Morality and Harry Potter

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 191892




> Kathy:
<snip>
 If the authorities weren't 
> > following the rules then why should he?

Bart:
>      The prohibition on the use of underage magic always seemed like an 
> artificial and forced plot device to me.

Pippin:
Of course half the fun of  a list like this is taking the books way too seriously, and I'm as guilty as anybody. But sometimes I think we overlook JKR's gift for satire. 

Case in point: although Hogwarts seems set up to function like a school in the real world, with students  bound by authority and any number of rather arbitrary regulations and sanctions for violators, in practice the students are scarcely governed (and in the case of some, scarcely governable). It's the staff who must do as they're told or else. 

Just compare the number of students who are forced out for unacceptable behavior compared to the number of teachers who have to leave. It's bad even in terms of raw numbers. Considered as a proportion of each, it's staggering. 

This satirical inversion leads to the  situation in HBP,  where  Harry and Draco can't wait to be thought grown up enough to  take orders. <g>

 Of course there's a serious point behind it all: willing obedience is not, as they think, a sign of maturity.  Reliability is. 

And that is why, when it's all over, Harry still thinks it is wise to ask Dumbledore's device, even though he knows that Dumbledore deceived him. Despite that, Dumbledore was reliable -- he said he hoped his plan would help Harry to survive and it did. 

As part of that plan, Harry had to think that he was going to die, not so that he would survive Voldemort's attempt to kill him, but so that he could, if he chose, cast the same spell of protection on Voldemort's enemies that his mother had used to save him. 

Dumbledore did everything he could to convince Harry that loving sacrifice was the most powerful weapon anyone could use against Voldemort, but he never told Harry anything to make Harry think he would have to use it. That is why it was such a shock when Harry realized it had to be done

It was not because he was under some compulsion to obey Dumbledore, or because he had been conditioned to sacrifice himself,  but simply because Harry knew that if he was not the next to die at Voldemort's hands, someone else would be. And Harry would   have to watch that death through Voldemort's eyes, and it would most likely be someone that Harry knew, and who cared enough about Hogwarts to fight for it, and whom Harry might have saved with choice Voldemort had offered him and the magic his mother had discovered. 

 I don't know if I would have the physical courage to choose as Harry did, but morally it seems like a no brainer. 

 Dumbledore's advice was sometimes flawed, in that it was too difficult to follow. Harry couldn't learn occlumency, Snape couldn't give up his grudge, Sirius couldn't bear to give up his freedom again. 

But it generally worked: while it sometimes  made things needlessly difficult, I can't think of anyone in  canon who actually came to grief if they did  as Dumbledore advised. Ever. 

Dumbledore had his weaknesses and Harry absorbed some of them, or had them already. 

But in the end Harry is aware of his tendency to be self-protective and controlling. By admitting in public how wrong he had been about Snape and by giving up the Elder Wand, he showed that he had become aware of these habits in himself and was determined to form better ones. 

Dumbledore, OTOH,  never publicly admitted such a serious error (and he made several of them) or relinquished control over anything that was rightfully his. 

To get back to Kathy's question, Harry would like people to be against torture, and it's not going to help if he gets in the habit of using it. 

Pippin