I'd agree with Glimmervoid.

The reason it is forbidden is the same reason there are gun laws in the UK and what not. From a British perspective, even their police officers are not typically allowed to carry guns. It makes sense that aurors would likely be hamstringed.

Dark Magic and its use is literally a gun rights argument.

 

There are plenty. Right of the top of my head, I can quote Backwards Compatible by Ruskbyte. There is a big discussion between Ron and Hermione about the consequences of Harry casting the Cruciatus Curse.

You do not really know that Rosier did off the killing curse. Just an off the cuff comment by Moody that he took a bit of his nose before he did. It may have been killing curse, it may have been something else.

My contention is not that the Aurors did for a fact use the Unforgivables. We do not know that for certainty. The fact is that they were allowed its use, that is all. Ergo, it follows that their usage likely wouldn't turn them into a sociopath.

As for the Lestranges, it may not even have been the Aurors who captured them. Might have been Dementors, we know they are used to hunt down criminals. Just so that they are alive does not quite mean the Aurors did not use Unforgivables.

My argument is not that Auror did or did not use Unforgivables, it is that it's utilisation is not going to make you evil per se.

I believe there is a section in Deathly Hallows where Voldemort reminisces about the time he came to Godric's Hollow to kill Harry as a child. There is a moment where he catches a reflection of himself and notes how his good looks have been damaged over the years due to the boundaries that he has pushed in magic. I think we can be fairly certain that he is referring to Horcruxes. From that moment where he still looked human to his rise in Little Hangleton, things have obviously changed. He was struck by a killing curse, he has consumed Unicorn blood and he was a participant in a dark ritual. That is likely to be the reason behind the absolute degradation of his facial appearance rather than his use of the killing curse.

I am fairly certain that when Dumbledore and Slughorn refer to murder as something that fractures the soul, it is not murder by killing curse that they mean. It is the act of murder. It does thematically work with Rowling's intention throughout the book.

 

Then the "loving caress" in Snape's voice when he talks about them implies he's the wizard equivalent of that NRA nut who's clearly compensating for something.

 

Harry had basically gone dark in the first two chapters of that story. Casting the Cruciatus made him darker. I'm sure there is one fic in which casting any dark curse at all will instantly make the user 100% evil, rather than a gradual process of soul damage, which is what I contend the canon reflects, but I haven't heard of it.

They were allowed to use Unforgiveable curses during the war and then no longer. There's no evidence the Aurors were not damaged in any way by the use of dark magic, and Crouch was punished for this move by being demoted to a sinecure in international games. Obviously, a large part of his 'transfer' is that allowing the use of the killing curse on suspects is a violation of their rights assuming the right to a fair trial exists, and I'm confused as to why someone who would order a massive miscarriage of justice would care if his men suffered soul damage in the process. If anything, Crouch would consider marginally eviler subordinates an advantage.

Voldemort killed 26 people, meaning 26 fragments broke off his soul, which is more than some other practitioners of the dark arts, but not nearly as many as some famous serial killers, who did not use dark magic or any other variety. It would be a noted phenomenon if they suffered some physical change as a result of their murders. If killing people damages the soul, they would have way more damage than Voldemort, but evidently they don't. I don't understand how doing something with the soul fragment, Slughorn says 'there is a spell', results in a physical change when breaking it off in the first place did not result in that change. Fundamentally, a horcrux is a storage system for soul fragments, the point being to keep them tethered to the world rather than lost, which is why the spell to preserve them has to be immediately performed after the murder is committed. The tethering spell is an external step in the process, and there is no reason to believe it would cause any change to the body or the remainder of the soul in the body.

Yes, he was involved with quite a bit more dark magic than the creation of horcruxes. He even used a killing curse on a muggle who overheard one of his conversations with young Crouch and Wormtail. I contend that he went from 'normal handsome young man' to 'distorted features but still human' due to his extensive use of dark magic, some of which was for the purpose of creating horcruxes, and then from 'distorted features but still human' to 'freaky snake thing' with a dark potion involving snake venom and unicorn blood, another killing curse, and a dark ritual. For anyone else reading this argument, the body generated in the ritual was indeed his body and not a brand new one, the reason for the serpentine features was because his proto-body had them due to drinking the dark potion.

