Good point, I should have said that it protected Harry while he was at home, not the home itself. I suppose that raises the question then of why didn't Voldemort simply kill the Dursleys to eliminate the protection?

 

By similar logic, why didn't Dumbledore simply place additional protections upon the Dursleys so that Voldemort couldn't reasonably kill them? This could be considered a plot hole, but if so, it's a very minor one, as the logic that makes character A exploit the plot hole would also lead character B to counter it.

 

Wait, has everyone aleast forgotten that Harry only survived his first year because he lived with the Dursleys?

Like Taure said the protection was on Harry, not 4 Privet Drive (which would just be silly; what if the house burned down or they had to move for some reason?), but it was sustained by him living with Lily's blood relatives, i.e. Petunia and arguably Dudley. It's plausible that in the occasion of their deaths he could've been placed with a cousin, great-aunt, etc. of Lily's, but conversely we can reasonably assume that the further the relation the weaker the protection would have been (that's how blood magic usually works anyway).

And there's no question that it was effective: the boy literally burned Quirrelmort's face off just by touching him, and later the blood protection saved (or rather played a part in saving) him from death by Avada Kedavra yet again. There's a reason Voldemort insisted on using Harry's blood to regain his body; when he said "I can touch you now" he wasn't just being melodramatic.

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Check out the Dumbledore quotes in post 186 above. The first one indicates that Harry burning Quirrelmort's face off was due to the original sacrificial protection he received from his mother. This had nothing to do with him living with the Dursleys.

The second quote then describes an additional charm Dumbledore placed that was based on the power of Harry's mother's sacrifice, and would protect Harry against Voldemort and death eaters while he was living with his mother's blood relatives.

 

Oh I do remember that bit

But somehow I forgot the "there", and thought it applied everywhere.

Isn't that redundant though? If Lily's sacrifice alone gave Harry the protection to burn Voldemort by touch, then doesn't it equally apply in Privet Drive as in Hogwarts?

 

I agree, it is redundant. The one thing the additional charm does is protect Harry while he is in his home, which could be accomplished just as effectively by a Fidelius charm or a nasty defensive ward setup. This is part of the reason why I questioned Dumbledore's decision to leave Harry with the Dursleys earlier in the thread. Harry really isn't gaining any unique safety benefit by staying at the Dursleys, which undermines Dumbledore's rationale for leaving Harry there in the first place.

 

From DH:

Basically, the charm Harry's mom placed on him does require him to live with his relatives, at least enough that he can call the place home. This is implicitly not anything Dumbledore did, either - it's all his "mother's charm".

 

But Moody's statement contradicts what Dumbledore himself says about the protection on Harry's home:

So Dumbledore placed a charm based on the sacrificial magic that already existed. Moody likely does not know the details, or is just grouping the two things together as his "mother's charm". All Moody cares about is that he needs to get Harry out before he turns 17.

 

What i find more interesting then whether or not he was manipulative (you can either say he was - in which case he either was really lucky or incredebly competent, or he wasnt - in which case he was even more lucky and probably a bit stupid, and lets be honest it comes down to interpretation if he was or not) is whether or not he was right to be manipulative?

Lets say he thought harry would not survive the whole thing - would it be rigt to sacrifice a child to stop a potential wizarding hitler2.0 from ever really coming to power?


I mean, say the worst of all the OMB Dumbledore tropes are true (bar incompetence), can you really fault the man for sacrificing the life and death of 1 child for, indeed, the greater good?

 

Yes, because he isn't consistent. There are lot of cases where "sacrificing the life of one person" would have resulted in greater good, but Dumbledore doesn't do that, but instead goes for the exact opposite. Simply killing off all the Death Eaters in the end of OotP and throwing Draco in Azkaban at the beginning of HBP would have contributed for the Greater Good, but that's not how Dumbledore does things.

Utilitarianism is fine, but only if you are consistent with it. Otherwise it's just empty justification for immoral actions.

Really Dumbledore (like most of Rowlings characters in HP) is mostly just a plot device. It's not as much Dumbledore as a character that's manipulative, it's the plot that needs him to be. Canon HP is very much a plot driven story.

 

See, they said "bar incompetence".

And even if he wasn't as consistent, there is to me no comparison between the limited harm the current crop of Death Eaters could cause without his intervention and letting Voldemort live practically forever. Especially if he eventually puts two and two together (I'm assuming incompetence is off for Voldemort too) and realizes what Harry is.

