Harry's flaws and moral errors? was: Apologies and responsibility

[msbeadsley]

No: HPFGUIDX 139390

Oh, my, this got long. I decided to combine responses and not use up
2/3 of my per diem on it. ;-)

msbeadsley:
<<And Harry is supposed to tell the difference between "necessary
rulebreaking" and "rulebreaking without much remorse or learning from
his mistakes" how, exactly? He is supposed to know "necessary" and "to
fight against unfair things" (like Umbridge, whom he opposes at the
risk of being eventually imprisoned) from where he should refrain or
have remorse because--um, why, exactly?>>

Lady Indigo:
<Let's make this very simple. Harry breaks rules because of, say, the
Sorcerer's Stone, as the more he noses into the situation and learns
about the subject the more he gets the feeling something very
dangerous might be going on. He wants to do something about it,
because as far as he's concerned he knows things about what's going on
that nobody else does. He reaks the rules because of, using your
example, Umbridge - because Umbridge is taking so much abusive power
over the school that the rest of the teachers encourage poltergeists
and Fred and George throwing people into closets. Any idiot from age
10 to 100 can see she's bigoted, sadistic, and any other number of
things; she needs to be stopped.>

But you can't make this simple; it just isn't. (And may be the root of
the problem here; most moral absolutes are an illusion.) What you're
saying is that it's okay for Harry to break the rules when he feels
privy to information constituting a sufficient reason to do so. Aren't
you?

Lady Indigo:
<Harry breaks the rules to get a good grade in Potions, or in other
classes where Hermione does his homework for him (something I never
liked either), looks into Snape's Pensieve in order to fight dirty
(only because Snape was fighting dirty, yes, but chances are he
wouldn't have that luxury when he came face to face with Voldemort; he
should have found some 'proper' way to learn the lesson)...and this
benefits no one but him in a situation that's completely unthreatening
if he fails.>

I don't agree that Harry broke "the rules to get a good grade in
Potions." At what point do you think he should have 'fessed up? I
think the good grades were entirely incidental, with Harry's
motivations being thus: curiosity, reluctance to emerge as unworthy of
Slughorn's fulsome praise; more curiosity, fear that the book would be
confiscated if known, curiosity, and a vague sense that, in the bigger
picture, he needed all the help he could get. Not that there wasn't
likely a tremendous satisfaction for him in excelling unfairly in a
class where he'd been unfairly handicapped for five years.

Fight dirty? How is this fighting dirty? With Snape? Canon makes it
clear to me that Harry's plunge into the Pensieve was about getting
information, not his constant power struggle with Snape:

[ Harry gazed at the Pensieve, curiosity welling inside him....What
was it that Snape was so keen to hide from Harry?
  The silvery lights shivered on the wall....Harry took two steps
torward the desk, thinking hard. Could it possibly be information
about the Department of Mysteries that Snape was determined to keep
from him?]

It was Snape who made that assumption, that it was about "scoring
points." Harry was, once again, following his curiosity, taking
another prime opportunity to find out all he could about
circumstances, in case he needed to *once again* use his own judgement
and act outside authority's.

<How does he not know the difference? I should think it was obvious.
And if he honestly *doesn't* understand the difference by this age,
even with Hermione looking over his shoulder and telling him all the
time, I'm more than just worried about him.>

"[M]ore than just worried about him?" What does that *mean*? The
way I
see it, JKR has written three very good characters with HRH; the trio
members are not always entirely scrupulous, not always kind, and
they're not always fair. Sometimes they're even -gasp-
dishonest
(Hermione's Confundus, Ron's appropriation of the fanged
frisbee).
They make mistakes (like Harry's using a spell he couldn't
predict or
control), and sometimes they indulge their baser impulses. (This is a
thing that happens in human beings, whether they like to admit it to
themselves or not, and whether or not they've reached a level of
maturity themselves to see it. It does not mean they are damned; it
doesn't even mean they're on the brink. Just my opinion,
obviously.)
But the character in the books with the most authority over the
definition of good and evil, a true ivory tower academic if
there ever was one, thought they, all three, were just dandy.

