Notice your use of "I." Your conceptual gap is your fanon. You don't trust the White Council, or its understanding of how black magic works, despite Harry agreeing with them on how it works and "taints" the magic of a wizard or sorcerer.

Harry chose to make a Faustian bargain for selfish reasons- paternal love for a child. While sympathetic, it was in some respects the moral equivalent of having a child needing an organ donor and murdering people until a matching donor was found- that's what the "whatever" in "whatever it takes" means. Harry is going to kill whatever he needs to kill, and allow whatever friends and allies need to die to die, to save Maggie. He might feel bad about it later, but he's quite clear that feeling bad later isn't going to stop him now. That's . .not a good choice, from a strictly moral perspective.

It worked out for him. Intentions do in fact matter, not just actions. If my wife is having a heart attack and I run a red light because she's dying on the way to the hospital, but then run over a pedestrian, it is neither legally nor morally the same as slamming on my gas when I see a pedestrian walking to run them over laughing. One is Murder 1: Deliberate and malicious homicide, one is negligent homicide or reckless endangerment- I knowingly took actions I knew *might* result in the death of someone but neither intended them to result nor planned for them to result. It's why such distinctions exist. In fact, that's the essence of the self-defense defense Harry has vs Justin- Harry did not want to kill Justin, he wanted to not-be-dead from Justin, which required killing same. No malice or enjoyment, the intention was self-preservation.

Harry annihilated the Red Court- and the heroic Fellowship of St. Giles. Good with the bad. He didn't do it for the war, or even to save his own life- in that respect, *not* selfish. He did it for his personal child- not all the children the Red Court regularly killed. It was personal.

"Buts" are justifications, not validations.

Notice your use of "I." Your conceptual gap is your fanon. You don't trust the White Council, or its understanding of how black magic works, despite Harry agreeing with them on how it works and "taints" the magic of a wizard or sorcerer.

Nope. This has been alluded to in WOJ, and in the books directly. The laws do not make moral sense. Luccio even says that they are about power, not morality. And you realize that both the WC and Harry can be wrong right? And even if this was not the case, I am well within my rights to have a "fanon" and argue the point if the "canon" doesn't make any sense.

Harry chose to make a Faustian bargain for selfish reasons- paternal love for a child. While sympathetic, it was in some respects the moral equivalent of having a child needing an organ donor and murdering people until a matching donor was found- that's what the "whatever" in "whatever it takes" means. Harry is going to kill whatever he needs to kill, and allow whatever friends and allies need to die to die, to save Maggie. He might feel bad about it later, but he's quite clear that feeling bad later isn't going to stop him now. That's . .not a good choice, from a strictly moral perspective.

It worked out for him. Intentions do in fact matter, not just actions. If my wife is having a heart attack and I run a red light because she's dying on the way to the hospital, but then run over a pedestrian, it is neither legally nor morally the same as slamming on my gas when I see a pedestrian walking to run them over laughing. One is Murder 1: Deliberate and malicious homicide, one is negligent homicide or reckless endangerment- I knowingly took actions I knew *might* result in the death of someone but neither intended them to result nor planned for them to result. It's why such distinctions exist. In fact, that's the essence of the self-defense defense Harry has vs Justin- Harry did not want to kill Justin, he wanted to not-be-dead from Justin, which required killing same. No malice or enjoyment, the intention was self-preservation.

Harry annihilated the Red Court- and the heroic Fellowship of St. Giles. Good with the bad. He didn't do it for the war, or even to save his own life- in that respect, *not* selfish. He did it for his personal child- not all the children the Red Court regularly killed. It was personal.

"Buts" are justifications, not validations.

- sorry but who did Harry Murder exactly?

-I said motivations, not intentions. There is a difference. Intentions are what you are striving to accomplish. Motivations are why you want to accomplish it. And I did not say motivations are totally irrelevant, I said they only apply in certain cases and in certain ways.

"If my wife is having a heart attack and I run a red light because she's dying on the way to the hospital, but then run over a pedestrian, it is neither legally nor morally the same as slamming on my gas when I see a pedestrian walking to run them over laughing."

Your right, these are entirely different. But its the action that is different. In case one the choice you made was to violate a utilitarian law (traffic laws) in order to save you wife. Given the circumstances, the violation is justified. In the second case you chose to violate the law without a good reason, and in fact you had a abhorrent reason which only increases the terribleness of the crime.

What you accused Harry of is entirely different. It would be like if Harry got in his car and decided to speed because he had to get his wife to the hospital. Then he ran a red light due to the first reason, but when he did so he thought it was funny when there happened to be a person there and he ran them over. The fact that he enjoyed killing the person makes him guilty of nothing, since the justification for running the red light was already present even if that person had not been there or they had never been run over.

