Harry’s blindness to Quirrel being pretty obviously bad news at this point is definitely something I’d like to see explained. I know that as the reader I get to see things more clearly than Harry does, but when you start thinking painfully murdering magical creatures to preserve your life for a short amount of time is fine if the person doing it is someone you like, something is going wrong there! I am fully expecting at this point to understand that Harry’s thinking on Quirrel is being deliberately suppressed. After all, Harry’s meant to be fundamentally curious about magic… why has he not investigated what could cause the anti-magic effect?
Actually, no, he outright approves—he doesn’t think unicorns are sapient, which means that their suffering is automatically worth less than a wizard’s life.
Also, there’s no anti-magic effect, Quirrell is just blindingly fast at casting and then False Memory Charmed Draco.
Ah, apologies I mean the fact that their magics interact in weird ways. He’s known about it for a long time, but hasn’t really gone out of his way to research it. Unless I’m forgetting, I don’t think he’s even looked it up in the library.
Re: the unicorn, yeah I’m aware of his thoughts, but that is an extremely uncritical approach. Even if we accept that a unicorn is less than a wizards life, he is basically saying its fine to kill something to gain at most a year (as far as we can tell? Its implied that unicorn blood is not an indefinite cure?). There should be some attempt at moral calculus there at least.
Well, really now, Harry eats meat. In other words he will accept the death of a nonsentient creature for purposes, not even of keeping himself alive for a few additional hours—he could eat veggies—but just because they taste good. To preserve life? Pff. The argument about sentience is one he ought to have, but conditional on unicorns being nonsentient, they are just not valuable compared to additional months of life.
There aren’t any clues that unicorns are sentient, so there’s no reason why Harry should find QM killing a unicorn more thought provoking than eating pork.
Who says he’s blind? He won’t so much as drink from his own containers in Quirrell’s presence because Quirrell might teleport something nasty inside. And even if he decided that Quirrell was totally irredeemable, Harry should still be upset about losing the enjoyable aspects of Quirrell’s personality.
Painfully murdering nonsentients to preserve one’s own life is considered fine in almost all human cultures. In fact, painfully killing animals for fun is considered acceptable by most people, so long as the killing is done in a non-sadistic manner.
Harry’s blindness to Quirrel being pretty obviously bad news at this point is definitely something I’d like to see explained. I know that as the reader I get to see things more clearly than Harry does, but when you start thinking painfully murdering magical creatures to preserve your life for a short amount of time is fine if the person doing it is someone you like, something is going wrong there! I am fully expecting at this point to understand that Harry’s thinking on Quirrel is being deliberately suppressed. After all, Harry’s meant to be fundamentally curious about magic… why has he not investigated what could cause the anti-magic effect?
Actually, no, he outright approves—he doesn’t think unicorns are sapient, which means that their suffering is automatically worth less than a wizard’s life.
Also, there’s no anti-magic effect, Quirrell is just blindingly fast at casting and then False Memory Charmed Draco.
Ah, apologies I mean the fact that their magics interact in weird ways. He’s known about it for a long time, but hasn’t really gone out of his way to research it. Unless I’m forgetting, I don’t think he’s even looked it up in the library.
Re: the unicorn, yeah I’m aware of his thoughts, but that is an extremely uncritical approach. Even if we accept that a unicorn is less than a wizards life, he is basically saying its fine to kill something to gain at most a year (as far as we can tell? Its implied that unicorn blood is not an indefinite cure?). There should be some attempt at moral calculus there at least.
Well, really now, Harry eats meat. In other words he will accept the death of a nonsentient creature for purposes, not even of keeping himself alive for a few additional hours—he could eat veggies—but just because they taste good. To preserve life? Pff. The argument about sentience is one he ought to have, but conditional on unicorns being nonsentient, they are just not valuable compared to additional months of life.
His best friend just died and it looks like his mentor is next. Good recipe for motivated reasoning.
There aren’t any clues that unicorns are sentient, so there’s no reason why Harry should find QM killing a unicorn more thought provoking than eating pork.
Who says he’s blind? He won’t so much as drink from his own containers in Quirrell’s presence because Quirrell might teleport something nasty inside. And even if he decided that Quirrell was totally irredeemable, Harry should still be upset about losing the enjoyable aspects of Quirrell’s personality.
Painfully murdering nonsentients to preserve one’s own life is considered fine in almost all human cultures. In fact, painfully killing animals for fun is considered acceptable by most people, so long as the killing is done in a non-sadistic manner.
Unless you have hard data to back that up, I will accept “many people” but not “most”. In the US, for example, less than 5% of people hunt.
But how many of the population disapprove of hunting?
(Make that sport hunting, to fit the original better.)
I actually suspect less than half in the U.S., but more than half over the whole world. (But I really don’t know.)