending Snape for the
> thousandth time but the idea that a person must be *nice* in order 
> to be *good*. Harry, our hero, whom we all agree is good, is very 
> often not nice, especially in OoP. He's rude and even cruel to Ron 
> and Hermione, his best friends. He's definitely not nice to Seamus 
> when Seamus wants to know what happened to Cedric. And he certainly 
> doesn't turn the other cheek to Dudley; he bullies him in return. I 
> can go quote hunting if you like to show mean!Harry. On those 
> occasions, has he become temporarily evil? Umbridge and Crouch!
> Moody are both "nicer" than Snape. Does that make them good? Or are 
> meanness and evil two different things?

Umm, as a leading proponent of the anti-"good but not nice" school, 
I'll answer.

Harry is definitely falling off of the path of treating people well 
when he behaves like that...and such is the lesson of the book, in 
part--it matters how you treat people.  Umbridge and Crouch!Moody are 
both nice...but in a very superficial use of the word, as both are 
undertaking some process of deceit.  (I've always insisted, in 
pushing this program, that the 'fake nice' niceness is not what is 
being talked about).

(For a better than I could EVER write it discussion of issues of 
deceit, I tip y'all to http://www.jelks.nu/misc/articles/bs.html.  
Give me a few weeks and I'll find a way to work it in somehow.)

What is being got at, I think, by the argument over nice-and-good is 
that we can conceive of a person who is not a good person 
(stative/ontological category) but who takes actions that are 
good...that is to say, the goodness is located in the action, rather 
than in the person.  To be a good person statively requires a 
particular orientation/consideration of other people, which mean 
behavior betrays as not being present.

Or we could have recourse to Kantian ethics, where roughly speaking 
(very roughly), the intentions of the action are what counts.  A 
common mistake made here is to assume that *considering* that what 
you are doing is good is enough to pass the test--it is not.  It must 
pass a strict categorical imperative/rationality test (which means 
someone like Lucius Malfoy fails, even if he genuinely believes that 
what he is doing is good).  Here, means and ends (in some 
understandings of the theory) blend together so that means ARE ends.  
How you get to a goal is an inherent component of getting to the goal 
itself...for our purposes, then, *how* you teach the students and 
treat them in the classroom is not separable from the end of teaching 
them.  "Any means to achieve their ends" is the antithesis of this 
proposal, and it's a principle that hasn't exactly been looked on 
well, so far.

Meanness and evil are not necessarily the same thing, but meanness 
and the stative condition of being a good person do not co-exist 
well, if at all.  This is because being mean to people is a 
fundamental statement about how you regard other people...and we're 
playing in an essentialist universe here, like it or not.  Hence we 
might wish to distinguish between 'being a good person' and 'doing 
good things'.

So I would say that yes, a person must be genuinely nice--that is to 
say, treat other people with respect for their subjectivity--to *be* 
a good person.  He does not have to be nice to take actions that may 
be construed as good, but we should be aware that there are very 
important to western thought moral constructions that would not 
consider those actions good, because they were not taken from the 
right perspective.

-Nora roots around for her mini-Kant...