" In fact, that's the essence of the self-defense defense Harry has vs Justin- Harry did not want to kill Justin, he wanted to not-be-dead from Justin, which required killing same. No malice or enjoyment, the intention was self-preservation."

If I enjoy killing someone in self defense it makes me guilty of nothing. What matters is why would not kill someone. In other words, if I enjoyed killing people, would I restrain myself from doing so if I knew there was no justification to do so.

I'm mostly pointing out what people have raised as issues in the past. If you think everything Harry did was justified, that's a legitimate way to read the book. I'll still argue about it some but I'm not interested in pursuing every question.

Fair enough, the point of this was for me to find out what the objections were anyhow.

Regarding Molly, her ability to make choices regarding Harry was compromised. He was her teacher, she had romantic feelings for him, she was her big damn hero, and she was already compromised by black magic. When you know how someone is going to answer, sometimes you have a responsibility not to ask. Even if she was an adult, Harry has a duty of care towards her as her teacher. He should not have led her into danger.

An adult never has their decision making compromised, at least not from the things you listed. She was an adult, it doesn't matter it he was her mentor. Would it be wrong for Eb to ask Harry for help? Of course not. It also doesn't matter that she was in love with him. Is it wrong to ask a spouse for help? I mean come on.  And I reject entirely that black magic is real or works the way the WC thinks it does. The entire justification given by the WC is logically incoherent with regards to the laws of magic.

I'm pretty sure they've done it since WW2 but I don't feel like looking it up right now. It's true that real false flag attacks, by any government, aren't on this scale.

However, the lie could go farther than you think. After all, they didn't invent an attack. If you line up enough "experts" to go out there and say "It was the Iranians!" enough people will fall for it because they will want to believe that there's something that can be done to stop it from happening again. The alternative is for the President to go on record saying "there is no effective action we can take to stop this from happening again." That's just not going to happen.

Will the truth come out? Sure. But the only people who have anything close to a complete and accurate picture of what happened aren't talking because they're the ones who decided to cover it up. By the time there's clear and convincing evidence it wasn't Iran, or whoever, the consequences of the lie will be manifest and there will be no going back.

How are you going to get these experts? If the government somehow convinces some people to lie on TV, there are going to be quadruple that number taking them to task in public. If they use fake experts, everyone in those fields is going to be scratching their heads where these people came from and that is going to rapidly be public information.

It was the Iranians? What coherent explanation is going to make that make sense? With what weapons? How did they move that many personnel in secret? These things are impossible. No one is going to believe that. Even the average lay person is going to have a hard time swallowing this kind of explanation. Especially since we have 8 million witnesses and tons of physical evidence. You are also forgetting that an accusation like that is going to be refuted by Iran and everyone else internationally. It would be impossible to generate convincing false evidence of an attack on this scale and very easily falsified. Large troop and weapons movements cannot be hidden easily, and they are never covered up long term. This just does not happen.

-If the truth comes out later the lie will be worse than useless. It will backfire. Nobody lies when they know for certain that they wont be able to pull off the lie. That defeats the purpose.

-I don't recall Harry actually doing anything that got his friends killed or put them in danger. He asked people to help him, and they obliged. Also saving Maggie was a perfectly good reason to go to extremes. Not to mention that all of these actions were really part of the war with the Vampires, so nothing can really be said about the motives of Harry since he had knowledge that he was acting within said war. Saving his daughter was also tantamount to winning the war and saving himself and the Eb. Whatever Harry did, he acted knowing that he was acting within the context of the greater war.

-I dont see a problem with having Molly help him kill himself, especially since it was a fail safe against Mab manipulating him. I also don't see how allowing her to fight is a problem either. Molly is a big girl and makes her own choices. And asking a weaker person to fight is hardly a moral crime.

-That is and extremely....interesting...definition of murder. Martin was an asshole working for the Red Court and had betrayed them all. Susan literally told Dresden to kill her in order to take out the Red Court. Why should a stand-up hero not do that? Its not heroic to have absurd and unprincipled standards that are devoid of context. Even if Susan had not given her assent to Harry, he would have been justified in killing her to activate the spell because she was dead or worse if he didn't. The situation is so black and white its not even funny imo.

I was perusing the WOJ database looking for things that might be relevant to some BG theories. I came across one where Jim is responding to a person who is disappointed about changes. This persons complaint was that they had been wondering what would make Harry act in immoral fashion. Essentially, what kind of pressure would it take to make Harry go over the edge? This person was disappointed because as they saw it, the fact that Jim made it so that Harry was trying to save Maggie turned the moral dilemma into a cop out.

Jim then responds by explaining that Maggie being in danger doesn't excuse Dresden because that's not a good enough excuse.

