The author’s clues are pushing in two different directions. “Taboo tradeoffs” in the title, and that Harry’s Dark side is delivering the solution, implies an answer that is morally unnerving or at least cold-blooded.
The author’s line about Harry shifting from seeing the Wizengamot voters as “wallpaper” to seeing individuals with agency, “PCs”, and the line about remembering the laws of magical Britain, implies an answer that involves the incentives and ‘rules of the game’ of the other Wizengamot members besides Lucius and Dumbledore.
None of the solutions I’ve seen (let alone the few I’ve thought of) seem both Dark/taboo and social/voters-are-PCs.
Harry calling in the (nominally) Imperiused voters’ debts: clever, invokes customs of magical Britain, makes the voters PCs rather than wallpaper, but not very Dark or taboo.
Harry threatens the crowd with the Dementor somehow, or browbeats Dumbledore into ruining his reputation: Dark/taboo, but doesn’t invoke the customs of magical Britain or treat the other Wizengamot voters as PCs.
Is there a solution that both invokes magical Britain’s laws / makes PCs of the voters and involves some alarmingly Dark/taboo move or trade by Harry?
Harry could destroy his own reputation in order to save Hermione, by (for example) threatening to forever abandon Wizarding Britain. He is a beloved celebrity, after all, and it would be bad press for the Wizengamot if the Boy-Who-Lived defected to France.
Not sure how likely his dark side is to go for a self-sacrificing ploy, though.
Wizarding Britain doesn’t know that there’s a Dark Lord still out there; it doesn’t know that they still need Harry Potter as anything other than a celebrity, and for him to make such a threat would appear only as the height of vanity.
Harry could destroy his own reputation in order to save Hermione, by (for example) threatening to forever abandon Wizarding Britain.
Shouldn’t they take that for granted already? I mean obviously he’s going to have absolutely no remaining loyalty to the state—or at least the power structure—that did that to him. They should all expect to die whenever Harry finds it convenient to overthrow them. Or is that just what I would do?
(Any sane politician who was planning to make that sort of move against a potential emergent power like Harry would also see to it that they were killed, crippled or framed as a matter of course. You don’t go around recklessly making enemies and leaving them free to gather power.)
″...Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.”
Apart from Dumbledore and Lucius, none of them are likely to take an 11-yo child and his promises of enmity and revenge at all seriously. “Enough talk, he’ll be late for his classes.” And even if he might become a political counter of some significance in a decade, or a few decades, they wouldn’t expect him to hold a grudge that long—normal children don’t often do that.
While Dumbledore and Lucius and other major figures might be sane, I’m not sure if we’re supposed to take the majority of the Wizengamot to be anything other than, in Harry’s words, “stupid, corrupt, and evil.”
On the same kind of criteria, you might expect the majority of all wizards and indeed all humans to be stupid, corrupt, and evil-when-given-great-power. It’s a Quirrel kind of thought. Which doesn’t make it untrue.
I disagree. This is a possible, but weak solution whereto the probability calculation of good Bayesian says that it doesn’t stand a good chance of succeeding compared to the cost. Right now Harry is not in an impressive social situation. Besides being the Boy-Who-Lived he’s done nothing, and in this particular context he has not scored an awful lot of points.
Much worse, Harry sacrifices Hermione to achieve a higher level of utility (probably something involving 3^^^3).
Horrible thought, but his dark side could do it, and he’s just gone to the dark side for a solution.
Much worse, Harry sacrifices Hermione to achieve a higher level of utility (probably something involving 3^^^3). Horrible thought, but his dark side could do it, and he’s just gone to the dark side for a solution.
That isn’t a scary thought at all. In fact, in the absence of a clever solution it is the best option available.
Sometimes you just have to lose because there is no real option. If it wasn’t in a story with Harry as the protagonist it would almost certainly be best to not start a war with the entire power structure to try to save her. Well, not yet.
Let Hermione go. Go research magic. Take over the world. Rescue Hermione. Use advanced magic and an FAI to heal the damage done to Hermione.
Rescue Hermione. Use advanced magic and an FAI to heal the damage done to Hermione.
The “scary” or “horrible” thought is if he can’t do this part. (Which to me looks plausible: if a 12 year-old girl
gets sent to Azkaban then she almost certainly can’t recover.) The taboo tradeoff would then look like this:
Option A : Rescue Hermione, but with some big utility downside.
Option B: Don’t rescue Hermione, ever, but with some big utility upside.