 

As I recall, the act of murder didn't split the soul, it just fractured/damaged it in a way that would heal if left alone. Whatever ritual or spell creates a horcrux is what actually splits a piece of damaged soul off to be placed in an object. I think the reason Harry would up being a half-assed horcrux was that by actually splitting his soul so many times, Voldemort had destabilized it. I'm pretty sure that if murder alone did that, you would have quasi-horcruxes lying around goddamn everywhere.

Anyway, I think of the "corrupting" effect of the unforgivables (almost the only spells clearly defined as "Dark Magic" in canon) as a more mundane psychological effect, rather than some kind of Star Wars-style "temptation of the Dark Side" bit. I think of it a little like magic in the Dresden Files, where intent and conviction are key. You have to mean them for the unforgivables to work. Meaning, you have to not only believe that you can sieze-control-of/torture/kill your target, but that you should, and that you have the right to do so. If that's the case, then even without any inherent magical corruption of your psyche involved, getting good at casting unforgivables would require you to become both comfortable and accustomed to thinking in that way.

Not to mention, I prefer a more hard-line interpretation of what "meaning it" really means when it comes to using unforgivables. There has to be an in-universe reason that these particular spells are "unforgivable", when you can likely achieve identical effects with other spells (or combinations of spells) or, say, certain potions. So my personal interpretation is this:

The Imperius must be cast with the intent to dominate another for the caster's own goals/benefit; it cannot be cast to, say, change the victim's self-destructive behavior for their own good. The Cruciatus must be cast for the sadistic pleasure the caster takes in seeing another being in agony; it cannot work for righteous purposes, and it will not work properly if the caster sees the torture as merely a means to an end. Lastly, the Killing Curse cannot be cast with intent to protect anyone; Only the purely selfish desire to see someone else dead for the caster's own satisfaction and/or pleasure can power the spell.

I believe that this interpretation would explain why casting any of them is a one-way ticket to Azkaban with no questions asked, because, particularly with the Cruciatus and Killing Curses, there is no such thing as mitigating circumstances: If you successfully cast either of them, then you're already an evil piece of shit on some level. The Imperius Curse, while more ambiguous in its possible uses, still says highly unflattering things about the caster's respect for free will, what with the unfettered desire to dominate another's will for your own purposes being the fuel for its use.

 

Harry Potter is the only quasi-horcrux in existence because he is the only individual to have ever survived the killing curse. The caster imparts a tiny bit of his soul into the spell every time he uses it, and ordinarily it just dies, unable to survive without a host, because a corpse is not a suitable container for a soul fragment, which is why it is ill-advised to use animals for horcruxes. Harry's mental link with Voldemort, consequent of a soul fragment, is proof that the tethering spell is not required to separate the soul fragment from the caster of the killing curse. Harry was not a half-assed horcrux, he had the same mental link to Voldemort as Nagini, which was why he had the dream where he was attacking Arthur from her perspective. He was easier to kill than most horcruxes because he had none of the same magical protections that Voldemort placed on things he wanted to not be destroyed.
Most of the time Voldemort casts the killing curse, he doesn't have a super cool artifact on hand, so he doesn't cast the tethering spell. He split his soul a ton of times, but he really only wanted to preserve seven pieces, including the one in himself. With Harry, he didn't have to cast the tethering spell, because Harry was a suitable host.

 

Forget Harry then, that interpretation would say some really unsettling things about McGonagall. At least Harry can say Griphook told him to use the Imperius.

 

I'm pretty sure that surviving the curse was incidental. IIRC, it's specifically stated in canon that the soul fragment broke away from Voldemort because his destabilized soul was being violently ripped from his body by the rebounded Killing Curse. It then attached itself to Harry because he was the only noticeable living thing left in the area. Basically, if both Voldemort and Harry had been killed by that curse that night and the Potters had had a cat that survived, then the family pet would have wound up as an accidental horcrux.

