That's a common misconception that TV Medical Dramas perpetuate all the time, but you never shock a flatline. If you do, you can depolarize the heart and rend resuscitation efforts futile. When the patient flatlines, what you do is CPR and administer vasoconstrictors like epinepherine or atropine. Mind you this doesn't usually work, but it works more often than shocking one.

 

What is a defibrillator good for if it isn't for restarting the heart? I thought that the heart operated through tiny electrical impulses and the purpose of the defib was to get those impulses going again.

On topic: For the most part, I believe that magic is neither good nor evil. However, there are some curses that I just can't see being used that way. If we just stick to canon, then I can think of at least three off the top of my head that could be classified as pure evil: Cruciatus, Avada Kedavra, and that purple slashing curse that Dolohov used on Hermione. Imperius, the other Unforgivable, is an intent-based spell; it doesn't have to be used to commit evil. For instance, you could use it to control a Death Eater to infiltrate Voldemort's hideout.

However, we are explicitly told that Crucio requires you to really want to inflict pain on your victim, and that you really have to mean it when you use an AK. I also categorize Dolohov's curse as evil because we are told that it was probably weakened by the fact that he did it silently (or is that a fanon concept?). If it did that much damage in a weakened state, imagine what it could do at full power. It was also apparently designed to be resistant to healing. Beyond those, I can never remember which curses are canon or fanon. Fanfic writers have come up with some pretty nastily inventive curses over the years.

 

Defib resets the heart's rhythm.

Time for a bit of devil's advocate.

Is it? Seems to me that the spell works regardless of what you intend to do with it.

There are some who could argue that taking away someone's free will is wrong no matter what the consequences.

See my earlier posts in this thread casting doubt on that.

[Citation needed]

So powerful spells are evil?

Also, Hermione survived okay. Doesn't seem to be that dangerous in its weakened state. We don't even know what it does, other than fanon's "internal organ cutter" idea.

Your argument seems pretty contradictory. You start by saying that magic is good or evil depending on how you use it, but then go on to say that there are certain spells that are evil in and of themselves, even if we can think of good (or at the least non-evil) ways of using them.

For instance, was Bellatrix's use of the Killing Curse against a fox in HBP evil?

 

Thanks for the clarification.

I guess intent-based was the wrong term. What I meant was that the spell is not limited to just causing death or pain. It works no matter what, but what you do with the control you gain depends on your intent.

True; so here's another example. A person needs to complete a task (let's say someone's life is on the line), but doesn't think he is mentally capable of doing it. Since he's the only person who can complete this task, he asks someone else to perform the imperius curse on him to help him get over the mental blocks he is having with the situation.

I didn't say you had to enjoy it. I said that you had to want to cause pain. There is a difference

I believe Crouch!Moody says it in GoF. I don't have the book handy to check it though. It's also common sense; why would you cast the killing curse if you did't want to kill?

Ok, maybe it was a bad example. You're right; we really don't know anything about it. Though I'm pretty sure that it left a scar (not many curses in canon do that) and that it still took a while for Hermione to recover.

Again, misinterpretation. I said that for the most part magic is neither good nor evil, but that there were some curses that I couldn't see being used for a non-evil purpose. I don't particularly want to get into a philosophical discussion of morality, but I consider the desire to kill or cause pain to be evil. That's not to say that you should never kill or cause anyone pain, as certain situations may demand it. However, to do so is still evil.

In the fox example, I'm not sure if Bellatrix found out it was a fox before or after she killed it. I'm pretty sure it was after, which would mean that she just wanted to kill whatever was out there, human or animal. I would still classify that as evil.

 

One example where both Killing curse can be used without wanting to kill or the Cruciatus used without wanting to cause pain: teaching purposes, shooting it at thin air.

And Crouch!Moody said you had to have power behind the curse, not that you have to mean it. Though those two things could be one and the same.

The fox example may allow you to evade, but Moody killing the spider in GoF doesn't. Was Moody's use of the Killing curse to kill a spider evil?

Mordac, I choose you!

He loves to talk about JKR and deontological ethics, so I'll let him talk about that. Suffice it to say that this position is a bit of an overly simplistic system, making certain acts immoral no matter what completely ignores intent, consequences and a person's character, all of which are important aspects of moral judgement.

 

I don't recall any canon evidence for untargeted killing curses/crucios.

The desire to kill is still there. Just because it isn't targeted at a human doesn't make it any different.

It's a little more complicated than that. I don't believe that performing an evil act automatically makes a person evil. Like I said, there are situations where killing - in my eyes an evil act - is the right thing to do. A lot of this depends on your own personal code of ethics though. Mine tend more towards the moral absolutist side of the scale, but others have looser codes of ethics and may see certain uses of the killing curse as acceptable.

