Your thread, it makes me wonder about something. Don't know if there has been a WoJ on this or anything like that.
If Thomas (as the best example of someone in the grey area between human and non-human) does magic, uses magic to harm another or otherwise violate one of the 7 laws, would he experience the same cosmic backlash as, say, Harry would?
The council has passed judgment on non-Wizards, human practitioners, and other low-level magic users before. Thomas, however, is not under their jurisdiction. I think that is commonly accepted as true.
But this is not really about the White Council as much as it us about the other aspect of Black Magic.
When Thomas does magic, he does experience a mild murphionic effect, as seen in Backup when he discussed the effect his magic has on his cell phone, which might be stronger if his magic was stronger. Something usually associated with human magic users. He is human enough to create that kind of effect. Is he, or someone like him, human enough to experience the cosmic/psychological backlash that can make someone a 'warlock'?
If so, then this could, potentially, open up a whole new can of worms for the White Council. If not, then does Thomas and other WCV (or other Non-humans, if there are any, in similar situation) have a built in 'Blackstaff effect' that keeps them from the negative repercussions of using magic to harm others?
I agree with your sentiment.
There is a significant difference between:
using an illusion to get someone to kill each other (Molly)
using a firestorm to burn down a building causing human deaths (Harry)
using a spell to remove the life from people (Eb)
There are three axes to look at these instances.
Intent consequences are to your conscience. enough deaths break you or turn you into a sociopath.
Morality consequences are to your soul/karma. Depending on your view, consequences are after your death.
Black Magic. consequences are unclear, but addiction and insanity seem likely. When Eb used direct death magic, black crap appeared on his arms and was eventually sucked into the staff. I believe that this was not from the use of the staff, but from the use of direct death magic. The staff allows the bearer to remove the taint.
The laws of magic deal with all three, but I surmise that they were written for #3. I further surmise that using death magic will turn you into a warlock similar to the boy executed, with nothing human left. My question is that is this a function of humans or a function of magic?
(on a far far different note, why the &*#$ does English spell ax without an e but battleaxe has an e at the end. Oh well, spelling will always frustrate me.)
*points out that Jim makes a big deal that such a backlash would not be remotely mystic or sentient, but rather something "which obeyed certain universal laws that governed its interaction with reality."* Not that your wording implies otherwise, but I want to keep that point firm, because I might not have done enough to emphasize that in my posts.
Although in Backup Thomas introduces himself with, "and I'm a monster," Jim has said that unless a Wampire is really vamping out, they are hardly affected by a threshold because they are too mortal. In Thomas' case not only is he a typically grey area wampire, but he tries reeeealy hard to hold onto his humanity, and I think this really matters when addressing your question. This ties into my first possible reason why "Black Magic" vs Mortals matters." If Thomas already had given into/embraced his hunger, he could already be so far twisted by it that some black magic would not make much difference. Think Madeline.
Even from beyond the grave, I think Margaret LeFay is still challenging the Seven Laws. Should any Wizard go after him with magic, Thomas may prove to be a test case, a way to see if there are inherent flaws in the Laws and their applications. Can you be tainted by using Magic against someone not considered to be human?
Still, I see an element of belief in this. If a Wizard strongly believes that someone isn't human, even if they are, there may not be any psychological ramifications of using magic against them.
If Harry didn't see that the being hidden behind the veil of the wild hunt was human, the one he attacked, it would not impact his psychology. His perception of himself as a user of Black Magic.
English spells it either way Ax or Axe. Most people use Ax because they are lazy.
Sure, Harry got away with making a Sue dino zombie, on a technicality. But so far, we haven't been told he received a mental backlash from this. If he doesn't get such a backlash from an animal, what's to say that making a zombie does anything different. (I know Cowl was pretty loopy, but it might not have come directly from the Zombie spells.)
So, it raises the question if all that's labeled Black Magic causes specific backlash, or if its just all generally considered illegal, but only certain types of spells have effects on the user.