My confusion is that I don't get what exactly Harry was supposed to have done wrong in Changes. What was the big moral dilemma?

As I read it the blast at the end of peace talks was the intentionally hex everything blast. So the people in the know who keeps stuff like a motorcycle and walkie talkies protected within magical circles still have functioning electronics, everyone else don't. Then when they take those electronics out of the circles they start breaking down fast because of all the magical energy in the air, but that is very far from the super hex in the beginning.

That attack helicopters arrive after Titania's water cleansing of the city and after dawn, so that is entirely different.

It does not seem odd to me that the army can send choppers to shoot stuff and make the pilots not talk aboit it afterwards and disappear the footage.

If it happened today and we knew about the losses, and then someone said that the magical frog people did it. I honestly think it would take quite some time before (of ever) the majority of people would take that seriously over chemical weapons of some sort and other advanced weaponry. But I think you are right about that someone needs to be blamed for it to be semi-believeable. Some middle eastern country maybe?

-The Fomor didnt seem to think that it would have mattered if Titania did her thing or not. Nor do any of the other people in the books seem to think this would matter. The arrival of the cavalry, literally the cavalry, is foreshadowed the entire time. It is never once implied that mortal forces would have any difficulty whatsoever handling the Formor. Both sides were racing agaisnt time. For the defenders of the city, it was to last long enough for them to arrive. The Fomor  discussion we overhear makes it quite clear that they are very concerned with still being in the city by the time the Army arrives. If they thought they could be dealt with simply by flooding the area with magic, they were apparently clueless to this.

-I went over blaming this on terrorists or some middle eastern country. Not going to work. Not even remotely possible or believable.

I dont see how a coverup is even beneficial. From either the mortal authorities or from the supernatural. If the truth is going to get out eventually, and relatively quickly, then the best way to handle the situation from both sides is to get on top of the situation by telling the truth, or at least most of the truth. Covering things up just breeds bad relations when everyone see's the lie that even the super natural council said at the end is eventually going to get out.

I was hoping Harry would do this but he didnt quite go this far when he was telling winter what they should do in order to avoid mortals starting witch hunts and other things in the aftermath.

What the super natural forces that met in the council at the end should be doing is announcing themselves to the world. Lots of people in Chicago saw them helping in the fight. Instead of hiding or trying to cover it up, they should be taking this opportunity to come out of the woodwork on terms that are favorable to them. Right now all the people who saw them saw them fighting on their side against the Fomor.

but if you didn't see them they just weren't real to you. Plausible deniability in the extreme.

Sorry but this is just absurd.

-20,000 to 60000 people were killed.
-There is massive property damage.
-The NG was called in. Do you understand the kind of coordination that requires? Guardsman had to be called in. Weapons and Vehicles had to be prepared. Civilians had to be coordinated with. Unleashing the military for a huge conventional assault on a city requires a massive level of involvement at many levels.
-The communications in and out of the city had to be sufficient enough to allow the decision to be made to employ the army. If communications simply died off, this response would never have happened.
-The attack helicopters knew exactly where to go in order to catch the retreating Fomor. This requires communications. Even if they spotting the Fomor visually or with thermal imagers, they had to know where the battle was taking place.
-If in fact an incident occurred and nearly all communications and recording devices were disabled, that in and of itself is enough of a red herring too make it impossible for anyone to believe the cover up. How does a city get attacked in the information age to the order of tens of thousands of casualties, and not a single video gets posted to the internet or the news etc?
-There is too big a leak at the government level. Even if the government tried to cut off the city, this would not work. Operations on this level cannot be kept under wraps after the fact. Too many people would have to be in the know. All of those chopper pilots saw what they saw, and their gun cameras recorded it. All of the NG troops on the way to help would have to have been briefed, even if vaguely, on what they were going in to face. And explanation would have to be provided to the literally thousands of government officials who would be involved in sequestering the city and dealing with the aftermath. Even if somehow the city of Chicago could be quarantined (which it cant btw) the rest of the nation is going to be discussing the matter and there are too many loose ends for a coverup to hold water.
-A terrorist attack is not going to make sense. No single non-nuclear weapon would have resulted in the level of destruction seen. There is no radiation and a nuclear detonation would have been seen internationally. 8000 terrorists could not sneak unnoticed into a major city in a developed country with the weapons and equipment needed to unleash that level of destruction on a city and inflict that many casualties. Moreover, they left no bodies, so a natural explanation is going to be impossible to make up. Especialyll when you have 8 million people saying otherwise. How are they going to stop the city from talking in this era? Are they going to cut off the internet/phones/cars from all of Chicago? The legal ramifications of doing so would be their own hilarity. How is that going to be justified to the rest of the country? How do you explain to the rest of the world why you are cutting off all travel and communications from a city that was just attacked?