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.

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.

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."

I think it is more complicated than that, since we are all unique in our emotional make up, it doesn't really matter if there are "things correct or incorrect" in the eyes of morality or society in that song. What matters is how a person hears and translates those words in his or her brain.  One person can be indifferent, another, hate the song, another love the song but neither is moved by it in an overtly emotional way..  Then there is the extremes, as the odd person who listens and is inspired to become a saint, and the other person who hears the same song and is inspired to become a serial killer.

<snip>
Myself, I try not to assume the author has an agenda of that sort; exploration of questions is more fun than proselytising answers.

Unfortunately, the analogy/parallel I am going to build will be based off of RL which doesn't have magic, and thus this non magical parallel could muddy some of the waters because part of this discussion is magical corruption from killing and doing nasty things, vs just plain corruption for the same thing without magic.  But the goal of this parallel is to conceptualize corruption WRT non mortals.

The Nazis went through a long, systematic campaign to dehumanize in the minds of the populace people like Jews and Gypsies and other victims of their "Final Solution.”  They even used the term “Untermensch” (German for underman, sub-man, sub-human) to describe these people.  From my life view it is incredibly difficult to understand what was portrayed in the last episode of “Band of Brothers” where the baker was completely indifferent to the fate of the “Untermensch” in the concentration camp down the road. 

Tying it to how killing non mortals can corrupt Harry, in reply #26 of this very topic I quoted the relevant portions of WN where, at the beginning of the Camp Kaboom scene, Harry said there was no use hating the Ghouls for who they were.  At that point he displays that he still posses empathy for this class of sentient beings.  Now however, Harry appears to see them as the equivalent of “Untermensch” not worthy of compassion while they are being exterminated in mass. 

Harry’s ability to remain empathetic towards humanity remains largely intact (the goal of the Council’s laws) but it seems to have been destroyed for those that fall into the class, “non human” which could certainly fall under the concept of having been corrupted by his killing non-humans with his magic.  (A consequence of the "universal guidelines" of how magic works)

Thanks Serack.

Does anyone think any of the rage and hate Harry is feeling in the above WK quote was just his own natural over developed “defend and avenge the children credo” happily enhanced by Lashiel’s shadow?

Knowing that I am bucking the trend, I am still unconvinced that killing non humans with magic results in a mystical black magic mind warping stain. As argued by others above, it seems that the normal psychological stress and strains of killing anything in a violent way is more than damaging in a normal real world way. Everyone is different and deals with violence and gruesome stuff differently, but the stuff Harry has seen in the books is more than enough to make him at least a candidate for any number of PTSD like issues… (Or at least I think so in my non professional mental health way of thinking).

So are Harry’s actions at his B-party a result of black magic warping? Sure in part, but let us not forget what he has gone though in life. It is not surprising Harry is getting darker and more violent. I suspect and hope that toward the end of the DF or the BAT Harry will begin to heal or find some balance.

in addition to the topic The Count just pointed out, I'll need to xfer this other topic of his soon

Also his topic Tehom/The primordial darkness before the light=Outsiders

I also want to keep tabs on this reference heavy theoryish topic I generated this week about Magic sticking to Outsiders

Come on guys, if you know of great references that should be archived let us know

Here you go.