Harry Potter and the Sleeping Dragon

(Note: You can't say things in a way that's both simple and accurate. When I present positions, I usually link to the corresponding SEP article, so that you can read up on it yourself and get a more complete picture than my (very) brief summaries. All I'm trying to do hear is present the basic ideas, and hope that if I'm strawmanning, I'm at least strawmanning both sides equally).

The Story

   "Come on, Harry! The cave should only be a few minutes away!"

   Harry, Ron and Hermione were in a dense forest, picking their way through the underbrush as they slowly but inexorably made their way towards their objective.

   "Wait, hang on a moment," said Ron. "Did you hear that?"

   "Hear what?" asked Harry

   "It sounded like a snort, or something."

   "I didn't hear anything" said Harry.

   "No, Harry, I heard it too," said Hermione. "In fact, it almost sounded like -"

   "- a dragon!" shouted Ron.

   It was true. Having reached a clearing in the forest, they discovered that they had reached the cave that was their destination. Most inconveniently, however, their way to the cave was blocked by a sleeping dragon.

   "That's it," said Ron. "We can't handle a dragon. We'd better go back."

   "We can't go back, Ron!" said Harry. "We've got to get the horcrux!"

   "I thought we were searching for the hallows," said Hermione.

   "Whatever plot device, Hermione! It's in the cave!"

   "Alright, well not leave then," said Ron, "but maybe see if the cave opens up somewhere else. Perhaps there's another entrance?"

   "...wait, hang on," said Hermione. "Something isn't right."

   "What do you mean?"

   "Well, think about it. If Voldemort had a dragon, why would he leave it around just guarding a cave?"

   "Uh, gee, I don't know, maybe because he's got a piece of his soul in there?"

   "Right, Ron, but he doesn't know that we're looking for them. I mean, if he had something as powerful as a dragon under his control, wouldn't he be doing something else with it other than leaving it around on guard duty in case someone were to happen to come around? I mean, think about it. Having a dragon here would draw a lot of unnecessary attention to this cave. If the last thing he wants is for people to know about this cave, why guard it with something that soon half the countryside would know about? For that matter, if he had a dragon around here, wouldn't we have heard something about it? I mean, in a forest this small, you can't keep a dragon the size of a house secret. And what would it eat? I haven't seen anything in here other than a few squirrels, have you? There isn't enough food around here for something that big. And look! It's not tied to anything. There's nothing keeping it here. If Voldemort could make dragons do what he wanted, without taking them prisoner, wouldn't he have already won the war?"

   "That's great, Hermione, but none of that changes the fact that there's a great, massive dragon right in front of us!"

   "I don't know Ron, I think maybe it does."

   There was silence for a moment before Harry asked "What are you saying, Hermione?"

   "I'm saying that it doesn't add up. Nothing about Voldemort keeping a dragon here makes any sense. I'm saying that there's no dragon here. It's some sort of magical illusion."

   Harry and Ron were quiet as they digested this. Finally -

   "You're bloody mental!" Ron erupted. "Look, Hermione, what you're saying is great and everything, really it is, but there's still a great big dragon in front of us! I can see it! I can hear it! I can smell it, and believe me, I really wish I couldn't do that."

   "Okay, so it's a really clever illusion, but we're talking about one of the greatest wizards who ever lived!"

   "You can say whatever you want. You can stay here and talk about reasons why the dragon isn't real until the sun comes up, for all I care. All I know is that, right here, right now, there's a dragon directly in front of me. Sure, maybe you're right. Maybe it is an illusion. But do we really want to bet our lives on that?"

   "Well, Ron, can you refute my arguments?"

   "Do I really need to? I mean, like I said, you can go on all you want, but there's still a dragon. It's still here. I don't know how else to put this. Here, look!"

   "Ron, wait!" Harry cried, but it was too late. Ron had already pitched a stone out into the clearing. It bounced off the dragon's tail with a thump before rolling away into the grass. The dragon did not stir.

   "There, see? The dragon's real. If it were an illusion, the stone would've gone through it or something."

   "Oh, yes Ron, real convincing. It's not as though we learned how to make illusions solid back in third year, or anything!"