Molly:
I think it is safe to assume that Molly manage to escape the cosmic taint of black magic while acting as the rag lady. The kind of taint that the Loa spirit sees in Harry's aura during DM.
Her problem is most likely the same as any soldier after a long and extremely grusome war campaign.
Kemmler:
It have to be noted that despite how corrupt Kemmler is, he still have free wil. Kemmler is still human.
It appears that free wil cannot be so easily snuff out. I believe that redemption is still possible for kemmler if he really wanted it, otherwise Harry, Molly and any dinarian have no hope of salvation. According to Michael even Nicodemos can choose the path of redemption.
Which probably explains why the white council have to use not magical means to execute kemmler and other worlocks. Those worlocks may be beyond the WC's power to rehabilitate, doesn't mean that their free wil is completely gone.
Had kemmler completed the Darkhallow, he will become a god. Maybe at that point, killing kemmler will be consider the same as killing a vampire because he is no longer human at all.
Thomas:
Thomas have dual souls. I suspect that doing black magic, the really tainting kind, will reduce his ability to control his demon half. Complete and utter corruption of Thomas's mortal free wil due to black magic usage would probably produce the same result as if the Rampire ritual in CY had succeeded. Thomas will be gone and only his demon half remains.
It is also have to be noted that a whampire's mind whammy, especially the wraith family brand is sort of seduction. In other words, their power entice a human, not compell them. As long as a whampire limits the intensity of his or her mind powers, it might not broken their preys free wil at all.
Of course, feeding too deeply, deep enough to put a mark on the prey's soul or even killing the prey entirely broke free wil. Doing so will cause adiction and more and more dependence upon the demon portion of a whampire's soul.
This would explain why a whampire's first feeding have to be lethal. It have to create that vital breach of free wil in order to entrench the demon half in a newbe whampire. This will also explains why Thomas cannot return to his previous feeding patern after the nagloshi is done with him. The adiction have run too deep due to repeat full feeding.
Thomas:
Thomas have dual souls. I suspect that doing black magic, the really tainting kind, will reduce his ability to control his demon half.
It is also have to be noted that a whampire's mind whammy, especially the wraith family brand is sort of seduction. In other words, their power entice a human, not compell them. As long as a whampire limits the intensity of his or her mind powers, it might not broken their preys free wil at all.
Perhaps one of the reasons why there are so few WCV Wizards (JB once said there were some, but I have yet to see any of them). The risk of being tempted to do Black Magic, the risk of being tainted by it, might be too big a price. Even the darkest of WCV hold onto their mortal souls to some degree. They all know that if the demon did take over completely, it would be worse than what happened to Thomas in TC. They would be nothing more than predatory, feral animals. Not mindless, but not civilized in any way and certainly not themselves.
Unverified WoJ from the 2011 Naperville signing:
'Are there White Court vampire wizards?'
Yes, there are. Thomas is middle-of-the-road in power and [ed: think I'm remembering this correctly] the strongest don't get as strong as mortal wizards [/ed], but they can pull off some strong tricks with their Hunger.
2) Wizards were a hell of a lot more rare in centuries past. Their numbers have increased along with the world population, but back then a given country was lucky if it had produced a single wizard-level talent more than about one generation in three.
Molly's tainted just as Harry is. But like Harry, she has other factors to counter balance the taint. Her upbringing in a very religious family, her relationship with Harry and what he taught her, and her own sense of right and wrong. And now the taint might not be so much an issue as the mantle of the WL. Depends on which corrupting force is stronger and if she is stronger than both.
Kemmler was a prime example of why the Wardens were created. He was the bad one, the one that broke the Laws and delved into Dark Magic with both eyes open.
The Wardens swords are their protection against Black Magic, a way for them to dispatch a Warlock without being tainted themselves.
First point of correction, Thomas (and other WCV) don't have two souls. They have a demon parasite attached to their soul. Does the demon have a soul of its' own? Most demons probably don't.
