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Alsadius comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 15, chapter 84 - Less Wrong Discussion
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What's wrong with disintegrating kittens? They're not much different than chickens, and we slaughter a billion of those(literally) every week.
Also, if you didn't realize by book 7 that wizarding Britain is actually a pretty terrible place, you weren't paying much attention.
Wizarding Britain is a pretty terrible place - my contention is that I don't think Rowling realised how terrible it was when she was writing the books.
Actually, as an ethical vegetarian, I find plenty wrong with that too. But that's besides the point. The point is that, in our world, the slaughtering is still done
The average teenager does not kill animals unless they've been brought up on a farm or in a context in which certain species have been firmly categorised as pests/vermin in their minds. They especially do not kill animals they categorise as pets unless they are psychologically disturbed.
Here we have a classroom of average teenagers who unhesitatingly follow instructions to kill kittens, in spite of the fact that some of them have pet cats and that there is no higher purpose for doing so (the goal is apparently to be able to Vanish higher-level animals still). Not one of them is described as objecting or showing distress (which even Milgram's subjects did).
There is no way that any citizen of a modern democracy could have written the courtroom scene in Order of the Phoenix and thought well of the society that produced it. That's when I started to really see how rotten the country was. Similarly, look at the utter incompetence of the politicians - they're worse than ours, and that takes some doing. There's enough other examples scattered throughout that I cannot believe that they were placed there unconsciously.
And yes, slaughtering is done in slaughterhouses...because it's messy, smelly, and requires some pretty specialized sanitation measures. The average teenager doesn't assemble cars either, for similar reasons, but they wouldn't object to auto shop. You're right that the pet/food distinction exists, though it's not universal - horse, for example, has commonly been treated as both. The fact that they use cats is odd for the muggleborn, even if wizards put them into a different category(assuming that they do die).
And re Milgram, remember that they were zapping humans, not animals. Even most vegetarians I know feel there's a pretty important difference there.
I agree that the politicians are deliberately incompetent/immoral, but overall my perspective on Rowling's world-building is opposite to yours. There are so many gaping flaws and inconsistencies in the Potterverse as a whole that I have trouble believing that a specific minority is deliberate while all the others are accidental.
Also, Rowling isn't exactly subtle with her villains. With the possible exceptions of Snape and very late Draco, Potterverse evil is morally unambiguous and obvious to the reader. This inclines me to believe that if an act is in no way condemned within the text, explicitly or implicitly, this is because it is not intended to be seen as wrong.
You seem to imply that, if it could be done in a suitably clean and convenient fashion, the average teenager would happily slaughter their own cows, chickens, lambs etc. for dinner on a daily basis, without a preceding process of desensitisation (which the majority do not go through). I disagree.
Definitely, but I think it's quantitative rather than qualitative. A human's suffering might have 500 AU of emotional impact whereas a cat's has 50, but when an animal's pain or distress is obvious, there will still be emotional consequences for the one causing it (unless they have succeeded in fully objectifying the animal, the way a psychopath objectifies other humans).
World-building: Plot holes are a lot easier to make by mistake than atmosphere for the average author. Most of the "this place sucks" seems atmospheric to me - Rowling may not have thought as poorly of her world as I do, but I doubt she thinks it'd be a great place to live after the wonder wore off.
Unambiguous evil: I disagree entirely. Yes, the Death Eaters and Dementors are unambiguous, but Snape drove back and forth across that line so many times that it's ridiculous("possible", really?), Grindelwald was appealing enough to draw Dumbledore in, Hagrid was criminally stupid half the times we saw him(literally), Lockhart/Slughorn/every politician were some combination of pathetic and loathsome, Percy Weasley was an utter git and a massive enabler, and I could go on. Admittedly, most of those weren't big-E Evil, but they certainly did not lack for human flaws and ill consequences. Don't let the unambiguousness of Voldemort or Umbridge fool you.
Slaughter: It wasn't that long ago that's precisely what happened. And even today, I spent the last few days with the part of my family that's farmers, and all of them have been hunting since childhood. Perhaps that's "desensitization", but if so it's an utterly common sort in the right cultures. Death being locked away is a modern innovation, not the natural order of things.
Milgram: Yes, people react extremely poorly to animals suffering - sometimes worse than to humans suffering(which can be funny or just, depending, not necessarily simple torture). But Vanishing is not suffering, it's simply death, as odd as that sounds. That's a lot easier to handle when it's applied to animals.
Yet the "this place sucks" atmosphere doesn't actually kick in for real until Book 5, when the protagonist finds himself on the wrong side of the barricades for the first time (and also when Rowling leaves the teenage angst tap on). Until then, the dominant theme is that of a marvellous, whimsical magical world that's so dazzling with its uniqueness that you don't stop to question the holes and contradictions. It seems likely that touches such as Vanishing kittens are meant to be seen in this context rather than the negative one of the later books (which in any case focuses heavily on formal structures such as law, politics and media rather than day-to-day social practices).
That's exactly my point. Apart from Snape, the reader never has to stop and think "is this person good or bad?" Grindelwald is charming but proto-evil even in his youth (based on his views), Hagrid is unambiguously well-intentioned even at his stupidest, Lockhart and Slughorn are clearly low-grade evil (though at least by the time we get to Slughorn, Rowling is learning to make bad people slightly sympathetic), and Percy Weasley has no redeeming features until he actually gets redeemed. You never have to think in order to tell good from bad (apart from Snape). And this leads me to believe that if something is not portrayed as bad in the least, then you're not meant to think it is, because it seems foolish to save all your subtlety for details of world-building and use none in characterisation.