   "Well what do you think we should do, then, Hermione? If you're wrong and the dragon's real, it will kill us as soon as we get near enough to wake it up!"

   "Well? If you're wrong, Ron, and we go away and start searching for another entrance - that may not even exist, I might add - we'll lose days, if not weeks, and Voldemort will end up killing us anyway!"

   "That's mental! You're mental!"

   "Mental? I'll show you mental!"

   "Stop it, both of you," Harry said sharply. He needed to think. The time to make a decision had come.

What's Going On

     This time, Ron and Hermione are bickering over something called epistemology. Epistemology basically asks the question: How do we know what we know? Or put another way, what is truth? Hermione and Ron both embodied two major perspectives here.

     Hermione was arguing for something called rationalism. Rationalism is the notion that the best path to truth is logic. Ultimately, our minds are the most important tool for determining what's true and what isn't. If something doesn't make sense, then it can't really be true. Perhaps the most well-known example of rationalism is the French philosopher Rene Descartes. His famous statement "cogito ergo sum," or "I think, therefore I am," was brought forth as an answer to the problem he posed, how can we have absolute knowledge? His answer: The only thing we can claim to have absolute knowledge of is the fact that we are thinking. Our senses could all be deceived, the evidence could be misleading, but the one thing we can know with absolute certainty is that we think. To say "I think that I don't think" is a contradiction, an impossibility. So to the rationalist, the surest source of truth comes through what our thoughts can logically determine to be true.

     To Hermione, it is completely illogical that a dragon could be there. So, since reason is saying one thing, and the evidence is saying something different, the evidence must be flawed, and our senses must be deceived - in this case, by a magic spell.


     Ron, on the other hand, was arguing more for something called empiricism. Empiricism is the notion that the best path to truth is experience. Logic can be flawed, and reasoning can be faulty, but the facts are the facts, and nothing can change that. One of the most prominent empiricists is British philosopher John Locke, who is often associated with the Aristotelean idea of "tabula rasa" - that is to say, that we come into this world as blank slates, and everything we know has to be taught to us. In other words, we develop knowledge through experience of the world around us: contrast this with the rationalist perspective that we come into this world with the ability to know all sorts of things, all we've got to do is use our brains to puzzle those things out logically.

     Ron claimed that he had knowledge of the dragon because he was experiencing the dragon's presence: He saw it, he smelt it, he heard it, and eventually he, in a way, touched it. He observed the dragon. To Ron, all the logic in the world isn't going to change any of that - you can't just logic away what your senses experience. You can't just logic away facts.

     Now, taken to extremes, both of those positions seem a bit silly. Rationalism, when taken to the extreme, claims that we can never really know or trust anything outside of what we can determine using logic alone; empiricism, when taken to the extreme, means that we can never believe anything that isn't directly communicated to us by our senses. So on one end, we've got a sort of extreme skeptic who constantly questions her senses; on the other end, we've got a sort of robot who just constantly observes and never draws conclusions. Immanuel Kant managed to synthesize the two positions - he looked at rationalism and said "Listen, logic is important, but if you never bother to root it in empirical evidence, it's all just going to seem fantastical. You can talk all you want about some grand theory that's logically airtight, but if the theory doesn't play out in practice, then you've got to revisit it," and he looked at empiricism and said "Evidence is awesome, really, it is, but if it's the only thing you trust, then you can never actually say anything meaningful. All evidence says is that every time you drop something from a tower, it falls. If you want to start talking about why it falls, or whether it will fall again next time, you've got to go beyond evidence and start using reason and logic."

    And this, of course, is the position most people take today. Hermione's logical conclusions were still based on empirical evidence (e.g. there weren't enough animals around to sustain a dragon's appetite), while Ron was still drawing logical conclusions from his evidence. So why bother discussing it? Well, because as we saw above, there's going to come a time when what is logically true and what the facts indicate to be true contradict each other - and which one you trust is going to have a huge impact on how you reason and interact with the world around you.


