Reminds me of this article. Now, Hemmens is being a little polemical there and I’m not sure the morality of the books is well-developed enough to support his reading, but there’s some interesting convergence anyway.
My take on it is that our judgments of people are ultimately about predicting how well their future behavior will align with our (moral and/or personal) interests. This is determined by their core motivations and assumptions, but our access to that deep structure is often patchy and speculative; if we don’t have a reliable enough read on it, about all we can do is fall back on nearest-neighbor matching against their past actions. It’s not a binary actions-or-motivations dichotomy, in other words: the more confident about someone’s motivations we are, the higher we weight those motivations relative to their actual deeds.
Harry’s just found out two important things about Quirrell: that his deep structure isn’t as accessible as he thought it was, and that he’s willing to use death spells in questionable circumstances. That might not be enough to completely destroy his confidence in Quirrell (and indeed I think Harry’s overreacting a bit given the evidence), but it’s definitely enough reason to take a step back and reevaluate.
Reminds me of this article. Now, Hemmens is being a little polemical there and I’m not sure the morality of the books is well-developed enough to support his reading, but there’s some interesting convergence anyway.
My take on it is that our judgments of people are ultimately about predicting how well their future behavior will align with our (moral and/or personal) interests. This is determined by their core motivations and assumptions, but our access to that deep structure is often patchy and speculative; if we don’t have a reliable enough read on it, about all we can do is fall back on nearest-neighbor matching against their past actions. It’s not a binary actions-or-motivations dichotomy, in other words: the more confident about someone’s motivations we are, the higher we weight those motivations relative to their actual deeds.
Harry’s just found out two important things about Quirrell: that his deep structure isn’t as accessible as he thought it was, and that he’s willing to use death spells in questionable circumstances. That might not be enough to completely destroy his confidence in Quirrell (and indeed I think Harry’s overreacting a bit given the evidence), but it’s definitely enough reason to take a step back and reevaluate.