Kant and Snape and Ethics and Everything

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 150237

Nora:
> Dumbledore doesn't seem to think so, at least in PS--the whole "go 
> back to hating your father's memory in peace" thing.  If Snape is 
> acting as he does out of search for his own freedom from the 
> obligation, then he's not a good actor according to Kant. 

Pippin:
But this is Dumbledore's analysis, not Snape's. It could be that Snape has
no idea that he's doing this, any more than Harry realizes that he's
blaming Snape for Sirius's death to take the edge off his own guilt.

The humor for me is in imagining Snape as trying to live according to
this extremely lofty and noble but utterly impractical vision of law and
perfect rationality. He *thinks* he's acting out of respect and love
for the law and the freedom of all other Beings. He can suppress
his conscious emotions and  so, as far as he knows, he is acting with
pure rationality. But he ain't. Nobody can, because it's impossible
to keep your subconscious emotions from affecting your behavior.
As the WW seems to be as pre-Freudian as Kant himself, Snape 
wouldn't know that.

IMO,  because Snape does have noble motives, Rowling takes pity
on him and grants him grace, allowing him to escape what would
otherwise be the results of his folly, or, as the books grow darker,
at least to let it be subsumed in the much greater folly of the 
consciously self-interested. If  Fudge wasn't  going to believe 
Dumbledore or anyone else if it meant he'd lose power, his
opinion of Snape scarcely mattered. 

If you think about it, what could Snape have said to support 
Sirius's story? He *didn't* see any sign of Pettigrew in the shack. 
(And why would a rational human being
take his eyes off a  Death Eater  to look at a rat anyway?) 

I suppose he could have told Fudge that Lupin could testify  that 
Sirius was an illegal animagus, and that Lupin himself had  confessed
to escaping Hogwarts while in werewolf form and menacing people
in the village.  I'm not clear on how that would have helped.<g>

Pippin
interested to hear  Get Snape brigade  version of why Snape
kept this important information to himself