Is there anything to support this idea? If I'm remembering canon properly, then this is a direct contradiction of what was written.

EDIT:

To be fair, the borderline beatification of McGonagall in the fandom is pretty undeserved. I mean, throughout canon, McGonagall confronting Umbridge (before she pissed herself and backed down, anyway), (iirc) Fighting at the DoM, and taking charge of the defense of Hogwarts for the final battle were about the only worthwhile things she did in the whole series. Otherwise, she was a pretty negligent Head of House, almost to the point of being totally useless outside the classroom.

 

I don't disagree that there are certain unsavoury requirements to casting the unforgivables, but I strongly disagree with the interpretation that they are considered unforgivable because of that. Forgetting the argument about what this says about Harry Potter, or the aurors for that matter, it goes strongly against the whole morality of the series.

People are not evil because they are able to feel certain things, they're evil because they choose to act on those feelings in a certain matter. Or, to quote Dumbledore, "What matters is the part we choose to act on on. That's who we really are. 'It is our choices, Harry, that show us who we really are, far more than our abilities."

 

She was not at the DoM, she was another of the Order members who'd been forced away from the school leaving Harry just with Snape, on account of those injuries from the attack on Hagrid. I think it's more that people like her attitude, and even then, I doubt people cared about it nearly as much before OOTP, where she was the only one who seemed to have the guts to rib Umbridge repeatedly and get away with it. Everyone else basically rolled over for her or got schooled, including Harry, so to have somebody there to put the toad bitch in her place, even if only rhetorically, was cathartic.

 

Umm, yeah, that's pretty much what I said. Just feeling that way means nothing, but if you cast those curses, it automatically means that you have acted on those feelings, and it means you can never plead that you only used them in self defense, because they can't be used if your intent is defensive. Don't get me wrong, you can take an Death Eater that is attacking you without provocation down with a Killing Curse, but the motivation needed to cast it successfully means that your intent was NOT to protect, but to kill for pleasure, regardless of who started the fight.

 

HBP Ch23, Dumbledore states that it is ill advised to make horcruxes out of animals. Animals eventually die and they can move around, rather than remain safely squirrelled away, which makes them more likely to die. A corpse is not a suitable container for a soul fragment, or even a whole soul, because then people would simply not die. Further, when Harry dies in DH, he was not 'entirely destroyed' which is the usual requirement for destroying horcruxes, he just was momentarily an unsuitable host and the soul fragment was lost, and it did not reattach itself to anything, including Narcissa Malfoy, who would have been a suitable host, which is why I have to reject the cat theory. When the soul fragment left Harry for the final time, it did not attach to anyone or anything because the tethering spell was not cast and soul fragments do not normally attach themselves to whatever happens to be around. The soul fragment does not go from one place to another without some kind of vehicle, which is why I contend that the fragment travels along the killing curse.
The reason Voldemort died in 1981 was because the curse for an instant connected him with the target, which had powerful magical protections on it; the magical equivalent of pissing on an electric fence. There was nothing that shot back at him, there was one, green flash and he died. For him to die, there would have had to be a momentary connection between his intended victim and his own soul, and as his soul broke apart, the singular fragment that went into Harry used the connection to preserve itself. Because this was a killing curse like any other, I contend that the killing curse with every use creates a momentary connection between victim and killer.

 

That's not quite the part I disagreed with. I disagree with the assessment that its the sentiment behind that's unforgivable rather than the curses per se. Canonically we know that aurors were permitted to use unforgivables, that no-one really reacted to Harry's use of the unforgivables and that there were no reactions to "Moody"'s demonstration of unforgivables in a class-room setting (which surely someone must have mentioned to a parent in a letter). It's like Guantamano Bay or other incidents of state sanctioned torture. We're not horrified that someone can hate terrorists enough to torture them; we're horrified that they actually do. (Leaving aside that we're also horrified about the lack of due process for questionable results at best.)