Would Thomas using Black Magic be affected by the Taint? That is the question I asked, but you do have a good point. If Thomas' mortal soul was corrupted by the taint of Black Magic it might very well give his demon the opening it needs to take nearly full control. The Thomas we know would be gone for good.
Perhaps one of the reasons why there are so few WCV Wizards (JB once said there were some, but I have yet to see any of them). The risk of being tempted to do Black Magic, the risk of being tainted by it, might be too big a price. Even the darkest of WCV hold onto their mortal souls to some degree. They all know that if the demon did take over completely, it would be worse than what happened to Thomas in TC. They would be nothing more than predatory, feral animals. Not mindless, but not civilized in any way and certainly not themselves.
I think part of the point of DB is that Harry's rules-lawyering about Sue succeeds because of the point of the law against necromancy actually being "do not commit crimes against dead people" rather than "this force is inherently Evil", there is the bit (I think it's chapter 19 of DB, I posted the quote a few weeks back but am not finding it now) where he realised that Kumori using necromancy to save the life of the gangster who got shot was a good act and that he had previously been wrong about necromancy being an inherently evil force.
I sat in the backseat with my eyes closed and thought about what I'd learned. Kumori had saved the gunshot victim's life. If everything Lamar had said was accurate, it meant that she had gone out of her way to do it. And whatever she'd done, it had been an extremely difficult working to leave a mystic impression as intense as it did. That might explain why Kumori had done very little during the altercation with Cowl. I had expected her to be nearly as strong as her partner, but when she tried to take the book from me, her power hadn't been stronger than my own muscles and limbs.
But the Kemmler Alumni Association was in town with some vicious competition in mind. Why would Kumori have expended her strength for a stranger, rather than saving it for battling rival necromancers? Could the shooting victim have been important to her plans in some way?
It didn't track. The victim was just one more thug for the outfit, and he certainly wasn't going to be doing anything useful from his bed in intensive care.
I had to consider the possibility that she'd been trying to do the right thing: using her power to help someone in dire need.
The thought made me uncomfortable as hell. I knew that the necromancers I'd met were deadly dangerous, and that if I wanted to survive a conflict with them, I would have to be ready to hit them fast and hard and without any doubts. That's easy when the enemy is a frothing, psychotic monster. But Kumori's apparently humanitarian act changed things. It made her a person, and people are a hell of a lot harder for me to think about killing.
Even worse, if she'd been acting altruistically, it would mean that the dark energy the necromancers seemed to favor might not be something wholly, inherently evil. It had been used to preserve life, just as the magic I knew could be used either to protect or to destroy.
I'd always considered the line between black magic and white to be sharp and clear. But if that dark power could be employed in whatever fashion its wielder chose, that made it no different from my own. Dammit. Investigation was supposed to make me certain of what needed to be done. It was not supposed to confuse me even more.
When I opened my eyes, thick clouds had covered the sun and painted the whole world in shades of grey.
Maybe that wasn't the point. Maybe this was one of those things in which the effort meant more than the outcome. I mean, if there was a chance, even a tiny, teeny chance that Kumori was right, and that the world could be so radically changed, wouldn't I be obliged to try? Even if I never reached the goal, never finished the quest, wouldn't the attempt to vanquish death itself be a worthy pursuit?
Wow.
This question was a big one. Way bigger than me.
I shook my head and told Kumori, "I don't know about that. What I know is that I've seen the fruits of that kind of path. I saw Cowl try to murder me when I got in his way. I've seen what Grevane and the Corpsetaker have done. I've heard about the suffering and misery Kemmler caused—and is still causing today, thanks to his stupid book.
"I don't know about something as big as trying to murder death. But I know that you can tell a tree from what kind of fruit falls off it. And the necromancy tree doesn't drop anything that isn't rotten." "Ours is a calling," Kumori said, her voice flat. "A noble road."
"I might be willing to believe you if so much of that road wasn't paved in the corpses of innocents." I saw her head shake slowly beneath the hood. "You sound like them. The Council. You do not understand."
