Requiescat in Pace: Unforgivables

[Dennis Grant]

No: HPFGUIDX 174642

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "littleleahstill"
<leahstill at ...> wrote:

> Leah:
> 
> Concise Oxford Dictionary: n. 

That's the dictionary definition of the word, not the legal or moral
definition of the act; there is a difference.
 
> Nothing there about the pain having to be prolonged. If I was put on 
> the rack and gave up everything the torturers wanted to hear after 
> the first stretch, I would still have been tortured, just as someone 
> who was racked for an hour would have been tortured. 

But in both cases, you're being racked as a form of coersion. The
purpose behind it COUNTS.

That's why we have so many legal definitions of acts that are
functionally identical - one person killing another. We differentiate
between killing by accident, killing in self-defense, killing in the
line of lawful duty, killing by neglect, killing with intent in the
heat of passion, and killing with premeditated intent and in cold
blood. One form is considered perfectly acceptable, while another is
considered heinous and evil - and yet both meet the same dictionary
definition.

Harry doesn't torture Carrow; he incapacitates him by inflicting
intense pain on him.

The choice of methods is perhaps a little unusual, and perhaps Harry's
intent included elements of chastisement or poetic justice. Would some
other technique have worked as well? Who can say; it's easy to
second-guess decisions made in the heat of battle by people who
weren't there, and in this case we are talking about fictional
weaponry which may have other considerations of which we are not aware
(Crucio seems to have telekinetic properties as well as pain
inflicting ones - Harry's Crucio flings Carrow across the room, and
Vody's Crucio is used to toy with Harry's "corpse") 

The use of Crucio vice some other spell is quite literally inarguable,
as there is no way to know if an alternative would have worked, and
the Crucio he *did* use was demonstratively effective. Carrow was
eliminated as a threat, and he still had his life - that's a mercy in
my book.

As far as the issue of remorse goes, remorse doesn't show up on a
battlefield; it shows up far later. And it's not the act itself that
does the most damage - it's the fact that one took pleasure in the act
at the time. Col Grossman's work on this has been seminal (see
http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-Society/dp/0316330116
 for more information)

Harry doesn't "come down" from battle until the epilogue; at no time
do we see him at the point where he is really dealing with all the
terms of the battles he has just fought. We see the *start* of that
process in the last chapter, but just the tip of the iceberg, and
there are other incidents competing for Harry's attention other than
his Crucio-ing Carrow.

It is entirely possible Harry spent more than a few nightmare-wracked
nights agonizing over that decision; we don't know. JKR doesn't tell us.

But his lack of *immediate* remorse doesn't bother me at all - that's
the typical human response to combat. He took Carrow out, a threat has
been eliminated, and he feels pretty happy about that, and that is
100% NORMAL.

Remorse, if any, will come later.

DG