DH reread CH 12

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 186431

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dumbledore11214" <dumbledore11214 at ...> wrote:

> But here? Hermione dear just made the person violently sick by force feeding him candy he wanted no part of (HA, good sense he has), of course with Ron and Harry's approval, do not think that I am letting them off the hook here, they discussed the plan together. The person did nothing to them except having a misfortune to be somebody they decided to impersonate. And when this poor guy leans on Hermione she has a nerve  to look repulsed when she made him so sick in the first place. Ugh, very big slap Hermione moment for me, and slap Harry and Ron too of course.

Pippin:
As with the cruciatus curse, the moral argument is not in DH because it was given already. 

Hermione is the one who made such a fuss in OOP over Fred and George testing the pastilles on first years, though they  at least had consented and were getting compensated too.  She's got to be at least as wrong here as Fred and George were then.

 
If Voldemort had ordered Hermione to poison an innocent person, I'm sure she would have died first. But DH is all about the way that people with decent values who would never give in to threats or blackmail can temporarily lose their moral compass through distraction  or emotional upheaval. 


IMO, JKR doesn't give us a moment where Hermione questions what's happened to her values, because nothing has happened to them. 

  In the Potterverse, IMO, your values are a part of you, for better or for worse. They do change, but you can't change them like you'd change your shirt, in no time or with little effort. It isn't as easy for Draco to become a killer as the innocent believe, but he can't easily become a hero either.  

Hermione's values are the same as they ever were, IMO. She didn't change her ideas about good and evil, it just got too difficult to keep them in mind, much less live up to them.

The moral discussion of the cruciatus curse is in GoF, where Sirius opines (summarizing) that Crouch may have been a good man once, but he authorized the aurors to use unforgivable curses against Death Eaters and condemned people without trial. 

Now, that's just what Harry did when he punished Amycus. 

So, by Sirius's standards, Harry wasn't being good while he did those things. But did Harry, as Sirius believes of Crouch, become as cruel and ruthless as a Death Eater? Or was Sirius wrong, too innocent  to understand?

The question GoF didn't answer was how Barty, who was always vehemently anti-Dark Arts, could feel that fighting fire with fire was okay. In DH we got the answer: the infamous greater good. It's a tricky argument, because "the greater good" is a valid moral position: it is generally accepted that laws are made to serve the common good, and not the other way round. 

One could argue that fighting fire with fire is a necessary evil -- that's what Barty seems to have thought. But IMO McGonagall gives us JKR's verdict on that line of reasoning: it's foolish. Because unless you are indeed as cruel and ruthless as a Death Eater, they are always going to win at that game, just as Barty Sr's moments of mercy led to Barty Jr's escape. And that won't serve the greater good at all.

Harry doesn't need anyone to point this out to him -- he's lived it all. 

Up to the moment when Dumbledore confesses, JKR doesn't tell us in DH when  her good characters are doing bad things. She wants us to choose what is right, being critical of people whom we would like to admire, rather than what is easy,  supposing that whatever the good guys do must be okay. But as you said, the cruciatus curse is so obviously wrong that unless you have a different set of moral standards for fictional people than for real ones, it would be very hard to approve of it.

Pippin