"Or maybe I'm just not quite arrogant enough to start rearranging the universe on the assumption that I know better than God how long life should last. And there's a downside to what you're saying, too. How about trying to topple the regime of an immortal Napoleon, or Attila, or Chairman Mao? You could as easily preserve the monsters as the intellectual all-stars. It can be horribly abused, and that makes it dangerous."
I faced her down for a long and silent second. Then she let out a sigh and said, "I think we have exhausted the possibilities of this conversation."
So it's more like he finds that things may be greyer than he thought rather than "Necromancy=not inherently evil".
Now I know you probably think Harry is mistaken and close-minded here but I'd say that Necromancy=evil is what Jim is going for.
The line in your first quote "if that dark power could be employed in whatever fashion its wielder chose, that made it no different from my own" strikes me as fairly definitive on that point.
Not at all. It seems fairly obvious to me that what Jim is going for there is that plans that involve killing innocents are evil, and then that following your own judgement regardless of the consequences is evil. (This latter from Harry I do take as irony.) Nothing in there specifiies that it's the mechanism you use to do those evil things that makes them bad; Harry would be just as disapproving of a mundane dictator with utopian fantasies that involved killing lots of innocent people, I reckon.
Non-evil, extenuating circumstances can exist to justify 'breaking' each of the laws. In theory. But just because you are convinced that you have to kill Hitler with magic to save millions of lives, doesn't mean you won't be tainted by it, doesn't mean that it's not "Black Magic".
I'm not disagreeing with that point. At all.
I am saying that the evidence of the first passage the Count quoted looks to me like using necromancy to actively save a life - the random gangster whose soul Kumori did something to so that it didn't leave his body and the hospital had a chance to get him back to a point where he could live - is not an inherently evil act, and Harry is realising and acknowledging that.
In DB, we see Grevane using necromancy in a crimes-against-individual-humans way - reanimating zombies left right and centre - and we do not see Cowl or Kumori do so; and my overall feeling from the book is that on the whole Harry finds Grevane to feel far fouler and more corrupt than Cowl and Kumori.
In DB, we see Grevane using necromancy in a crimes-against-individual-humans way - reanimating zombies left right and centre - and we do not see Cowl or Kumori do so; and my overall feeling from the book is that on the whole Harry finds Grevane to feel far fouler and more corrupt than Cowl and Kumori.Yeah, I'd agree with that. Grevane's behaviour shows he's gone further down the path of the warlock which, as I understand it, is that using black magic to achieve your desires makes you more likely to use black magic to achieve your desires in future to the point that eventually you won't see any other method of doing so.
Corpstaker, too. But yeah, Cowl is dangerous but was not quite as blatantly evil as the other two. At least not until the ritual. That doesn't mean he's a nice person who isn't tainted.
He isn't tainted to the extent that it messes up his mind and judgement, in the way that, say, the Korean kid at the start of PG blatantly is.
We have evidence that using the force of magic that Harry normally uses, which is repeatedly described as a positive and life-driven/aspected/oriented force, for killing or warping people's minds is corrupting and perverting and messes up the caster.
We also have evidence that necromancy is a fundamentally different force. Harry notes this in GP when looking at the black barbed-wire spell. It isn't life-aspected, if anything it's death-aspected.
Therefore we have no reason to lump both forces together under the heading of "black magic" and expect them both to work the same way in every detail.
Sooo...then there is Grey Magic?
Quote"Or maybe I'm just not quite arrogant enough to start rearranging the universe on the assumption that I know better than God how long life should last. And there's a downside to what you're saying, too. How about trying to topple the regime of an immortal Napoleon, or Attila, or Chairman Mao? You could as easily preserve the monsters as the intellectual all-stars. It can be horribly abused, and that makes it dangerous."
Now I know you probably think Harry is mistaken and close-minded here but I'd say that Necromancy=evil is what Jim is going for. There is the Mother Winter-Kumori-Death connection for one thing.