     A great place where this sort of conversation comes up is in crime dramas - think CSI, Sherlock, Law and Order, that sort of thing. A fairly common episode premise is that a crime is committed, but the evidence gathered doesn't make sense - the person who it's pointing to has no motive, nothing to gain from the crime, and everything to lose. Sometimes in the show, we'll see a rationalist. This might happen more in a show like Sherlock - the investigator might look at all the facts and say "Okay, these are the facts, but they're stupid facts," and go about investigating. Sure enough, by the end of the episode we've discovered that the person was framed - the facts point to them because the real killer specifically arranged it to look that way. On the other hand, we might see an empiricist. This might happen more in a show like CSI - the investigator looks at all the reasons why the suspect couldn't be the killer, but then looks at the evidence and says "It doesn't add up, but the evidence doesn't lie. He must be hiding something." Sure enough, by the end of the episode, we've discovered that the person with no motive and nothing to gain was actually the victim's ex.


     The point is that in the first scenario, the investigator says "If the facts don't make sense, then there's something wrong with the evidence," while in the second scenario, the investigator says "If the facts don't make sense, then there's something wrong with our line of reasoning." Ultimately, when push comes to shove, most of us will fall into one of those two categories: Do we trust what seems to make sense over what the facts indicate to be true? Or do we trust what the facts indicate to be true over what seems to make sense?


     Asking and answering these questions reveal a great deal about how we view the world around us.


     As a final note, sometimes empiricism is associated with the hard sciences, while rationalism is associated with things like mathematics and philosophy. It's very important that we have both in either camp! The hard sciences need people who are willing to stand up and say "I don't care what the evidence says, it doesn't make any sense! You need to reconsider your theory!" just as fields like mathematics or philosophy need people who are willing to stand up and say "I don't care how logical it is, it doesn't play out in reality! There's zero evidence to support it!" When we don't do this and cordon off rationalists and empiricists to separate disciplines, all of humanity is poorer for it.

Harry Potter and the Question of Ethics

   Last night the idea of using Harry Potter-themed short stories to explain philosophy came to me in a dream. That might be the strangest sentence I've ever written, but it seemed like it would be fun enough that it would be worth trying, no matter how it turns out.

The Story

   "Okay, so according to what we know, only someone pure of heart can get the horcruxes and defeat Voldemort."

   Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny were all sitting about Ron's bedroom in the Weasley home, discussing how they were going to vanquish the evil Voldemort once and for all.