Incidentally, one thing that no-one—I think—has mentioned is whether Muggle law carries any weight at all in this, since what Malfoy and the Wizengamot are voting for is a grotesque form of child abuse (and a huge taboo violation in Muggle society). Can they just ignore the civil law like that and get away with it : what if it led to a breakdown in the edict of secrecy (with Harry helping)? Are Hermione’s parents going to be memory-charmed or fobbed off with some random story to shut them up?
Wouldn’t this also be a form of taboo tradeoff—Lucius et al following through on Wizard law to avenge a blood debt vs keeping Magical Society secret? Or (from Harry’s side) - breaking the edict of secrecy to get Hermione released vs Keeping it for the greater good (e.g. prevention of war).
Harry’s Muggle parents could not authorize it because they were Muggles, and Muggles had around the same legal standing as children or kittens: they were cute, so if you tortured them in public you could get arrested, but they weren’t people. Some reluctant provision had been made for recognizing the parents of Muggleborns as human in a limited sense, but Harry’s adoptive parents did not fall into that legal category.
I kinda doubt wizards in general care overmuch about Muggle law.
But presumably they do care about rampaging Muggles on witch-hunts?
That hasn’t happened for about three hundred years. But then, by a mysterious coincidence, neither has torturing little children into insanity to appease the blood lust of the “nobility”, something which is likely to get those pitchforks sharpened pretty damned fast.
“She is too young! Her mind would not withstand it! Not in three centuries has such a thing been done in Britain!”
Secrecy about magic does seem to matter to these folks, otherwise why go to all the effort? Possibly because in an all-out war the wizards risk losing. They have less magic now, the Muggles have much nastier weapons, and not all wizards would fight on the same side. The magical world would be itself deeply divided if torturing a child proved to be the causus belli. Quirrell for one thinks they’d lose (Chapter 34):
“Your parents nearly lost against half a hundred, who thought to take this country alive! How quickly would they have been crushed by a foe more numerous than they, a foe that cared for nothing but their destruction?…
And if some still greater enemy rose against us in a war of extermination, then only a united magical world could survive.”
Harry promises Lucius to speak under Veritaserum, that Dumbledore confesed to Harry, that he burned Narcisa. Harry is occlumens or almost occlumens, so he can beat Veritaserum, but everybody don’t know it.
Lucius Malfoy has his revenge, and his son, so he let Hermione free. Dumbledore loses, and maybe everything is lost, but Hermione is free. That’s taboo tradeoff.
First of all: Dumbledore has visibly just traded Hermione for his own position (so that’s one trade-off).
But besides that I find one hypothesis that answer your questions within the given parameters (more might dot my mind later, hence I’ll number it from the get go):
Harry asks Draco if Draco had submitted him to torture with no intention of helping him.
Draco is already under the effects of Veritaserum, so he’ll testify.
The dark part: betraying a promise.
Now the social part:
Now he has let everyone in the Wizengamot see that Draco is willing to torture another kid until this kid dies/goes crazy. And this is not ANY other kid; it is The-Boy-Who-Lived.
Next Harry could ask them if they then thought it beyond Draco to have Hermione and himself false-memory charmed/obliviated so as to both get revenge over Hermione who publicly humiliated him (which Harry hadn’t) AND regain his lost honour by appearing victorious in the false memory.
For kicks he could throw in the mudblood/true born-equality discovery (and that would also qualify for the taboo-part).
… Lucius would severely regret having earned that enmity. Dark side should like this.
Oh, and about the laws: this should have Draco, and thereby the House of Malfoy, owe a blood debt. This blood debt could be used to either:
a. let Draco suffer the same punishment as Hermione (a good way to make sure none of them get hurt too badly)
b. let him take her place (a way darker way of dealing with Lucius) (unlikely due to the sheer amount of harm done; too dark)
c. have Lucius revoke his vote (uncertain about the legality)
Another option when it comes to Magical Britain’s laws might be invoking some duel right. I do not know if this is possible, but it would be in line with the medieval feel of Magical Britain.
We would object that laws cannot be changed retroactively. Magical Britain doesn’t follow a constitution so I cannot see why not.
Besides that I suppose a duel might actually invoked to defend Hermione’s honour. I’m really uncertain about that though.
Harry asks Draco if Draco had submitted him to torture with no intention of helping him. Draco is already under the effects of Veritaserum, so he’ll testify.
Draco isn’t even present. His earlier testimony under Veritaserum was simply read aloud.
And also the possibility of utilizing Draco’s use of torture was mentioned and rejected in the previous chapter, as Lucius Malfoy may well have obliviated anything incriminating he found in Draco’s mind under his own Veritaserum interrogation of his son.
My bad. Speed reading and sleep deprivation is a bad cocktail if you want a keen eye for detail. Thank you. Given that I’ll retract my previous comment.