QuoteNow I know you probably think Harry is mistaken and close-minded here but I'd say that Necromancy=evil is what Jim is going for.Not at all. It seems fairly obvious to me that what Jim is going for there is that plans that involve killing innocents are evil, and then that following your own judgement regardless of the consequences is evil. (This latter from Harry I do take as irony.) Nothing in there specifiies that it's the mechanism you use to do those evil things that makes them bad; Harry would be just as disapproving of a mundane dictator with utopian fantasies that involved killing lots of innocent people, I reckon.
I'm not disagreeing with that point. At all.
I am saying that the evidence of the first passage the Count quoted looks to me like using necromancy to actively save a life - the random gangster whose soul Kumori did something to so that it didn't leave his body and the hospital had a chance to get him back to a point where he could live - is not an inherently evil act, and Harry is realising and acknowledging that.
I don't know that you can say that what Kumori did was necessarily keeping the soul bound to his dying body. It seems to me that what she did was use her necromancy to stop the body from dying in the first place, so that the soul never left.
Dude, that quote fits into this whole paradigm for me like a foot in a shoe.
Actually the 7 laws kinda do indicate that the mechanism matters.
And Harry's "ye shall know them by their fruits" paraphrase helps reinforce that they have the right idea.
Of course my whole point is that it isn't the laws themselves that make it black, but rather that it's black so they made a law against it,
It might not be inherently evil, however it is profoundly reality warping. People die, their souls leave their body, the world continues turning... Except when some necromancer comes along and says, newp I don't want it to happen that way, and I'm going to rewrite reality so that this soul is forced to stay within this dead body and have it get revived.
Perhaps this isn't a bad thing, but it certainly is HUGE, and probably puts significant stress on the necromancer's humanity because they are playing "god" with mortal souls on a level that is disturbing and maybe even dangerous.
Which is kinda Harry's point when he rejected her arguments.
That gets into how you define dying; am I misremembering how the paramedic guy describes it ?The quote that sticks out in my mind is that "He wasn't allowed to die." which can mean either physically or spiritually, to me.
I'm not seeing how that is qualitatively distinct from the ways in which all DV magic is to some extent rewriting reality in accordance with the caster's will.
More so than, say, any doctor making any difficult medical decision that affects how long someone can stay alive, or prevent them from dying when they otherwise would?
Then apparently you completely missed the concluding section of the OP of this topic. "Vs a Mortal Matters"
But I'll reiterate: Doing it with magic is using your mind and will to reshape reality. Reality pushes back, and reshapes your mind in turn. When your magic F's with a mortal soul, the pushback is all the more relevant to your own soul/will/mind.
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".
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.
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.
Yeah, but if a wizard were to try to move something with telekinesis, for example, be it force or wind, or whatever, and that thing is actually securely anchored to the ground, it's not going to just up and move because they think it should. It's one thing for their magic to fail, it's another for their magic to not give the effect they want.
JB/Harry has said that the magic must obey the laws of physics. Belief is important to make magic work, but even when it does it can't change the fundamental laws of nature. At least on Harry's level of ability.
By WoJ there are no upper limits to what magic can accomplish. With enough power you can literally do anything.
So it seems the more power you have, the less you have to obey the current laws of reality.
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.
I didn't mean my post here to read hostile or dismissive of your effort and I apologise if it came across that way.
Reading those two quotes again, though, the one from chapter 29 of DB seems to admit of more than one possible interpretation, and to my mind, "I've seen the fruits of that kind of path" followed by a bunch of examples of murder, suffering and misery skews towards Harry objecting to paths involving murder, suffering and misery rather than using necromancy specifically - I'd cite the main plot of FM as an example of a road paved in the corpses of innocents to what the people involved believed was a greater good, which Harry has previously encountered, that had nothing to do with necromancy. On the other hand, I am at a loss for a way of reading "It had been used to preserve life, just as the magic I knew could be used either to protect or to destroy." compatible with regarding necromancy as an inherently corruptive force.
