A), not all moral systems would agree with that. B), again, I find there's a pretty big difference between it being an individual's choice whether or not to help, and a system that makes it illegal to help even if you want to. I am pretty sure there must be quite a few kind-hearted wizard Healers whose hearts break whenever they think of, say, Muggle children dying of cancer when in the Wizarding World it'd take a wave of a wand to cure them, and know that they cannot just intervene or the Ministry will stick them in Azkaban.

Also, sparing half an hour to Gemino a shipment of penicillin and Portkey it to the needy really doesn't present the same kind of risk to yourself as jumping into a burning building. To me the situation is more akin to sparing a pound to give to a beggar or a charity.

For starters, I should think not. I may imaginably end up as a Cornelius Fudge, a bumbler who leads the country to disaster by incompetence — I don't think so but it's plausible. However, there is no plausible universe where I end up a mass murderer. I loathe death in all its forms (more in the real world than the Potterverse, obviously, since in the Potterverse they have an Afterlife, but even then).

And again, A) some people do think you have a moral duty of care to all other sapient, or indeed all other feeling, beings; B) I'm not forcing anyone to do anything, I'm allowing those so inclined to help. Sorry to bring up Doctor Who a second time, but it's a good metaphor for those of you who may know it: this argument is much the same as that of the Time Lords who'd forbid the Doctor from "meddling".

As for your suggestion that Magical Healing works only on wizards… I really don't see why that would be the case. Transfiguration works on Muggles, Potions work on Muggles — it would be odd if as soon as you start applying either of these to them it stopped being effective.

But even then, you can always use magic to increase the available amount for expensive pure-Muggle medicine; that would already be a tremendous help. Depending on whether they count as "food" for Gamp's Law you might even be able to Transfigure some types of medicine altogether (though I have my doubts on that). And as a last resort, magic could act as an actually-reliably-working alternative to cryonics — Petrifying terminally ill Muggles until a cure is worked out, be it Muggle or magical.

Similarly, magic can apparently multiply food. That's enough to eradicate starvation right there.

 

GRINDELWALD DID NOTHING WRONG

 

Do we know if this food is all good? What if it has half the nutrients it should? You also have to take into account the fact that there are billions of muggles. It would take a whole lot of wizards multiplying food around the clock to eradicate starvation.

 

True, we can't know for sure as to the first one, but in the absence of further information I'm assuming you can multiply food wholesale. Well, anyway, I don't see why it would take that many wizards, actually. We know for sure that Gemino can be applied in such a way that the object, once the spell is set off, will keep multiplying for days on end.

As I reminded you lot of about, Grindelwald's no-Statute position was based on "why should we superior wizards hide from the inferior rabble? besides they'd probably be better off too", not "wizards have a moral duty to help Muggles, and nevermind if it's a bit out of their comfort zone".

 

Going by that logic, would you argue Europeans had the moral duty to help the Native Americans, the continent of Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, or Southeast Asia?

 

There was a time when that attitude was prevalent, and more commonly known as the "White Man's Burden".

 

I mean, yes, if only in the sense of "if we discover a cure for cancer and verifiable proof that Heaven is real we won't intentionally keep that knowledge from them".

 

You're not arguing over the sharing of knowledge. You're arguing that wizards have a moral obligation to go around healing muggles, which requires active participation of an insane degree if the tiny wizard population is to even make a dent at the vastly larger muggle population.

Or would you be happy with wizards saying 'yeah cancer ain't shit to cure with magic, we got it done. Good luck now!'

 

Do we know if wizard healing works on muggles? I can't remember it ever coming up in canon.

 

Magic as a rule works on Muggles; it would be odd for healing to be the exception.

 

Were Fred and George's sweets, the ones they fed Dudley, enchanted or were they potioned? A muggle can't make a potion, I wouldn't be too surprised by the idea that a potion won't react on a muggle.

 

I'm not sure if a muggle ever has a potion themselves (apart from Dudley and I don't know if the toffee was a potion or not), but you can use a muggle hair in Polyjuice potion as shown multiple times in DH and all other magic is shown to work on muggles so I'd of thought that muggles would be affected by potions.

 

Rowling's explanation implies that the reason Muggles can't make Potions is that any Potion's brewing involves some wandwork. So it would be quite a leap of logic for them to be unable to drink Potions on this basis, since consumption of Potions obviously doesn't involve any spellcasting.

Also, we have, in Fantastic Beasts, an example of Potions working on Muggles, with the city-wide Obliviation Potion dispersed by the Thunderbird.

 

Was that a potion or a straight venom extract?

 

It's straight venom but the theory still holds. If magical liquids didn't have an effect on non-magical people then the venom wouldn't have worked.

 

You may remember that the method of choice for regrowing bones in the Wizarding Britain is a potion called Skele-Gro.

 

While potions do work on muggles, there's a bigger problem: how to properly supply enough to the muggle population.

There are only so many wizards, and only so many of those wizards know how to brew the especially useful potions like Skele-Gro. Similarly, the magical ingredients are presumably fairly rare, and trying to harvest too much could set more than a few magical animals and plants on the path to extinction. And that's without getting into sketchy people trying to sell off bad or ineffective potions in the muggle market.

 

As far as I know, a shield charm could block physical objects in cannon. I don't remember the exact wording in the book, but I think it was something along the lines of "So and so blocked banished desk from So and so with shield charm." In the department of mysteries. So correct me if I'm wrong, I might just be remembering this incorrectly.
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I have a bit of a query, where exactly did we get the stigma that electronic devices don't work around magic? Like Sataniel said, Mr Weasley fixes an electric fire with magic, and yet we all think electricity doesn't work properly around magic. Did this idea come from canon or fanfic? And if it came from fanfic, why is no one using things like walkmans in Hogwarts?

 

I don't recall if anything was said on this in canon, but even if not, I find wizards using muggle electronics to be tonally jarring. A wand and a cellphone just don't go together.

 

I have a bit of a query, where exactly did we get the stigma that electronic devices don't work around magic? Like Sataniel said, Mr Weasley fixes an electric fire with magic, and yet we all think electricity doesn't work properly around magic. Did this idea come from canon or fanfic? And if it came from fanfic, why is no one using

True, I still find that they should at least make their oen version of certain things. I mean, the entertainment industry is litterly at 0 in the wizarding world, with no decent way to listen to music because it can't be recorded properly is kind of a problem.

It's not like wizards can't just make an entirely new device based of mp3 players, just with wizarding music. Even though there probably isn't to much of that around as the population is so much smaller that the amount of artists is going to be incredibly small.