The Dresden Files > DF Reference Collection
Law Breaking Vs Black Magic [Spoilers for everything]
Serack:
--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on November 29, 2013, 07:24:17 PM ---I may be missing your point, but I am not sure I am seeing your point there as connecting on to the question I am raising.
I am accepting that there is a difference in the DV at the practical-magical level between killing a person with wizard-magic and killing them with a sword or a gun, in that one corrupts the soul in objectively measurable ways and the other does not.
I am not seeing that the text of the DF intends us to regard this as exactly equivalent to the moral distinction (if any) between killing a person with wizard-magic and killing them with a sword or gun, in terms of which is more evil an act. (A)
I am also not seeing that the text of the DF establishes that use of the distinct, and consistently described as different, force that is necromancy/Black Court vampire magic, behaves the same way as misused wizard-magic in the matter of corruption of the caster. I am not by any means arguing that using a death-aspected force to kill is any less evil than misusing a life-aspected force to kill on a moral level(A), but the text seems compatible with a reading that using a death-aspected force to raise a tyrannosaur, or prevent a mortally injured gangster from dying, does not necessarily generate the same corruptive effects as using a life-aspected force against its nature by killing with it.(B)
And I am making the argument that, given the premise that the Laws were specifically set up to limit the power of wizards, any law that specifically says "Do not use this form of power" cannot be safely automatically assumed to have the justification "Because it is corrupting" or "Because using it is a crime against human free will", rather than simply "Because wizards should not have too much power".
--- End quote ---
Apparently you have been making distinctions that I hadn't, or hadn't delineated to that level.
Perhaps the universal aspects of "Black Magic" are distinguished by moral issues like the ones you emphasize in your comments (noted by me as (A)). I prefer to examine it in the terms* I have already gone through such care to outline though. (*those terms being corruptive and mind warping rather than evil and not moral) I believe approaching it in terms of evil and morality will just result in spinning my wheels and getting embedded in the morass up to my axel so I won't bother trying, whereas approaching it in the terms I have, actually has accomplished something. The morals are likely to fall into place along those lines anyways. Or not.
As to the distinction you make in (B) necromancy certainly seems to be a distinct subset of the "Thalt not X vs a mortal" parts of the 7 Laws. I do think that the set of tools I have crafted in this topic to analyze the effects of Black Magic manage to handle the differences nicely though, and I have already commented how the text Count was so good to quote for us seems to support that approach nicely.
Of course you already established that you dismiss that quote's pertinence.
peregrine:
Where are we getting the whole "it's rewriting reality" thing from for magic? Seems to me that magic is about 90% just moving and affecting assorted forces. Not any different from using a shovel to move some dirt with your hands, other than the mechanism of doing so. But when you move the dirt, you're moving the dirt, not just causing an alteration in the fabric of reality in which that dirt was always in the other place.
King Ash:
Probably because Jim has said that the highest level beings can't be considered mad because they are able to rewrite reality to match their own perceptions. Based on the idea that upper level magical is just a logical progression from lower level magic, all magic rewrites reality in some way. That's the closest thing that I can think of.
123456789blaaa:
There's a bunch of stuff but I'm far too lazy to go into all of it. DV magic is a murky as heck topic.
cass:
--- Quote from: peregrine on November 30, 2013, 04:34:27 AM ---Where are we getting the whole "it's rewriting reality" thing from for magic? Seems to me that magic is about 90% just moving and affecting assorted forces. Not any different from using a shovel to move some dirt with your hands, other than the mechanism of doing so. But when you move the dirt, you're moving the dirt, not just causing an alteration in the fabric of reality in which that dirt was always in the other place.
--- End quote ---
IIRC, there was also at one point a WoJ that the level of belief in magic for a wizard is such that they'd be flabbergasted if they attempted a familiar spell and it didn't work (in the same way that vanilla mortals would be shocked if they dropped an object and it didn't fall). That the reason magic works for them is that this is how they believe the world should work on a fundamental level.
Which might help explain why killing with magic is bad: the wizard believes on a very deep level that that whatever/whoever they're killing isn't supposed to be alive.
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