I love your description of the "see-saw effect" - this is something I've been grappling with for a while.
If I killed someone to stop them from killing me or someone else I might feel I did the right thing but I could still accept that I actually killed someone without pretending I did something else (like "counter-killed" them). It doesn't mean I'm denying that the other person was about to kill somebody.
There seems to be this weird idea that what the good guys do and what the bad guys to can never, under no circumstances, be in any way considered to be the same. Hence the need for terms like "counter-jinx", because heaven forfend the good guys should be caught using the same tools as the bad... It's this whole essentialist idea that these two groups are so completely different that even if what they do looks the same to an outsider, it must still be different because, y'know, they are the good guys, and the others are the bad guys...
Hermione's justification for her Polyjuice plan is that "killing Muggleborns is worse than brewing a difficult Potion."
Which is no justification at all. And there seems to be no concept that just because one side does something bad, the other can still do something bad as well. Reacting to something bad doesn't make what you do in reaction a good thing - often it isn't. That's what we call escalation. It happens all the time in the real world, unfortunately. And just because someone thinks that all in all, Harry perhaps shouldn't have done X, doesn't mean they are saying he's no better than Voldemort. Just because something could be worse doesn't mean we should stop criticising.
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Date: 2004-11-02 11:43 am (UTC)If I killed someone to stop them from killing me or someone else I might feel I did the right thing but I could still accept that I actually killed someone without pretending I did something else (like "counter-killed" them). It doesn't mean I'm denying that the other person was about to kill somebody.
There seems to be this weird idea that what the good guys do and what the bad guys to can never, under no circumstances, be in any way considered to be the same. Hence the need for terms like "counter-jinx", because heaven forfend the good guys should be caught using the same tools as the bad... It's this whole essentialist idea that these two groups are so completely different that even if what they do looks the same to an outsider, it must still be different because, y'know, they are the good guys, and the others are the bad guys...
Hermione's justification for her Polyjuice plan is that "killing Muggleborns is worse than brewing a difficult Potion."
Which is no justification at all. And there seems to be no concept that just because one side does something bad, the other can still do something bad as well. Reacting to something bad doesn't make what you do in reaction a good thing - often it isn't. That's what we call escalation. It happens all the time in the real world, unfortunately. And just because someone thinks that all in all, Harry perhaps shouldn't have done X, doesn't mean they are saying he's no better than Voldemort. Just because something could be worse doesn't mean we should stop criticising.