 

"The right thing to do" = "the morally correct thing to do".

"Morally correct" = "good"

Thus "There are occasions where it is good to do evil"

Thus "There are occasions where good is evil".

A fuck up of the terms involved at best, a contradiction at worst.

You didn't answer the question: is it evil? Is my desire to kill a spider evil?

If no, then there is an occasion when the killing curse isn't evil.

If yes, then what is evil becomes so loose that it loses all meaning.

Nor is there any evidence that there is something preventing people from casting magic at nothing.

Moreover, even if you said that untargeted magic is impossible, it's easy to get around: the target is the air.

 

Alternatively, miss on purpose.

 

"the right thing to do" != "the morally correct thing to do"

I meant it more like: "the right thing to do" = "the necessary thing to do"

Just to break down the way I've been using good, evil, right, and wrong:
good = morally right
evil = morally wrong
right = necessary for the situation (i.e. correct)
wrong = unnecessary for the situation (i.e. incorrect)

This is one of those situations where the English language really sucks since all of these terms can mean so many different things.

I thought I made it clear that the desire to kill is, in my opinion, evil. How does that make the definition of evil loose? It seems pretty clear to me.

True. However, I see it this way: unless someone in canon casts an untargeted curse, untargeted curses are not canon. Think of it this way: there is no evidence that any of the spells created by fanon don't exist in the canon world. However, they aren't considered canon by anyone.

Ok, but one problem. We know that killing curses can occasionally have an effect on non-living things, but I'm not sure if they can be targeted on a non-living thing. Is it really possible to kill something that isn't alive? I'm just not sure it could work if you targeted it on something that wasn't alive.

And again, no evidence for killing curses targeted at non-living objects in canon that I can recall.

That doesn't work. Either you don't really target the person (see above for why I don't think that would work) or the other person dodges, which means that you were still intending to kill them.

 

If your use of the term "right" had no moral connotations then it's relevance to this debate is rather minimal, in so far as this is a debate is about whether magic can be good or bad.

Moreover, your position still requires a bit of moral wrangling. To claim that sometimes the way one should act is in a way that is evil is a bit dodgy. The term "good" has normative force, which is to say that what is "good" is an action guiding idea. The very idea of good necessitates that the correct way to act is the way which is in accordance with the good.

Consider the two statements:

"I'm bad at tennis, but it's okay, I don't care to get better."

"I'm bad at behaving morally, but it's okay, I don't care to get better."

The second statement should trigger the response "Well you ought to", whereas the first does not. The idea of morality is that one is meant to obey it. There is no such "ought" to tennis playing.

So to say that the correct way to act is sometimes not in accordance with "the good" is...odd. To say the least.

It makes it loose because every time I swat a fly I'm commiting evil. Everyone is performing evil on a regular basis, no one cares about the fact that people are performing evil, and in fact encourage it regularly. The term loses all normative force, and since morality is characterised by being normative ("Ought" rather than "is"), it becomes meaningless. If swatting a fly is evil, what term do I then use to describe rape? Genocide? Mega-evil? Super-evil?

I see it this way: unless I see someone in canon say that you can only cast magic/curses on a target, saying you can't cast except with a target isn't canon.

My position is the base one because it requires nothing extra in canon. Your position requires the addition of a new rule to magic.

It's the same way that I assume that cork (insert material here) can be conjured. We've never seen it conjured, but we've never seen an active rule restricting its conjuration. The default position is that it can be done unless shown otherwise (like we were told that food cannot be conjured). It's not canon, because canon is only that which is in the books. But it's a perfectly acceptable assumption, given what we've seen of conjuration.

And what we've seen of spell casting in general is that there isn't anything restricting what spells can be cast upon.

Your argument:

1. The killing curse kills things.
2. It is not possible to kill things that aren't alive.
3. Thus the killing curse can only be cast at things that are alive.

There is a hidden assumption here:

The Killing Curse can only be cast when its result will be the successful death of something.

Without this, 3 does not follow from 1 and 2.

The fact that we have seen killing curses miss shows that it is perfectly possible to cast a killing curse which does not end up killing anything.

 

Yes, it is a bit odd. However, I'm still working out my own personal moral code. It's bound to have some holes in it still.

But this is my own moral code. I do my best to stick to it, but I'm not asking anyone else to. "Good" and "evil" are very subjective terms, and every person will have his own way of defining them.

