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THE ETHICS OF WIZARDS
Always with Unyielding Integrity.
—GE Values Statement
Mark Twain once remarked that to act morally is noble, but to talk about acting morally is also noble, and a lot less trouble. This is funny, but while it’s true in one sense, it’s also misleading on a much deeper level. In this chapter, we’re going to talk about what we can learn from the wizards in Harry Potter’s world about the moral life and the role of ethics in long-term success. But on the topic of ethics, the whole point of talk is action. When we begin to understand what acting morally, or ethically, really means, we learn very quickly that the worst trouble in life comes from ignoring the insights and requirements of ethics.
OUR CHALLENGE
Ethics is one of the most important things in business, and in life generally, and it’s also one of the most misunderstood. Getting it right—properly understanding the ethical way of living, and then acting with ethical consistency every day—is the foundation of sustainable success in both our professional and personal lives. Getting it wrong is a setup for disaster, as so many business headlines over the past few years have indicated.
There is nothing more crucial for building a great career, enjoying a rich and fulfilling personal life, and leaving your proper legacy in this world than living the right ethical values in everything you do. But consistently ethical living has always been a challenge for a great many people. Before we take a direct look at some of the ethical lessons in Harry Potter’s world, we’re going to do a little preliminary thinking about why ethical living is such a challenge, we’re going to dig up the deepest truth concerning what ethics is really all about, and then we’re going to ask what it takes to live the best life we can.
Hogwarts is ethically no different from the rest of the world. There have been saints and scoundrels at every point in history. The saints have understood some important things that the scoundrels have never fully grasped. If we can share their insights, we will inevitably gain a new and distinctive motivation to resist the temptations that always threaten to lure us off the high road of ethical action.
GETTING CLEAR ABOUT WORDS
When you think about it, the word “ethics” itself can be a bit confusing. Is it singular or plural? It looks plural, but, oddly, it’s both. We might say, “His ethics are deplorable,” treating it as plural, but we could just as easily remark, “Ethics is crucial in business,” using a singular verb as if we’re dealing with a singular noun. To make things even more complicated, we sometimes use another form of the word that’s obviously singular—“The Puritan ethic is fading fast.” This can all be a tad worrisome for any of us who are haunted by the memory of an old English teacher, every bit as strict as Minerva McGonagall, who insisted that we get such things right. But the key to a basic mastery of the word is actually quite simple.
When we’re talking about the various principles or patterns of action that a person lives by, we tend to speak of ethics in the plural—as in “Her ethics are admirable.” When we want to refer to an over-all concern for moral principles, or to the study of such principles and values generally, we most often use the term in a singular way—as in “Ethics always has a place in law school, medical school, and business school curricula.” Could we alternatively say that ethics always have (plural) a place in professional school curricula? Yes, unfortunately, the sad fact is that we can, although it would be a bit less standard. There is no absolute consistency of usage for the term in ordinary language, but there are general tendencies of standard use.
One more source of potential confusion is that some people use the words “ethics” and “morality” differently, limiting the former to professional and business contexts and the latter to personal matters. It seems to me that this is ultimately a distinction without a difference, or else it’s a big mistake. We shouldn’t even try to compartmentalize our lives in this way, in terms of how we treat people. Other human beings deserve a certain measure of respect, honor, and care, whether the context is business or family life, the office or the neighborhood. Values like truth and virtues like courage range across the distinction between the personal and professional with no alteration whatsoever. Because of this, I like to use the words “ethics” and “morality” basically as synonyms, meaning roughly the same thing.
Respect, honor, and a concern for others are just as important at work as they are at home.
We shouldn’t let language confuse us. Life is often confusing enough without allowing our words to wrap us up in needless perplexity. The predominant modern misunderstanding of ethics, however, has little to do with grammar and word usage. It’s a fundamental mistake concerning what ethics is really all about. It’s subtle, and it’s dangerous. Seeing the real truth about ethics will help us to unmask this mistake, and once we do, we’ll understand the real nature and power of ethical living. That, in turn, will help us to learn the most we can from the ethics of the wizards in Harry’s world.