 

I'm pretty sure it's explicitly stated in canon that Voldemort's destabilized soul (already damaged further by the recent murder of Lily) shed a fragment after his body was destroyed by the rebounded curse, which then attached itself to Harry as the only living thing left in the immediate area. I'm not saying it makes perfect logical sense because, you know, Rowling. But, If I'm remembering things right, that is pretty much exactly how Dumbledore explains it in canon.
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*shrug* Could have just been a political move to reassure the laywizard that likely doesn't know very much about the mechanics of the unforgivables that the Ministry was taking serious action. I'd bet any auror that used any of them but the Imperius (and even then under supervision) would have been looked askance at by his fellows for a long time, even if he would never be punished for it.

Because he never used any of them successfully except the Imperius, and even that was in service to accomplishing a supposedly impossible task necessary to the defeat of Voldemort (which is assuming anyone outside the trio ever found out for sure that he had used the Imperius successfully, which is not guaranteed considering that just about all the goblins involved wound up dead. And they may not have told anyone all of the details of exactly how they managed to rob Gringotts afterwards.)

Because, except for the Imperius, he only used them on spiders. In general, while it's still not entirely acceptible, I think most people (outside of PETA at least) are a lot less concerned about the idea of someone feeling sadism or homicidal urges toward a hideous, possibly poisonous bug than they would be if the same feelings were brought to bear on people. Even the fact that he used the Imperius on the students as an educational experience doesn't necessarily discount the desire to dominate as necessary intent for the spell. After all, the caster doesn't necessarily need to feel that way all the time. If Harry can make himself focus on feeling deliriously happy in the middle of a Dementor swarm to cast a patronus, then a dark wizard should be able to summon up murderous feelings on call to cast the Killing Curse at a person actively threatening their safety.

The point is that in that moment of casting the Cruciatus or the Killing Curse, your intentions must be malicious (that much is canon, even if Rowling never goes into great detail on exactly how malevolent your intent needs to be). And in matters of law, intent is insanely important. Two different people, both brought up on charges for shooting a man in the face, would be facing very different prison terms if one of them was proven to have done it accidentally, while proof is found that the other shooter got angry and meant to kill the victim. The acts, and the results of them, are identical. It's the intent, or lack thereof that determines which shooter gets 5 years for negligent homicide, while the other gets 25 years for 2nd Degree Murder.

So from a legal standpoint, it's not all that unlikely at all that it's ultimately the intent behind those curses, rather than the effects (which can be easily replicated by other means with a little effort and creativity) which got them classified as "Unforgivable".

 

That's a problem with pretty much any HP theory. What I am stating is what I believe makes the most logical sense with the least extrapolation. It is stated that Voldemort's soul was destabilized, but then how did it get from Voldemort to Harry, and why did only one fragment go to Harry if it broke into many fragments? It did break into more than one piece at the time of Voldemort's death, and it took a while for it to re-form into a shade, during which time he describes himself as 'less than the meanest ghost'. These fragments were lost and confused; they did not seek out a new body because there was no vehicle to take them to a new body.
Killing Lily was an essential part of this process, which is why the text refers to her love for Harry as sacrificial; she only managed to protect him by giving up her life. The love that is inside Harry is not purely a shield, as we see in PS when Quirrell tries to physically attack him and Quirrell dies as a result. For the rest of his life after killing Lily, Voldemort's soul could not make contact with Harry(without killing him in the process) until he put Harry's blood in his body, which he did for the express purpose of being able to use the killing curse on Harry, which was what he attempted to do after Story Time with the Death Eaters. Harry was not protected against any possible harm, he was protected only against contact with Voldemort, so it would have worked if he used any other spell while he was possessing Quirrell or while he was a cursed baby. A previous version of himself nearly succeeded at killing Harry with a basilisk he controlled by virtue of being the Heir of Slytherin. The reason he did not do this is because he did not want to harm Harry; there was still a use for him until Voldemort was resurrected.