Here we'll have to agree to disagree. I agree that conjuration of pretty much anything is reasonable (and you can conjure food...it just disappears after a while and is thus useless). This is because we've been shown that conjuration works. However, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of spells cast throughout canon, and every single spell that was intended to have an effect on something had a target. Spells were always demonstrated on targets, be they objects, animals, or people. Nothing was ever demonstrated by casting it at nothing.

You're stretching with this one Taure. I never said anything about the result of the spell. This is all about intended targets. A missed killing curse was still targeted at a living person. In other words, the intent was to kill that person. What I'm saying is that it doesn't seem logical that you could intend to kill something that isn't alive. The curse wouldn't work if you intended it to hit a non-living thing.

 

This differs from your earlier assertion.

Earlier you claimed that you couldn't cast the killing curse without intending to kill someone on the basis of causation: there would be no situation in which you would cast it except in these circumstances.

We have now worked ourselves to the point of you claiming that it is a magical requirement of the curse for the caster to have the intent to kill.

The beauty of your original assertion (which would be a great position if not for the demonstration objection) was that it relied on logical reasoning alone.

Unfortunately the latter position, as an assertion about the way magic is, needs evidence to back it up. And there is no evidence that there are any magical requirements for the successful casting of the Killing Curse with regards to intent.

I'm a relativist myself, but just to throw a spanner in the works, riddle me this:

"Everything is relative", if true, would mean that the claim "everything is relative" is itself relative, and thus can be denied by others. Moreover, the only way for it to be true would be for "everything is relative" to be an objective claim, which would self-refute.

It is impossible to assert a position of relativism without self-refutation.

So in the case of moral codes, to say that morality is relative, and that everyone has their own moral codes, itself requires a non-relative moral assertion that morality is not objective. This assertion itself is objective, and self-refutes.

(This works under the assumption that a statement about ethics is a statement of ethics, which I take to be true: a position of nihilism, "there are no ethics", is itself an ethical position).

 

You're right; my original assertion was more logically sound, barring the demonstration argument. However, I'm pretty sure that the idea of all magic being intent-based is a canon concept. There's no specific description of the effect of intent in the killing curse, but it follows that if the purpose of the spell is to kill, then you must intend to kill whatever your target is in order for the curse to work. And logically, it is impossible to intend to kill something that is not alive as long as you know that it isn't alive.

If I'm wrong and it's actually a fanon concept, then I concede the point. Though, the advisability of demonstrating the killing curse is questionable at best.

I actually put forward this exact same argument in my high school philosophy class about 3 years ago. However, it doesn't stop every person on the planet from being a moral relativist to some extent. It is practically impossible for human beings to be completely absolute when it comes to morals. We will always make exceptions: for ourselves, for our loved ones. Can anyone honestly say that they would sacrifice their mother or their child to save the lives of two people that they don't know? A moral absolutist would say yes - saving two lives at the cost of one is good. I don't think that any human being could do that though.

 

With regards to magic being intent based:

In HBP, Harry successfully cast the Sectumsempra curse without a clue as to what it would do. In PS, Flitwick spoke of a wizard who pronounced his spell wrongly and the wrong effect followed.

These two examples seem to show that spells have some intrinsic nature independent of what the wizard intends to do with them. "Avada Kedavra" is the Killing Curse, and no amount of intent will make it the bunny-conjuring curse.

At the same time, intent is at least part of some spells. The Shield charm, for instance, changes in form depending on the desires of the caster: normally it blocks magical attacks, in HBP we saw it reflect an attack, in DH we saw it block the physical, and also be cast over multiple people at once.

The majority of spells, however, seem to be not intent-based. At least not at the lower levels of magic usage - who knows how someone like Dumbledore may be able to twist the usage of a spell beyond it's "default" form.

 

In the Sectumsempra example, it could be argued that Harry had the intent to harm Malfoy. Of course he wasn't trying to harm him as seriously as the curse did, but the intent was still there. But that's just nitpicking.

So it sounds like it could go either way. Personally, I think it's logical that the killing curse couldn't be cast on a non-living object since it makes things dead and you can't make something that's already dead even more dead.

But hey, who knows? It's not spelled out in canon, so we just have to speculate. I think we should just agree to disagree on this.

 

Well, since public demand is so great, how can I say no.