UNDERSTANDING THE HEART OF ETHICS
Most people nowadays seem to think that ethics is all about staying out of trouble. That’s why corporate and industry discussions of ethics always center on issues of law, regulation, codes of conduct, compliance, and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. But this is a misunderstanding of ethics that has misled people throughout much of human history, and it’s a mistake that can set us up for serious problems today.
When you think that ethics is all about staying out of trouble, you can easily be tempted to accept any alternative way of avoiding trouble as a substitute for real ethics. We all saw this in the case of the Enron debacle. Some very smart executives came to believe that sophisticated deceptions involving sufficiently complex and “creative” accounting practices would keep them out of trouble, no matter what they did. But they were wrong. And disaster ensued.
The ancient philosophers saw it all much more clearly, and so have the best people in all of human history: Ethics is not about staying out of trouble. Ethics is about creating strength. And this operates at every level. Ethics is all about strong people, strong relationships, strong organizations, strong friendships, strong communities, and strong families. Ethical action produces a form of strength grounded in trust that nothing else can duplicate. And that’s because ethics is rooted in a fundamental realism about human nature. There can be no substitute for it when it’s properly understood.
The path to resilience and strength is through ethical behavior. Unethical conduct inevitably leads to failure.
My father had his own real estate company, focused on large residential land development. He always treated people well. He was completely honest in all his business dealings, absolutely dependable, and he went out of his way to be helpful to his clients, along with potential clients. Because of that, people instinctively trusted him. His reputation for integrity spread. And his business grew. I remember that, in the course of his career, he sold the same piece of land—two hundred and fifty acres—six times. When each buyer or group of buyers decided that they wanted to sell, they came back to my father to handle the transaction. They all did well because of their investments, and my dad did very well because of his character. Strong character is a foundation for strong business.
Harry Potter’s friends look to him as a leader not just because of his many talents and accomplishments but also because of his character. They know they can trust him. They can depend on him. They are convinced that he has their best interests at heart, as well as his own. He will do anything for them, and they know it. This deep-down certainty about Harry’s goodness provides a strength and resilience to his friendships. He and his friends occasionally may misunderstand each other and have fights like many young friends do, but in the end, their bond is so strong that his closest chums will follow Harry to what they know may be their deaths. Harry’s fundamentally ethical orientation is the foundation of much of the good that he can do with others.
There is something else that’s important for us to get straight. Morality and legality are different. Ethics and law overlap, but they are distinct things. Some people think that as long as they aren’t violating any laws, they are satisfying all the requirements of ethics. One way to see the difference between ethics and the law is to consider the fact that, throughout history, ethical people have often felt they were morally obligated to disobey grossly unjust laws while working to see them changed. Harry and his fellow students, as well as some of the teachers, including Dumbledore himself, have on occasion had to resist and actually violate official Ministry of Magic decrees that were unjust and dangerous. It was precisely their strong ethical concerns that generated their stance and their resulting actions.
On the other side, sometimes the law is silent but the demands of ethics are clear. Vance Young, a good friend and star Realtor in my small town, had over eighty-three million dollars’ worth of real estate closings last year. He always goes far beyond the requirements of the law in making sure that everyone in a transaction is treated fairly and well. When two friends of his were recently making competing offers on the same piece of property, among four interested buyers, he was careful to follow the ethical path of maximum disclosure to everyone involved in the whole situation, rather than be content merely with the extent of disclosure legally required. He believes that good character demands following the promptings of conscience and not just hiding behind mere compliance. And the strength of his business reflects that commitment.
In ancient Greek, the word “ethos,” from which we get “ethics,” actually meant “character,” not “rules” or “regulations.” It had to do with integrity. And that’s an interesting concept. Our term “integrity” comes from the same root word as “integer,” which means “whole number,” and the word “integrate,” which means “to bring together into a greater unity or wholeness.” Integrity is all about wholeness, unity, and harmony. When you make a decision, do you bring to bear on it all of your highest values? Do you always act in harmony with all your most fundamental beliefs and commitments? Are your words united with the truth? Do you treat other people the way you would want to be treated—acting toward others in harmony with how you’d want them to act toward you? These are all questions of integrity. They indicate what makes for strong character, a strong person, and strong relationships. Understanding this helps us to avoid a second and closely related modern misunderstanding of ethics, the very common belief that ethics is really just a matter of restraint and restriction, involving lots of rules that tell us not to do what we might really enjoy and benefit from doing.