All magic has the potential to corrupt, though some (like Necromancy) more so than others. How it is used, and by whom is just as important as the type of magic. However, certain magic (again like Necromancy), feeds into a need to kill people. Which is why it is far more corrupting than most other magic.
I didn't mean my post here to read hostile or dismissive of your effort and I apologise if it came across that way.
Reading those two quotes again, though, the one from chapter 29 of DB seems to admit of more than one possible interpretation, and to my mind, "I've seen the fruits of that kind of path" followed by a bunch of examples of murder, suffering and misery skews towards Harry objecting to paths involving murder, suffering and misery rather than using necromancy specifically - I'd cite the main plot of FM as an example of a road paved in the corpses of innocents to what the people involved believed was a greater good, which Harry has previously encountered, that had nothing to do with necromancy. On the other hand, I am at a loss for a way of reading "It had been used to preserve life, just as the magic I knew could be used either to protect or to destroy." compatible with regarding necromancy as an inherently corruptive force.
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.
I can't remember this WoJ (not surprising, you've been around a LOT longer than I have :) ) but this is a great paradigm for why snuffing a life by dropping a building on someone with magic is more significant than doing it with a gun.
I can't remember this WoJ (not surprising, you've been around a LOT longer than I have :) ) but this is a great paradigm for why snuffing a life by dropping a building on someone with magic is more significant than doing it with a gun.
This raises another question.
Sure, a wizard dropping a building with the express purpose to kill someone is bad (Cosmically tainting), but what if a wizard is hired to demolish an empty building. Without the knowledge of the wizard, someone else uses that opportunity to kill their enemy by placing their victim inside that building. What kind of karmic balanced are to be levied in that case?
A case similar to this happened in GP. When Harry unleash his great fire spell at Bianca's party, he is targeting vampires. Unfortunately, several human were caught in the crossfire. So far, we did not see any taint happened on Harry for that act. I mean, Harry seems to remain sane enough after that.
This challenges the assumption that only consequences matters. I think intentions matters as well and both intentions and consequences both carries their own weight and functions independantly from each other. You intends bad but your act did no lasting harm, you got a little tainted. You don't intend harm but the act cause major harm, you got tainted. You intends harm and you succeeded, express way to worlockdom.
I recall Harry saying it in the books as well.
The problem is that this doesn't explain why doing other horrible things doesn't corrupt you as well. You're going to have a hard time convincing me that (for example) slowly ripping someone's eyes out to get information has less of an impact on the wizards mind then blowing their head off with a fireball.
You can also kill lots of beings without souls/Free Will and you won't get corrupted either (at least not in the black magic sense). Given how similar and friendly Little Folk are to humans, it seems strange to me that killing them doesn't warp your mind just as much as killing a human. Maybe you could make a argument for a Red Court vamp or ghoul or whatever but the Little Folk? Or an angel? ???
I'm not saying it's completely wrong but I think there's something else causing the corruption as well. I'm partial to the RPG theory that the first few Laws are based around Free Will and the last few are just "wrong" in the sense of "Things That Man Was Not Meant To Do".
Torture for information and other mandane ways of doing evil i.e: violating free wil carries its own taint. In PG, Murphy admits feeling tainted when she shots agent benton.
The point is, when you add magic to the equation, the taint becomes much, much worst.
It makes sense. In PG, it is stated that the reason god gave human the 3 swords is to balanced the enormous advantages the supranatural have over the vanilla human. Providing an extra penalty for wizards that violate free wil does make sense for the balance.
Wizards are humans, they have free wil. If they choose to use their free wil to kill and enslaved, it is their choice, so long as they pay the penalty.
If a predanatural creature violates free wil i.e" eating people, they cannot pay the penalty by losing their humanity/sanity. They are not human in the first place. These creatures are penaltied by different means. The little folk are weak and cannot do much harm, but they are virtually imppossible to find without magic. Lesser fei i.e: Bridge trolls, are teritorial and can easily be avoided or chase away, even by vanilla methods. If humanity choose to stay in denial and refuse to believe in the supranatural and therefore caught off guard, it is the human's own fault.
