6.6 KiB
Where is the line drawn?
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Author: u/None *
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URL:
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Score: 0
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Created: 2016-05-05T23:33:27
Post:
[removed]
Comments:
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+4] Roll the Dice on Fate (15 minutes later)
I am God of Death? I give no-one any punishment on the condition that the people I judge guilty pretend to be under unimaginable torment if anyone actually ever summons them up to talk, on pain of... pain. Being omnipresent, I can pro-actively punish (or otherwise influence) future defectors until they play along. There's no point actually torturing people on the other side, so long as the people on earth believe that I will.
As for what I think of his actions? I judge him based on the results his actions were most likely to have, not the bizarre stroke of luck that he somehow actually to have happen. If 4/10 times his conscious choice would lead to the death of his charge, and 5/10 would lead to his injury, he doesn't get off innocent just because he lucked into being in the 1/10.
u/totorox92 [+1] Because I want to Know (24 minutes later)
Okay, so, fancy acausal insurance rationality is hard, but you answered the question well enough. Rate him on the probability of the outcomes from his actions rather than the outcomes he actually got, makes sense. What i was sort of going for was: since the actions themselves were objectively pretty awful FOR HARRY, but they ended up okay for everyone else, would the actions be justifiable? If i torture someone because their body produces the water of life when they are in agonizaing pain, and i give that water to everyone thus rendering humanity immortal, is that okay?
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+2] Roll the Dice on Fate (37 minutes later)
If i torture someone because their body produces the water of life when they are in agonizaing pain, and i give that water to everyone thus rendering humanity immortal, is that okay?
I'd be okay with it happening. I wouldn't be happy with it, but I recognise that it's pretty much a flat improvement upon the current state-of-the-world in aggregate. I probably wouldn't want to actually hang around the torturers since they're the kind of people who torture people, but I'd respect the task itself in the abstract.
It would be better if it were more okay and hopefully, eventually technology would make his/her suffering unnecessary, but I imagine that wouldn't be particularly comforting to him/her. My bar for being convinced that torturing someone actually produces essence of life would be pretty high though, and I'd want to at least try and make sure it's not secretly some kind of bizarre test by a higher power as well.
u/blazinghand [+2] Chaos Undivided (an hour later)
It's worth noting that like, in general, most real life situations that share an appearance with "torture this person to produce the water of life" are actually bad. The reason our moral intuition flinches away from this kind of thing is that "I will do this terrible bad thing in order to do this good thing" often turns out to only be true up until the "in order" part of the sentence. Humans are in generally really bad at judging these things. If you are willing to torture a person to produce the water of life, due to your occasional errors in judgement perhaps you'll also torture a person to do nothing sometimes. It's safer to torture no people.
This is why, for example, pullers of levers in the trolly problem sometimes aren't also person-shovers. Pushing someone in front of a train to save 5 lives looks a lot like pushing someone in front of a train and saving no lives. In fact, most of the time you're given a chance to shove someone in front of a train to save lives, it doesn't actually save lives. This is why we have a moral intuition against it.
I will be charitable and note that there are times when you have to make decisions with immediate negative moral costs. Generally, though, following a rule of "don't do something unethical to cause a more ethical outcome" is the right choice. We're bad at understanding how these systems work. We're bad at predicting where our course of action could go wrong. We're bad at guessing when our assumptions are wrong or when something is less sure than it is. We're bad at identifying what is good and what is bad in a situation. For all these reasons, in real life, you must always be hesitant to torture people to produce the water of life.
u/FuguofAnotherWorld [+3] Roll the Dice on Fate (an hour later)
I entirely agree. Far too many things are excused as a necessary evil when they're not necessary at all.
u/Arancaytar [+4] (25 minutes later)
success is not part of the contract
The whole Triwizard thing just makes less sense the more closely you look at it.
Not only was there no obligation for Harry to actually compete instead of forfeiting (it wasn't even his school on the line, since Hogwarts was represented by Cedric) or for the teachers to encourage him to, but it was also one of the least practical ways imaginable of getting Harry to touch a portkey. Why not just Portus his toothbrush?
As I remember EY put multiple lampshades on it.
u/totorox92 [+2] Because I want to Know (30 minutes later)
yeah, cannon is kind of a huge mess, but thats more of a topic for the HP subreddit.
u/DaWaffledude [+2] (2 hours later)
Ugh. This whole conversation has been done to death in so many fanfictions (often terribly) that just mentioning it anymore is enough for me to roll my eyes. The whole "Dumbledore is evil/stupid/abusive" interpretation clearly isn't what the author intended, doesn't add anything other than cynical shock value to the text, and isn't even novel anymore. Can we please just accept Dumbledore's actions as one of the many things in the series that doesn't quite add up and move on for Christ's sake?
All that being said, Dumbledore seems almost entirely irrelevant to the question ultimately being asked, said question being, "Should we judge people by their actions or their intentions?" And that is a question which I feel goes beyond the scope of this subreddit.
(Yes, I'm aware that the OP says we don't know his intentions. This is utterly silly, as it leaves us with nothing but his results to go off of, in which case you're judging a person's morality by their competence)
u/PeridexisErrant [+1] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (2 hours later)
From the sidebar:
Do not post scenarios for discussion, requests for someone to write a story, or brainstorming threads. Authors get one exemption after each published chapter or equivalent.