They could adopt/legitimize Draco’s children by another lover. As Harry’s fanclub says, he and Draco and the lady could have one of those, you know, arrangements...
The author’s clues are pushing in two different directions. “Taboo tradeoffs” in the title, and that Harry’s Dark side is delivering the solution, implies an answer that is morally unnerving or at least cold-blooded.
The author’s line about Harry shifting from seeing the Wizengamot voters as “wallpaper” to seeing individuals with agency, “PCs”, and the line about remembering the laws of magical Britain, implies an answer that involves the incentives and ‘rules of the game’ of the other Wizengamot members besides Lucius and Dumbledore.
None of the solutions I’ve seen (let alone the few I’ve thought of) seem both Dark/taboo and social/voters-are-PCs.
Harry calling in the (nominally) Imperiused voters’ debts: clever, invokes customs of magical Britain, makes the voters PCs rather than wallpaper, but not very Dark or taboo.
Harry threatens the crowd with the Dementor somehow, or browbeats Dumbledore into ruining his reputation: Dark/taboo, but doesn’t invoke the customs of magical Britain or treat the other Wizengamot voters as PCs.
Is there a solution that both invokes magical Britain’s laws / makes PCs of the voters and involves some alarmingly Dark/taboo move or trade by Harry?
Boy-Who-Lived marries Draco Malfoy?
Harry could destroy his own reputation in order to save Hermione, by (for example) threatening to forever abandon Wizarding Britain. He is a beloved celebrity, after all, and it would be bad press for the Wizengamot if the Boy-Who-Lived defected to France.
Not sure how likely his dark side is to go for a self-sacrificing ploy, though.
Wizarding Britain doesn’t know that there’s a Dark Lord still out there; it doesn’t know that they still need Harry Potter as anything other than a celebrity, and for him to make such a threat would appear only as the height of vanity.
Shouldn’t they take that for granted already? I mean obviously he’s going to have absolutely no remaining loyalty to the state—or at least the power structure—that did that to him. They should all expect to die whenever Harry finds it convenient to overthrow them. Or is that just what I would do?
(Any sane politician who was planning to make that sort of move against a potential emergent power like Harry would also see to it that they were killed, crippled or framed as a matter of course. You don’t go around recklessly making enemies and leaving them free to gather power.)
--Machiavelli
Exactly the philosophy I had in mind! Is this also present in rationality quotes somewhere? It certainly should be.
I don’t see it anywhere.
Apart from Dumbledore and Lucius, none of them are likely to take an 11-yo child and his promises of enmity and revenge at all seriously. “Enough talk, he’ll be late for his classes.” And even if he might become a political counter of some significance in a decade, or a few decades, they wouldn’t expect him to hold a grudge that long—normal children don’t often do that.
While Dumbledore and Lucius and other major figures might be sane, I’m not sure if we’re supposed to take the majority of the Wizengamot to be anything other than, in Harry’s words, “stupid, corrupt, and evil.”
On the same kind of criteria, you might expect the majority of all wizards and indeed all humans to be stupid, corrupt, and evil-when-given-great-power. It’s a Quirrel kind of thought. Which doesn’t make it untrue.
Dark side doesn’t care about consequences—I believe someone likened it to an UFAI.
I disagree. This is a possible, but weak solution whereto the probability calculation of good Bayesian says that it doesn’t stand a good chance of succeeding compared to the cost. Right now Harry is not in an impressive social situation. Besides being the Boy-Who-Lived he’s done nothing, and in this particular context he has not scored an awful lot of points.
The taboo tradeoff is presumably Lucius being asked to trade off his chance at revenge.
Agreed. I’m not sure why everyone’s so fixated on a tradeoff by Harry.
Much worse, Harry sacrifices Hermione to achieve a higher level of utility (probably something involving 3^^^3). Horrible thought, but his dark side could do it, and he’s just gone to the dark side for a solution.
That isn’t a scary thought at all. In fact, in the absence of a clever solution it is the best option available.
Sometimes you just have to lose because there is no real option. If it wasn’t in a story with Harry as the protagonist it would almost certainly be best to not start a war with the entire power structure to try to save her. Well, not yet.
Let Hermione go. Go research magic. Take over the world. Rescue Hermione. Use advanced magic and an FAI to heal the damage done to Hermione.
The “scary” or “horrible” thought is if he can’t do this part. (Which to me looks plausible: if a 12 year-old girl gets sent to Azkaban then she almost certainly can’t recover.) The taboo tradeoff would then look like this:
Option A : Rescue Hermione, but with some big utility downside.
Option B: Don’t rescue Hermione, ever, but with some big utility upside.