Not to mention there are only like six Death Eaters present at the Ministry, as opposed to the possibly hundreds of followers Voldemort had. I really don't see how that solves the wider issue. Killing Harry, on the other hand, is an actual solution to the Voldemort problem (or at least one-seventh of one), and his death is something that has to happen anyway, all sensibility aside.

If I was in Dumbledore's shoes and I knew from the start that Harry was a Horcrux...my interpretation of that prophecy would have been very different. And with good reason. In all honesty I would've killed the kid and pushed the Neville boy to be the wizarding world's hero instead, which would probably backfire spectacularly down the line but hey, hindsight is 20/20.

I mean, it's kind of like comparing a fraction of the armies of Mordor to the One Ring (if the Ring happened to be a teenaged boy...). Come to think of it, would the Council of Elrond have killed Frodo if he somehow melded with the Ring? Could Sam have pushed him in at Sammath Naur if Frodo absolutely refused to give it up and there was no Gollum ex machina?

 

To be fair, it's not really a fair comparison, because Harry had to die. Without his death, there would be no chance of Voldemort's defeat. And the idea that such a play is utilitarian kind of falls apart when you consider the lengths Dumbledore went to to ensure that Harry would live. It's actually fairly consistent in that sense, he wants both Harry and Draco to have the chances to make their own choices and define their futures. It's the opposite of utilitarian in both cases.

 

Yeah, but this is a hypothetical utilitarian manipulative Dumbledore.

Harry was Dumbledore's greatest weakness imo, though of course you could call him his greatest strength. I don't think he ever cared about any of his other students half as much as he did about Harry; with Draco you could almost taste how dry and academic his interest was, and in the end we find out it was all part of his "let the Elder Wand's power be broken with my death" plot. I don't think he gave two fucks whether Draco lived or died, he just wanted him to die a (well, relatively) good person.

Ironically, Dumbledore seemed prepared to sacrifice everyone but the one person who actually needed to be sacrificed. Including himself.

 

How's that? Voldemort was plenty defeated for thirteen years while Harry was happily (or not) alive.

I think that Dumbledore's biggest mistake was to focus too much on Voldemort, and forget everything else in process. It was the Death Eaters who killed people, it was the Death Eaters who infiltrated the Ministry, it was the Death Eaters who organized the concentration camps for muggleborn wizards.

Without his Death Eaters Voldemort is only one (if nasty) wizard that can be defeated and thrown to Azkaban to spend the rest of his immortal life.

 

As Dumbledore said in the first book, he would come back. He could *always* come back. Death Eaters, pureblood prejudice, all the things his platform were built on are not things that can be rooted out so simply.

The whole Horcrux shebang and the series in general are full of callouts to LOTR, and that world had to deal with its resident Dark Lord Junior like seven times before his "horcrux" was destroyed and they could have some actual peace.

Also, concentration camps? This ain't Grindelwald we're talking about.

 

Leaving aside Harry's duel with Voldemort in DH, the only one we know to be capable of defeating Voldemort is Dumbledore, who is getting on in years. We know Voldemort's powerful enough to duel, what was it, McGonagall, Kingsley and Flitwick at the same time. James Potter, one of the most talented students of his year and a highly experienced Auror, was a second's work. And, to top off all of that, if Voldemort's defeated, he'll simply come back again. That's a basic recipe for his ultimate victory.

Consider the fear that Fudge showed at the mere thought that Voldemort could return. That's when everybody knew he'd been dead for years. Now consider the constant fear that would ensue if every single time he was defeated, there was practically a guarantee that he'd be back in a decade or two. And then consider that the way the likes of the Malfoys would react would also drastically change, so Voldemort would likely come back sooner and would see much less degradation of his power base.

And it's made fairly clear that Azkaban couldn't possibly hold Voldemort. I'm not sure how Grindelwald was held, but simply letting one of the most brilliant and vicious wizards of all time hang around hardly seems like a good option even if they could reasonably trust to holding him for any length of time.

 

All that, but minor nitpick - James was never an Auror. I don't think he ever had a full-time job, what with the war and prophecy and Order and all.

 

(Ensuing discussion moved to 'Is it possible to imprison Voldemort?')

 

Dumbledore held some of the more powerful positions in the wizarding world for decades (Headmaster, Supreme Mugwump...), he could have changed the wizarding world, fixed Hogwarts and supported progressive causes through the children... Instead he did basically nothing and just maintained the status quo.

 

We see exactly how powerful all those positions make him in OotP, don't we. As for how powerful he could have been, well, he was burned by power in his youth and doesn't trust himself to be any more than a mirror of Voldemort, which, ironically, seems to lead people to accuse him of being exactly that.