The Dresden Files > DF Spoilers
How often does Harry's withholding of information actually get people hurt...
nadia.skylark:
--- Quote ---What would your moral ground be like if you left a gun out where a child could get it, with no more protection for the child then your assertion to the child that the gun was dangerous and they should leave it be? If you hesitate before you answer, don't have kids. They have no agency, they can't be responsible. Children die every year because parents fail to understand this.
--- End quote ---
A large part of the reason that children can't be considered responsible is actually their lack of physical brain development. They literally lack the equipment for the kind of decision-making that adults do. This, obviously, is not true of Kim.
--- Quote ---I'm not assessing fault. Were I, in the story, it would be the FBI agents. What I keep suggesting is that Harry bears a moral responsibility for what happens.
--- End quote ---
Can you please define how you are using the words "fault"/"guilt" and "responsibility"? Because you appear to be using them to mean different things, but the definition I found and posted says they're synonyms. As a result, I am not understanding what you are saying when you treat them as having different meanings.
--- Quote ---Molly knows better but she does so anyway. So if a threat of a death penalty and Harry's constant carping doesn't stop her why would anything stop Kim, who compared to Molly is a kindergartner?
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I'm reasonably certain that the books explicitly say that black magic is addictive. As such, Molly's actions can in no way be compared to Kim's, since Molly is acting as an addict with her drug and Kim is not.
123Chikadee:
@BadAlias: Oh, I do too. It's just with me, I can see what it is that the author wants alongside with the audience part of my brain, so it just leaps out at me. It can get a little irritating, so yeam I'm with yeah on that count.
morriswalters:
--- Quote ---In philosophy, moral responsibility is the status of morally deserving praise, blame, reward, or punishment for an act or omission performed or neglected in accordance with one's moral obligations.[1][2] Deciding what (if anything) counts as "morally obligatory" is a principal concern of ethics.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote ---Culpability, or being culpable, is a measure of the degree to which an agent, such as a person, can be held morally or legally responsible for action and inaction. It has been noted that the word, culpability, "ordinarily has normative force, for in nonlegal English, a person is culpable only if he is justly to blame for his conduct".[1] Culpability therefore marks the dividing line between moral evil, like murder, for which someone may be held legally responsible and a randomly occurring event, like earthquakes, for which no human can be held responsible.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote ---Guilt is a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person believes or realizes—accurately or not—that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated a universal moral standard and bear significant responsibility for that violation.[1] Guilt is closely related to the concept of remorse.
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--- Quote from: nadia.skylark on June 08, 2019, 06:26:34 AM ---A large part of the reason that children can't be considered responsible is actually their lack of physical brain development. They literally lack the equipment for the kind of decision-making that adults do. This, obviously, is not true of Kim.
Can you please define how you are using the words "fault"/"guilt" and "responsibility"? Because you appear to be using them to mean different things, but the definition I found and posted says they're synonyms. As a result, I am not understanding what you are saying when you treat them as having different meanings.
I'm reasonably certain that the books explicitly say that black magic is addictive. As such, Molly's actions can in no way be compared to Kim's, since Molly is acting as an addict with her drug and Kim is not.
--- End quote ---
In order.
Brain development may not be complete until your middle 20's. I'm not going to support that. The subject is too complex.
The three quotes above give you a sketch of the ideas I'm discussing.
It's an easy out to rate Molly as an addict. You, are in effect removing her agency, her ability to act as a moral agent.
--- Quote ---Moral agency is an individual's ability to make moral judgments based on some notion of right and wrong and to be held accountable for these actions.[1] A moral agent is "a being who is capable of acting with reference to right and wrong."[2]
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If she's an addict then she must not be capable of doing the right thing.
nadia.skylark:
--- Quote ---It's an easy out to rate Molly as an addict. You, are in effect removing her agency, her ability to act as a moral agent.
If she's an addict then she must not be capable of doing the right thing.
--- End quote ---
Addicts are capable of fighting their addiction; it's just difficult.
I brought up the addiction thing specifically in response to your claim that, since Molly violated the terms of her parole even though the consequence of doing so was death, then no consequence would be sufficient to prevent Kim from doing what she did. However, this is comparing apples to oranges. Molly is a recovering addict falling off the wagon. Kim is a college student who decides to shoplift because she doesn't want to admit to her parents that she needs money. The situations are not at all the same, and consequences that the addict will ignore can and frequently will be enough to prevent the college student from doing things.
Bad Alias:
--- Quote from: KurtinStGeorge on June 08, 2019, 05:26:36 AM ---I'm late to this discussion, so if someone has already mentioned this incident, I apologize, but it seems to me there is one time when Harry withholding information has led to someone getting hurt and it's in Storm Front and it's not Linda Randall.
So Harry trying to protect Murphy led to her treating him as a suspect. It led to Murphy searching Harry's office because she didn't have the information she needed and I'm certain you will all remember, it led to Murphy getting stung by Victor Sells ever growing scorpion construct or demon. (Whatever it was.)
Now it could be argued that Murphy sometimes makes questionable to bad decisions, but I see that more in Fool Moon than in Storm Front. Murphy's view of supernatural world in Storm Front is like someone looking through a keyhole rather than a nice large window and Harry tries to keep it that way; and though Harry does it mostly to protect Murphy, it backfires instead.
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I believe I mentioned it, but put the consequences even further back. Murphy would have understood why Harry didn't want to do the research. He could have gone to Bianca's with Murphy and Carmichael. This would have prevented the whole plot line leading to Grave Peril. Harry wouldn't have been in the situation in which he gets jumped at the gas station and had to confront Marcone head on starting the rumors that he worked for Marcone, and that would have lead to Harry working more with S.I. because the I.A. investigation wouldn't have stopped Murphy from hiring him. Then he would have been in on the werewolf investigation earlier in a less desperate situation. On the other hand, he wouldn't have cleared himself of the Doom either. Morgan would constantly be over his shoulder looking for an excuse to kill him, and maybe he would have found one. The Grave Peril plot line wouldn't develop. The war with the Reds would have been delayed until a time when the Reds were more prepared. Mab would never have gotten Harry's debt because Bianca would have never given the athame to Lea. Harry wouldn't be forced into the role he had in Summer Knight and there would have been a disaster in the Faerie Courts that was probably worse than what was described in the books based on WoJ about what would have happened if Summer power was dumped into Winter. It could have theoretically lead to the end of existence. If everyone has survived to this point, would Harry have known Michael and gotten involved with the Denarians? Would he have survived if he had without the help of a half turned Susan? Would Harry have developed a good enough relationship with Thomas to keep Lord Raith from killing him? Would Mavra have been in a position to blackmail Harry to stop a dark god from arising?
Basically, the mistakes made in Storm Front set up Grave Peril which sets up the rest of the series in which Harry plays a big role in stopping an apocalypse every two to three years. Now Harry has a way finding trouble and it has a way of finding him, so maybe he still would have been a central figure in all these (or likely somewhat different) events and things would have turned out better. Who knows? And that's the point about sharing information in the DF that Harry eventually realizes. You can't predict the consequences of sharing information, so maybe you should let the people most likely to bear those consequences decide if they're willing to risk it.
@123Chikadee: Same, but I usually don't notice the Doylist reasons for why things are happening if the book, movie, etc. is well executed until after first consuming it because I was too busy being engrossed by the story. If I'm watching a movie and am impressed with anything technical (special effects, acting, cinematography, etc.), I feel like somebody messed up in the story telling.
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