Other predators like the rampires and the blampires are the real evils. For these creatures penalty comes in the form of weakness to sunlight, weakness against faith based magic and inability to cross threshold. And if they got too active, they'll have either the KotC or some wizards hunting and killing them.
Demons/creatures from the nevernever cannot cross without being summoned. And those creatures who is powerful enough to cross without invitation i.e" Mab, have an equal power balancing them i.e: Titania.
All in all, Butcher have created a quite balanced and realistic supranatural world.
Also, magic has a far greater requirement for investment to work. The wizard has to believe the thing is right, and will work, or it won't. You can't half-ass it.
However, you can entirely half-ass taking someone's eyeballs out with a melon baller. You can do that even if you're 49% opposed, as long as you're 51% for it. No sense of justification required in order to be able to do that horrible thing.
This raises another question.
Sure, a wizard dropping a building with the express purpose to kill someone is bad (Cosmically tainting), but what if a wizard is hired to demolish an empty building. Without the knowledge of the wizard, someone else uses that opportunity to kill their enemy by placing their victim inside that building. What kind of karmic balanced are to be levied in that case?
A case similar to this happened in GP. When Harry unleash his great fire spell at Bianca's party, he is targeting vampires. Unfortunately, several human were caught in the crossfire. So far, we did not see any taint happened on Harry for that act. I mean, Harry seems to remain sane enough after that.
This challenges the assumption that only consequences matters. I think intentions matters as well and both intentions and consequences both carries their own weight and functions independantly from each other. You intends bad but your act did no lasting harm, you got a little tainted. You don't intend harm but the act cause major harm, you got tainted. You intends harm and you succeeded, express way to worlockdom.
Let me take this analogy a bit further and say Rodreguez uses his magic to disencorporate (like he did to the bullets in WN with his gauntlet) a building that he has every reason to believe is empty, and never ever finds out that it actually had a mortal in it. His magic directly shreaded a mortal and he never knows.
The "Wizards are card carrying members of humanity" portion of my reasoning for "Vs a Mortal Matters" would not kick in because he didn't chose to do it, however, the "Mortal Will has Metaphysical Mass" portion would still matter. It is concievable that because a mortal will was snuffed out by magic, the metaphysical ramifications of a free will being snuffed out by magic could affect this wizard. I can see the mechanics for this working being much like if a wizard gives his word by his magic that he would return something to someone before they die, Fed-Exes it to the person and never hears from them again because they had a heart attack before it was shipped.
One point that might be relevant regarding the First Law. It's a fairly well-known fact that humans have an instinctive block against killing other humans. This used to be a huge problem for armies, as a lot of soldiers would "freeze" when they needed to kill under extreme stress. So what the army started doing was taking people and retraining their instincts, putting them under extreme stress and making them "kill" dummies and practice targets again and again and again, until their reaction under stress was not "mercy!" but "kill!". I've begun to suspect that breaking the First Law does much the same thing, except much faster.
As the analogy above suggests, I don't believe that this necessarily makes the wizard evil (and I don't think the White Council does either, as suggested by the Doom of Damocles), but it does make him dangerous. Possibly dangerous heroic (like any good soldier), but still dangerous.
One point that might be relevant regarding the First Law. It's a fairly well-known fact that humans have an instinctive block against killing other humans. This used to be a huge problem for armies, as a lot of soldiers would "freeze" when they needed to kill under extreme stress. So what the army started doing was taking people and retraining their instincts, putting them under extreme stress and making them "kill" dummies and practice targets again and again and again, until their reaction under stress was not "mercy!" but "kill!". I've begun to suspect that breaking the First Law does much the same thing, except much faster.
As the analogy above suggests, I don't believe that this necessarily makes the wizard evil (and I don't think the White Council does either, as suggested by the Doom of Damocles), but it does make him dangerous. Possibly dangerous heroic (like any good soldier), but still dangerous.
@Serack: Reminds me of that marching song from TP's Night Watch, wonder if that was intentional on TP's part.