Who was responsible for Sirius' death?

[lupinlore]

No: HPFGUIDX 167472

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "cubfanbudwoman"
<susiequsie23 at ...> wrote:
<SNIP>
>
> So SSSusan suggests:
> Well then, by golly, we MUST go back a step further, I say!  The
> blame *clearly* lies with Mr. & Mrs. Dumbledore.  If they'd stopped
> with Aberforth, never *had* Albus, then there would never have been
> a DD to ignore Snape and Bella, to have hired Hagrid, to have
> allowed him to have thestrals and to retrieve Grawpie, who
> proceeded to bleed all over after those centaurs that Albus
> obviously allowed to remain in the forest.
>
> Yes, I say it's all Mr. & Mrs. Dumbledore's fault!


Well, that's fine with me.  DD really IS such a contemptible and
incompetent idiot at times, and does have such a high tolerance for
Harry in particular being abused, that another Headmaster would have
been hard put to have messed things up any worse.  Even Voldums could
have been trusted to be more consistent and believable to character.

But, to get to the heart of the matter, how do you draw chains of
causation?  If the history of Snape and the Marauders is in some way a prime causal factor in present events, how can Dumbledore NOT in some way be blamed?  Or is there a statute of limitations on causation, that things can be traced back only X number of steps and not any more?

Legally there are various mechanisms.  One could argue, for instance,
that "causation" requires results to be foreseeable in order for blame to accrue.  But that gives people too easy of an out, as they can always claim "But I couldn't have KNOWN X would happen!"  It also
ignores a very important point made in the movie "V" (one of the few
good points in the whole wretched thing) where "V" tells someone "This isn't about what you meant to do.  It's about what you did."

On the other hand, its true that after a while chains of causation get rather silly and unsupportable, at least in the moral sense.  That is the fatal weakness of utilitarian thinking -- if you press it even moderately hard, everything ends up fraught with deep moral
consequence, including how you tie your shoe-laces on a given morning.

JKR isn't very consistent or clear about this, as with so much else.
My sense is she doesn't want blame traced to DD, not because of any
deep thinking about the morality involved, which would be refreshing
when it comes to DD, but largely for the arbitrary reason that she
wants his character viewed in a particular way, thank you very much.
Similarly, she short circuits the "causation" of Voldie's evil with
another arbitrary device -- the kid was flawed and evil from birth,
product of a poisoned bloodline and therefore something akin to a
living cancer or a sentient tornado, an evil in and of himself but not something whose origin can be linked in any real way to moral actions on someone else's part.

So, was Snape in part responsible for what happened to Sirius?  Sure he was, as was Dumbledore (self-admittedly, in this case).  DD tries to short circuit causation in this instance by taking it all on himself, but I'm not really sure that move is any more legitimate than any of the others.  And I think that JKR in her heart knows it's a weak move -- hence the failure of Harry, inexplicably, to press the issue.


Lupinlore