Incidentally, one thing that no-one—I think—has mentioned is whether Muggle law carries any weight at all in this, since what Malfoy and the Wizengamot are voting for is a grotesque form of child abuse (and a huge taboo violation in Muggle society). Can they just ignore the civil law like that and get away with it : what if it led to a breakdown in the edict of secrecy (with Harry helping)? Are Hermione’s parents going to be memory-charmed or fobbed off with some random story to shut them up?
Wouldn’t this also be a form of taboo tradeoff—Lucius et al following through on Wizard law to avenge a blood debt vs keeping Magical Society secret? Or (from Harry’s side) - breaking the edict of secrecy to get Hermione released vs Keeping it for the greater good (e.g. prevention of war).
I kinda doubt wizards in general care overmuch about Muggle law.
But presumably they do care about rampaging Muggles on witch-hunts?
That hasn’t happened for about three hundred years. But then, by a mysterious coincidence, neither has torturing little children into insanity to appease the blood lust of the “nobility”, something which is likely to get those pitchforks sharpened pretty damned fast.
Secrecy about magic does seem to matter to these folks, otherwise why go to all the effort? Possibly because in an all-out war the wizards risk losing. They have less magic now, the Muggles have much nastier weapons, and not all wizards would fight on the same side. The magical world would be itself deeply divided if torturing a child proved to be the causus belli. Quirrell for one thinks they’d lose (Chapter 34):
Harry promises Lucius to speak under Veritaserum, that Dumbledore confesed to Harry, that he burned Narcisa. Harry is occlumens or almost occlumens, so he can beat Veritaserum, but everybody don’t know it.
Lucius Malfoy has his revenge, and his son, so he let Hermione free. Dumbledore loses, and maybe everything is lost, but Hermione is free. That’s taboo tradeoff.
Dumbledore knows Harry is an Occlumens, and he would say as much and have it independently verified.
First of all: Dumbledore has visibly just traded Hermione for his own position (so that’s one trade-off).
But besides that I find one hypothesis that answer your questions within the given parameters (more might dot my mind later, hence I’ll number it from the get go):
Harry asks Draco if Draco had submitted him to torture with no intention of helping him. Draco is already under the effects of Veritaserum, so he’ll testify.
The dark part: betraying a promise.
Now the social part: Now he has let everyone in the Wizengamot see that Draco is willing to torture another kid until this kid dies/goes crazy. And this is not ANY other kid; it is The-Boy-Who-Lived.
Next Harry could ask them if they then thought it beyond Draco to have Hermione and himself false-memory charmed/obliviated so as to both get revenge over Hermione who publicly humiliated him (which Harry hadn’t) AND regain his lost honour by appearing victorious in the false memory.
For kicks he could throw in the mudblood/true born-equality discovery (and that would also qualify for the taboo-part).
… Lucius would severely regret having earned that enmity. Dark side should like this.
Oh, and about the laws: this should have Draco, and thereby the House of Malfoy, owe a blood debt. This blood debt could be used to either: a. let Draco suffer the same punishment as Hermione (a good way to make sure none of them get hurt too badly) b. let him take her place (a way darker way of dealing with Lucius) (unlikely due to the sheer amount of harm done; too dark) c. have Lucius revoke his vote (uncertain about the legality)
Another option when it comes to Magical Britain’s laws might be invoking some duel right. I do not know if this is possible, but it would be in line with the medieval feel of Magical Britain.
We would object that laws cannot be changed retroactively. Magical Britain doesn’t follow a constitution so I cannot see why not.
Besides that I suppose a duel might actually invoked to defend Hermione’s honour. I’m really uncertain about that though.
Draco isn’t even present. His earlier testimony under Veritaserum was simply read aloud.
And also the possibility of utilizing Draco’s use of torture was mentioned and rejected in the previous chapter, as Lucius Malfoy may well have obliviated anything incriminating he found in Draco’s mind under his own Veritaserum interrogation of his son.
My bad. Speed reading and sleep deprivation is a bad cocktail if you want a keen eye for detail. Thank you. Given that I’ll retract my previous comment.
You know, that would almost work, except that that would basically mean the extinction of the Malfoy line.
They could adopt/legitimize Draco’s children by another lover. As Harry’s fanclub says, he and Draco and the lady could have one of those, you know, arrangements...
How on earth does that make PCs of the voters/get Hermione off the hook?
(My apologies if it was a joke.)
Intended to suggest pulling some kind of social stunt that would put the Malfoys under obligation or massively shake up the politics of the room...
… but mostly ’cause it’s funny. I mean, it’s got to be a solution to some problem Harry faces. His fanclub demands it!