That's not relevant in this context, though. We're not dealing with people from cultures elsewhere in the world, or from a different time period. We're dealing with modern British children, some from Muggle society and some from wizard society, engaging in practices that contradict at least the norms of Muggle society and possibly the wizard one as well.
Yup, and that would certainly reduce the psychological impact of Vanishing Charm practice to some extent. Of course, there are also other spells practised on live animals that do not have this saving grace ("your pincushion still quivers in fear whenever somebody approaches it with a pin").
I find your impressions of good and evil rather amusing. Grindelwald is basically a utilitarian, something that most people are, he just doesn't do it very well. Slughorn was specifically introduced to be a good guy Slytherin, if a bit weaselly, so I disagree with you there as well. And Percy's a tool, but he's not actually evil, he's mostly just self-important and clueless - ditto Lockhart, for that matter. It's nowhere near as morally arguable as MoR, but it's hardly a world of cardboard either.
Re Vanishing, that's a fair point. But to counter - what do the kids get told about where the cats go? Regardless of the truth of the matter, if they're told "Oh, we just bring them back after class", then they'll be fine with it.
Lockhart mindwiped a bunch of people to steal credit for their good deeds. He ended up attempting to mindwipe Harry and Ron. He's evil.
Evil, perhaps, but also correct about some important points. If you compare his back story to Harry Potter's interactions with the public in the remainder of the series, Lockhart does handle fame better and if he'd taken credit (and if there hadn't been a series of additional threats waiting in the wings that he had no reason to expect) it would have been better for Harry to have been ignorant of his own involvement.
Lockhart's fame-sink argument may well have been just as correct for all those other, earlier people he swindled.
But I agree that Rowling meant him to be irredeemably evil.
What does the EV stand for in this case?
Edit:
He tried to mindwipe them before they actually killed the basilisk. And I always read
as indicating a complete mindwipe, of the sort that (not coincidentally) happened to Lockhart when his spell backfired.
Okay, fair(though most of the reason most people disliked Lockhart had more to do with the incompetence than the evil, from what I've seen). But I stand by Percy - he reminds me of Elaida from Wheel of Time, if you've read it. Not actually evil, and in fact trying to be good, but so utterly incompetent about it that everyone's surprised by that.
But here's the thing - his portrayal has pretty much no redeeming features. He's not even "nice unless you get in the way of his ambitions", he's just low-grade nasty all the time, except when he's being blatantly patronising. Whatever the big picture view of his personality, at any given time he is either 100% unpleasant or actually redeemed.
I think that goes for most of the other characters as well. They aren't portrayed as, say, positive 10% of the time and negative 90% of the time - instead, every single thing they do conforms to the same moral level. Someone like Lockhart couldn't pet a kitten without it being a PR move (or possibly without accidentally hurting it to demonstrate his incompetence).
Up to a few hundred years ago, almost all teenagers lived in a rural context and did just that. A big part of the world population still does.
The necessary desensitization occurred simply by growing up there - being aware of it and considering it to be a normal part of life. Maybe if normal young children (11yo) are placed in an environment where their peers, upperclassmen and instructors all do it and act like it's perfectly normal, then they'll get used to it in a couple of days and it'll be normal for them too. Why do you expect otherwise?
I agree that killing species preconceived of as pets rather than food, pests, etc. could require more desensitization for some children.
You seem to argue that the majority of teenagers would act in the way you suggest if it were a natural part of the culture they were brought up in. I agree.
However, I don't think we have evidence to believe that British wizarding culture is such. And even if it were, this would not account for why Muggleborn students (including pet cat owner Hermione) act no differently to their pureblood counterparts.
They routinely have children kill (vanish) animals in class to learn a spell. Their parents presumably did the same when they were in school. Isn't this pretty much the definition of it being a natural part of the culture?
As for Hermione, I agree with the interpretation "Rowling is a bad writer" over "she is making a subtle point here".
Circular argument, I think. "It's presently OK to kill animals in class, therefore it must have been the same in the past, therefore it must be part of the culture, therefore it's presently OK to kill animals in class".
Read "is OK to ..." to mean a cultural norm, not a judgement made by my or yours real values.
My argument is then: It's presently OK (in their culture); therefore (all else being equal) it's likely to have been OK in the recent past, and is not a recent innovation; therefore it matches the definition for being a part of their culture.
The last link to "therefore it's OK" that you propose is simply not necessary, I have already reached my conclusion.
Now if you read "it's OK" as meaning I, User:DanArmak, think it's OK for wizards to kill kittens, that would be a circular argument, and also a wrong one (because I don't think so). But that's not what I was saying.
Politics and litigation are almost totally incomprehensible to the average citizen. Therefore, it seems very plausible to me that Rowling thought she was depicting something analogous to what actually happens. Maybe not what happens frequently, but happens occasionally in a country the size of Magical Britain.
I think she's wrong to think her depictions were realistic, but that's a separate issue.
I don't know, Magical Britain is the size of a small town. It doesn't seem unreasonable that small towns with no higher authority to answer to would devolve into that.
If she intended that to be accurate, then she makes CSI look well-researched.
I think she intended it to be plausible. Weren't we just discussing what a terrible worldbuilder Rowling is?
It's an entirely plausible legal process...for a shitty country stuck in the Middle Ages. If she's so much as watched an episode of Matlock, she'd be aware of how far outside the realm of modern legal procedure it is.