   "But I don't understand," said Harry. "Didn't I already gather the horcruxes and defeat Voldemort?"
   "Harry..." Hermione gives an exasperated sigh. "We've been over this. That happened in the books -"
   "- and the movies" Ron chimed in helpfully
   "Yes, yes, and the movies. But that was different. This isn't a book -"
   "- or a movie"
   Hermione glared at Ron before continuing. "Or a movie. This is a hackneyed attempted to use a pop culture phenomenon to explain principles of philosophy."
   "Oh, I see," said Harry, who didn't. "Anyway, it says I've got to be pure of heart. How can anyone know if they're pure of heart?"
   "Oh, well that's easy," Hermione said. "You see, being pure of heart means that you've stuck to a certain set of principles. We've all got a duty to improve our lives and the lives of the people around us, so all we need to do is see if you've actually stuck with that duty or not. If you have, then you're pure of heart, simple as that."
   "That's stupid!" burst out Ginny
   "Fine then," Hermione said crossly, "If you're so smart, let's hear you tell us what it means to be pure of heart."
   "Well," said Ginny, "Obviously it's not about just sticking to a set of rules, or something" (at this Hermione glared, but said nothing). "Anyone can do that. Just doing what is considered good doesn't make you a good person. You have to be a good person! I mean, if someone were to live according to that duty, but the whole time they were just doing that so people would think they're good, when they're really plotting on enslaving everyone, would that make them pure of heart?"
   "Well, no, but -"
   "Exactly! Why you do things is just as important as what you do!"
   "Oh, you're both mental!" says Ron, shaking his head. "All you're doing is talking about what you do or why you do it. Who cares about any of those things? You can try to help someone out of duty, or because you want to be a good person, or whatever, but unless what you do actually helps that person, what difference does it make? Being pure of heart isn't about principles and character and all that sort of rubbish, it's about doing things that actually make the world a better place. If we listened to Hermione, we'd spend all our time trying to make sure we're helping people in a way that lines up with our duty, and if we listened to Ginny, we'd never help people at all! We'd just sit around all day hoping to become a better person!"
   "What! That's not - MUM!" Ginny hollered, "RON'S STRAWMANNING MY POSITION AGAIN!"
   "RONALD ARTHUR WEASLEY!" came a shrill voice from downstairs, "WHAT HAVE I TOLD YOU ABOUT MISREPRESENTING SOMEONE ELSE'S ARGUMENTS?"
   "That it's intellectually dishonest and is nothing more than manipulating people into thinking I'm right," parroted Ron while rolling his eyes. "But you see my point, don't you? Good actions and good character are all fine and dandy, but unless they actually produce good results, who cares?"
   "I care," said Ginny sharply. "I mean, really, Ron, where would you draw the line? If I were to become a murderer and go around killing people for fun, but only killed criminals, would you say that I'm pure of heart because the consequences of my actions are that there's less crime? What if I became a murderer to rid the world of tacky decorators? Would that make me pure of heart?"
   "What! No! Ginny, you know that the consequences have to be weighed against the actions! MUUUUM! NOW GINNY'S STRAW-"
   "Alright, alright" Ginny cut in. "I get it. But don't you see? There's no way of actually calculating whether the actions outweigh the consequences. It's all down to someone's opinion. Suppose there's a mouse in my room, and it's bothering me, and I don't really like chocolate frogs, so I use them to lure the mouse away and into a trap. But then you come up, and you didn't really care about the mouse but you loved chocolate frogs. I think it's a good consequence, because getting rid of a pest outweighs losing a bit of candy, but you're all upset, because to you there's no way giving up your favourite treat is worth being rid of a mouse that really wasn't bothering you anyway. Was that a good action or a bad action?"
   "I know you both think you're arguing against me," Hermione said smugly, "but really you're only proving me right. See, how do you develop a good character? And how do you bring about good consequences? Why, by doing good actions, of course. If you get into the habit of living according to the duty to do good, then over time that's going to make you into a person of good character. And if you base your actions on the duty to do good, then those actions are probably going to bring about good consequences. We have a duty to be honest with one another. Our entire society depends on it. If we hold to that duty, then we will become an honest person, and we'll never have to deal with the consequences of being dishonest. See? Like I said, it's easy."
   "No, it's not easy, Hermione," Ginny retorted. "Lying isn't always wrong. Not if you're doing it for a good reason. Like sparing someone's feelings! Or covering up for a friend. Lying's only wrong if you're doing it to hurt the people around you. Like I said, it's about intentions. Whether something's good or not is about why you're doing it."
   "Oh, so someone can do whatever they want so long as they're doing it for the right reasons! Yes, who cares about lying, lying's fine so long as it's a "Good Person" who's doing the lying. Well, Ginny, if someone doesn't live up to their moral duty to be honest, how could you call them a good person? How could you say 'Oh, that person lies all the time, but they mean well, so they're pure of heart!'"
   "I agree with Hermione. Being lied to is never a good consequence. No one enjoys it."
   "Thank you, Ron."
   "But I do think that sometimes there are consequences that are worse than being lied to, and that if the only way you can avoid this sort of consequence is through lying, then lying is the most ethical thing to do."
   "Ron, that's no different from what I'm saying!" argued Ginny
   "It's completely different from what you're saying! I'm saying that doing something that brings about a bad consequence is only okay if you can tangibly show that the bad consequence is still the best possible consequence! You can't - you can't just go around bringing about whatever bad consequences you'd like because you've got the best intentions at heart!"
   "Ron! Please. I'm not saying you can just do whatever you like. I'm saying that if you work on developing your character, and becoming a moral person, then your actions and the consequences of those actions will become moral as well."
   "Ginny, an action can't just become moral because of the person doing it. Either it's moral or it isn't. And Ron - I'm surprised at you! You know full well that there will always be a way out of a situation that doesn't involve shirking your moral duty! Doing something bad, even to bring about something good, is immoral."
   "No, Hermione, I don't 'know that full well.' Please explain to me how every situation ever will have a potential good consequence. Oh! That's right! Because you don't care about consequences! To you, holding to your moral duty, even if the consequences are awful, is good! And straying from that duty to bring about fantastic results is the pinnacle of evil, isn't it?"
   "Ron, you can't bring about good by doing evil!"
   "According to who?"
   "According to me, who says that actions and consequences are irrelevant! It's about who you are!"
   "Alright Ginny, how do you define who someone is without looking at their actions?"
   "Gee, I don't know, Hermione, how do you define their actions without looking at the consequences?"
   "Look, Ron, we've been over -"
   "Shut up. Shut up! SHUT UP!" Harry shouted. The room went silent. "Look, okay, thank you for your input, alright? I appreciate it. No, I do, really. Maybe we should just get going."