<Oh, and Lockhart didn't *need* anything except to be taken to the
authorities. The only reason I'm not completely freaked out that they 
basically used him as a meatshield (I'm remembering mainly by the
movie here, but still) is because there was probably no time to do
anything else under the circumstances.>

So are you saying you condone situational ethics? Isn't that partly
what you don't like about Harry?

msbeadsley wrote:
<snip canon I cited and how it contraindicated L.I.'s POV.>

Lady Indigo:
<You're reinterpreting what I actually said.>

Um, I thought I was just explaining how it came across to me. That
might be useful information, actually.

<Harry finds the spell. Harry sees the spell is labelled 'for
enemies'. Harry decides, at that moment, that he should make a point 
of trying that out later. Therefore his first *urge*, not action, is
to use it and see what it does. I did NOT say that Harry goes right
out and tries it, and I don't see what difference it makes anyway. He
uses it, and while his use of it is partly a reflex he had plans to
use it at some point anyway. If he'd only been wondering what the
spell did, and used it to counter the Crucio because it was fresh in
his mind, I'd have no problem with his morals there whatsoever.>

So, you think a person should be judged by their impulses, urges, and
intentions, rather than their actions? (I can't help thinking of poor
President Carter, lusting in his heart...)

I'm not going to go into my impulse/action ratio. Nope.

So, let's say Harry's first "urge" *was* to find out what
it did;
BRAVO! This is not a rich kid from a gated community in some New
England Muggle prep school who's come across something with a
barrel
and a trigger whose first thought is to go out and hunt up someone
who's annoyed him and point and shoot. If Harry had let the school
year end without at least firing that spell at a watermelon, I'd
be VERY worried about his chances of surviving that final, inevitable
encounter with Voldemort. If he hadn't had Hermione chewing on him
constantly, he might have done some judicious experimenting; but he
put it off in an effort to avoid any more nagging (which was just
*tiresome* in HBP) and ended up using it in extremis, against someone
he was pretty sure (correctly, IMO) was a DE, who *had* just "pulled
the trigger" on a spell Harry KNEW to be excruciating (hence the
name), damaging (hence Neville's parents in St. Mungos), and as
close
to a capital offense as anything in the world. (Harry was more
horrified by the spell's effect on Draco than I was, BTW. I was
only
grudgingly glad Snape came along, to be honest.)

In a moral sense, the only excuse I need for what Harry did is his
reaction when he saw the results. You indict Harry over and over again
for his lack of rectitude; I say that's extreme; he's far
guiltier of
poor judgement than anything else, and under the circumstances not
even an extreme case of that.

<As for whether or not Harry will come out all right, maybe he will. I
just worry that if Rowling is taking this long to point out that Harry
is doing dangerously unethical things and how wrong this is, that his
development will feel rushed and contrived. Or that she plans to
excuse him from these things altogether. I really, really hope not.>

You see, I disagree flat-out with "Harry is doing dangerously
unethical things" and "how wrong this is." I think we
have seen some
indicators that Harry is not quite as innocent and pristine as
Dumbledore's words to him would have him appear, and that he has a
temper, and that he has been affected by having lacked a clear moral
role model during his formative years, and that he has some sorting
out to do in terms of how far he might be willing to go to
"vanquish"
the Dark Lord. You indict him. I sympathize with him. Maybe it's
because I see him as a child and you see him as something much closer
to a peer and so are less forgiving. I also think that JKR *wants* us
to consider that Harry is showing some signs of behavior that, in
another, less stubbornly anti-DE and anti-Voldemort human being, could
be contributing factors to ending up "in the Dark." (I expect
it to
come into play as Harry continues to develop empathy; that he will
look back on some of the things he has done or almost done and be less
rigid in his judgement of others; a quality related somewhat to that
all-important love.) I just don't imbue it with the drama you do,
and
so don't see Harry as having as far to "come back" from
or get to.
He's definitely teetering a bit, okay, that's appropriate. I
don't
want a little tin hero who always knows immediately and beyond a
shadow of a doubt what the "right" thing to do is. (Even
comic books
have gone beyond that.) Being an adult means acknowledging the
ambiguities, IMO, though growing the capacity to do so (as Harry is
having to do) is sometimes painful; sometimes idealism doesn't fade,
it breaks, leaving many sharp and painful shards to dispose of.

Sandy aka msbeadsley, tipping her hat to Lupinlore and others, and
apologizing profoundly for the weird line breaks she's mystified by