Kant and Snape and Ethics and Everything

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 150202

Nora:
> But on the other hand, Snape has absolutely no problems with a 
> somewhat...haphazard enforcement of rules for the students and such 
> under his control.  He makes it personal, and he lets his favoritism 
> out of the bag.  I think Neri's charge of Snape being somewhat 
> mechanistic (there, describing a hypothetical perception of the Life 
> Debt magic) has some teeth to it.  Rules enforced, but probably not 
> with the Kantian awareness of the deep metaphysical nature and 
> meaning of the rules--otherwise he wouldn't be inconsistent as he is.
> 
> For instance, remember that Kant's perfectly good will is perfectly 
> rational, which is how Kant gets around the objection that "Each 
> person *thinks* he's doing the objectively right thing."  From a 
> Kantian perspective, showing cruelty to students in the pursuit of 
> their education is not acceptable.

Pippin:
I know almost nothing about Kant, but from what you and Sydney
are saying, it sounds like Snape could be a  satirical critique of this 
philosophy. He's someone who *thinks* he's utterly rational, 
except for those occasional moments of CAPSLOCK rage when
his mighty powers of occlumency fail him, but he has no idea 
that his subconcious emotions and biases are influencing him
*all the time*. 

So when he says that he tries to treat Harry like any other
student, he is being completely  honest, as far as he knows.  
He doesn't let his *conscious* hatred of Harry influence him, but
he's wholly and hilariously unaware that his *unconscious* hatred
makes him view everything Harry does in the worst possible light.

While he thinks he is showing no more than the normal favoritism
to his own House, he has no idea that his subconscious biases make
every Slytherin misdeed  look like kidstuff, best ignored, while
each instance of  Gryffindor rulebreaking looks like incipient criminality 
to be nipped in the bud at once.

Seen in this light, his worry that Dumbledore will make trouble over
Sirius is understandable -- he doesn't get  Dumbledore's 
emotional style of decision-making and thinks that the old guy's
soft-heartedness and squeamishness over dementors might keep
Sirius from facing his just deserts.

That this is comic is shown by the lack of serious consequences:
Harry's psyche is not squashed to jelly, Sirius gets away,
Neville's hopes of being an Auror would have failed anyway, 
Harry's attempts at occlumency would have failed anyway, Lupin 
would have been outed anyway, and so on.

I'm not quite sure how this relates to the scene on the tower, but it
could be that Dumbledore was pleading for Snape to open his heart.  
Of course we all have our little differences of opinion on what 
Snape would find if he did that. But Dumbledore, at any rate, believed
in DDM!Snape through and through.

IIRC, current thinking is that a normal person cannot be completely
rational anyway. Brain-damaged people whose ability to feel is 
compromised do not make perfectly rational decisions. They can 
hardly make decisions at all because they have no preference for 
any particular outcome.

Pippin