The Explanation

     The positions held by Hermione, Ginny, and Ron are the three major positions that comprise what is called normative ethics, which is the study of how people ought to act in order to be ethical. Now, the three positions presented here have been simplified, and are a little extreme - in real life, people tend to be more nuanced in their views, and might hold to a more complex system than what we've seen today. They also may draw from multiple or even all three positions. Nonetheless, people generally tend to gravitate towards one position in particular, which comes to be their main way of filtering life and understanding how they should act.

     Hermione was arguing something that amounts to what we call deontological ethics. This is essentially the idea that there is a certain standard of ethical behaviour, or perhaps a set of ethical rules, and to be ethical is to live your life according to those standards or rules. Perhaps the most well-known proponent of deontological ethics is the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who developed the notion of categorical imperatives, which can be understood as standards for our actions to be compared to,

     Ginny, on the other hand, was contending for something that's closer to what is called virtue ethics. Roughly speaking, virtue ethics is the concept that morality is about how you approach a situation, rather than about what you actually do. A major advocate of virtue ethics was the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who outlined this notion in the Nicomachean Ethics. The fundamental concept here is that there are a series of virtues which a person ought to cultivate. Actions alone are insufficient to determine morality, because they deal with only a small part of a greater whole. Rather, to the virtue ethicist, to possess these virtues is to be moral; to lack them is to be immoral. One way of looking at it is a reversal of the famous line from the film Batman Begins: "It's not what you do, but who you are underneath that defines you."

     Finally, Ron is advocating something that's called consequentialism. This is the idea that at the end of the day, being ethical is less about principles and more about results. The most popular position within consequentialism is something called utilitarianism, which is a view popularized by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Bentham developed something called the Greatest Happiness Principle - the idea that the most ethical thing we can do is whatever brings the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest amount of people. Of course, later philosophers (most notably John Stuart Mill) would go on to give more nuance to this idea, helping to define exactly what we mean by happiness. So, to the utilitarian, the action itself isn't all that important, nor is the person doing the action - if that action brings more happiness to more people than other possible actions, it is therefore the most ethical action.


     So, to take the lying example used above, as a deontologist, Hermione sees lying as against the standard of ethical behaviour, and as a result, to her lying is categorically immoral - even if something good comes out of it. Ginny feels that the fact that someone has lied simply isn't enough information to determine whether a person is ethical or not. The entirety of the person must be understood in order to make an assessment there - we need to know their motives and intentions. Ron feels that as lying is not an action that will, in the long term, bring about happiness, lying is immoral - but also that there could be extenuating circumstances where lying could bring about more happiness than any other possible action, and that in such a case, lying would be moral. This differs from Ginny in the sense that to Ron, if lying brings the most happiness, then the person lying is moral even if they are doing it for malicious reasons; similarly, if lying does not bring about the most happiness, then the person lying is immoral even if they are doing it for selfless reasons.

     Hopefully this whole thing might prompt you to think and read a bit more about this whole ethics thing, and what it means.

Christian Corner

     Just a side note to those who are Christians - there is a tendency within Christianity to think that this sort of thing is a waste of time. Ask yourself, though, from a Christian perspective, what does it mean to be moral? Does it mean to act according to the standard God has laid out? Does it mean to become more Christlike? Or does it mean to act in whichever way brings about the Kingdom of Heaven? All three, certainly, but in what balance? When two of them seem contradictory or at odds, how is that resolved? On which side should we err? I would encourage my fellow Christians to not fall into the pit of thinking we know everything, but instead realizing that our faith doesn't do away with these questions, nor was it intended to. It merely casts them in a different light, giving a different focus.