In the Harry Potter books, we see JKR's confused ethics shining through. It seems to be the case--Dumbledore certainly believes that way, and we know Dumbledore many times acts as a mouthpiece for JKR's infodumps--that there are some types of magic that are always wrong to cast, with the Unforgivables a part of them, but not the only -- Hurcruces count too, for instance. This pretty much shows that in her mind, it is always wrong, among other other things to kill. This is shown in the author endorsed Order of the Phoenix modus operandi of never killing any enemy or retaliate on their level--which seems pretty damn weak for a supposed vigilante organization, but I digress. These rules are of course broken in the last novel for Harry, because apparently, Harry can do nothing wrong, but I will ignore that as a sign of author incompetence.
It seems that JKR (and you) favor an extreme view of deontology like that of Emmanuel Kant, where certain acts are always wrong without exceptions. Many people think this is the only viable alternative to consequentialism, but there is a moderate version of deontology, favored by, for instance, W.D. Ross(and me), in which we have several duties, none of which are absolute the way duties for Kant are. Duties can often conflict for Ross, and when they conflict only one will turn out to be an actual duty, whichever one is morally more important. In a case of killing to save a life, the life is more important than the normal duty not to kill, since you're killing a would be murderer to save an innocent victim, while in the case of killing because someone looked at you the wrong way it's still wrong to kill, even if the consequences are better from killing. So this is not consequentialism, but it's not absolutism either. This is also called 'graded absolutism'.

I think it's JKR's ignoring of these nuances that make her seem so morally confused at times---the wizard government post First War didn't have any qualms about restricting civil rights and putting people in jail without a trial, but killing someone is so wrong that they didn't use the death penalty on them. This is of course completely unbelievable, but shows how her ethical framework is so dead set against it that there seems to be a current of moral schizophrenia in her work, leading to problems in the classifications of magic such as this one.

I think I rambled a lot, but I tend to do that.

 

This whole topic sound eerily familiar to the Potentium view of the Force from Star Wars. Darth Sidious even stated "The reality is that there is only the Force. It is above such petty concepts as positive and negative, black and white, good and evil". It should be noted that this view eventually led to corruption by the dark side. Since the force was tied to emotions the question needs to be asked whether severe negative emotions are consistently needed for dark magic. If so a practitioner can be expected to slowly chip away at their core values with the continued use of dark magic. The result is a change in the tone of one's intent where sacrifice becomes easier and negative consequences from one's own actions become easier to bear. This inevitably leads to a dark wizard.

 

I considered arguing my point, showing you the benefits of relativity, telling you about the meaning of life, and all that...

...and then I remembered you brought Darth Vader to a philosophy discussing.

*sigh*

 

Nice tie in with Star Wars. By way of parity, Voldemort (Sidious' counterpart) said that, "There is no good or evil - there is only power, and those too weak to seek it."

I prefer Darth Traya/Kreia's view on the Force as being a poison, as it were. I suppose it is no coincidence that so many Jedi fell to the dark side, convinced that they were doing the will of the Force. The will of the Force indeed!

No, that is not entirely accurate. Kreia got the closest to expressing what I felt is the right way of looking at the Force, but as long as we're talking about the Force, I might as well get my entire view out there: the Force is simply that a force of nature, no more kindly to sentient interests than water is.

Water sometimes, out of pure indifference, happens to favor sentient interests (i.e. seasonal rain) and other times, out of pure indifference, happens to disfavor sentient interests (i.e. tsunamis). Just as one ought not pretend that the will of water is really the right way to go for sentient interests, one shouldn't pretend that the will of the Force is really the right way to go for sentient interests. Look at all the phenomena in the universe and one finds that they don't actually favor one being or another - it only seems it does when looks at events through faulty reasoning.

Vader, Caedus, Qel-Droma, and a host of other Dark-Siders firmly felt they were doing the will of the Force. I believe they were right. It just happens that the will of the Force is ultimately indifferent to sentient interests.

Interesting digression over, back on topic

Perhaps one way to pragmatically approach the Dark/Light dichotomy might be, in legal terms, declare the Dark Arts illegal, but extenuating circumstances (to be determined by a prosecutor/jury or whatever) might allow for exceptions. For instance, it is illegal to murder someone with a firearm, but it is not illegal to defend one's self with a firearm against a threat. Likewise, it should be that it is illegal to employ the Killing Curse to murder someone, but it is not illegal to defend one's self with a Killing Curse. The Killing Curse, unlike a Cruciatus for instance, is a legimately useful spell for self-defense - there is no magical counter to it and that definitely gives it status as a useful self-defense tool. Also, an Imperius could well be useful for restraining purposes (honestly, is it really worse, under Ministry control, than Ministry-enacted Obliviation?). Perhaps the only unjustifiable curse may be a Cruciatus, which doesn't seem to give way to any mitigating circumstances, beyond coercion. Fiendfyre seems to be illegal given its inherent unpredictability and difficulty in controlling it. The same reasoning would seem to apply to any other prospective Dark Arts.