We get the English word “virtue” from an ancient Latin word, “virtu,” a term that meant “strength, power, or prowess.” The great moral philosophers have always understood that deeply satisfying and proper success in life comes from the exercise of certain virtues, or strengths, of character. As much as the circumstances and conditions of human life have been transformed throughout the centuries, human nature has never really changed, and this insight about success has never changed, either.
Personal power comes from being honest with yourself and candid with other people, along with being dependable, courageous, caring, persistent, and creative. These qualities are all individual human virtues, or habits of thinking, feeling, and acting that empower us. When you understand this, you no longer see ethics as mainly about restriction and restraint, although both these things are certainly part of the ethical stance. As a matter of fact, the simple restraint of self-discipline is one of the most forgotten virtues in modern life, and yet it’s of crucial importance for both business success and personal happiness. The unrestrained life is, ironically, the unsatisfied life. But ethics is not just a matter of being told that “Thou shalt not” do this, or do that. It’s mostly about building and being the best and strongest person that you can be.
HOW TO BE ETHICAL EVERY DAY
This last insight leads us to a third aspect of the modern misunderstanding of ethics. Many people tend to think of ethics as encompassing just big, complex, and debatable problems involving professional codes of conduct, large-scale social issues regarding such things as race, gender, and poverty, workplace problems like sexual harassment, and headline-grabbing corporate abuses of standard accounting practices. But ethics is mostly about the little things: How do you feel and act toward the people around you every day? Are you a blessing or a curse to those who cross your path? Do others see you as short-tempered, peevish, insulting, dismissive, or arrogant? Or do they rightly think of you as a kind and caring person? Are you perceived as self-absorbed and undependable, or as someone others can count on? These are the basic ingredients of ethical living. Of course, as Harry’s career at Hogwarts often shows, circumstances can sometimes mislead people into misunderstanding us and ascribing to us characteristics, attitudes, and motivations that we don’t have at all. But a truly ethical person will be understood as such by the people closest to him or her. And Harry’s experience bears this out. When all the rest of the school seems to doubt him, he always has at least one friend who sees him for the basically good person he really is.
The little things always add up. How do we interact with those around us? What tone of voice do we use? Are we kind and understanding? Are we honest? Do we get back to people with answers to their questions as quickly as possible, or do we ignore their needs whenever we think we can get away with it? Do we realize that great business is all about taking care of the customer, or do we think that it’s really all about us—our needs and our income? Are we as good as our word, or do we expect a free pass in life? These are the most common sorts of questions that constitute the small but very important concerns of everyday ethics.
In ethical behavior, everything matters.
Ethics is not mainly about mind-bending complexities and dilemmas at all. Sometimes, of course, we do face difficult questions where ethical demands might seem to pull us in two opposite directions. This can happen when loyalties to more than one person, institution, or value are in play—as, for example, when you’re both representing the interests of your company and yet also acting as an advocate for your client. We can also occasionally face other complex issues where there are no clear precedents or rules to guide us. I don’t mean to say that figuring out everything we should do in specific situations is always easy. Not at all—it’s sometimes quite difficult. But it always involves treating other people as well as we possibly can. It always means treating others the way we would want to be treated if we were in their place. We’ll see in just a bit how this comes up in Harry’s life. But for the moment, I want to provide first a little more preparation for our reading of the wizards.
I’ve just stated a version of the most famous ethical rule in all of world history, the Golden Rule. It’s a touchstone of conduct that’s been recognized by the wisest people in every developed culture, and it is every bit as relevant to modern business and life as the latest developments in science and technology. In fact, nothing may be more relevant to personal success than this one standard of action. The best classroom teachers I know govern their conduct by the Golden Rule. And then there are teachers like Severus Snape, Harry’s sarcastic, vindictive, and emotionally abusive potions instructor, who seems completely unable to engage in Golden Rule behavior, at least when it comes to Harry and his friends. And this prevents him from teaching them well. The most successful retailers I know treat all their customers in accordance with the Golden Rule—even the difficult ones. Great managers and the most admirable leaders I’ve ever met follow its directive in everything they do. I’ve also seen the rich results of this wonderful rule of ethical behavior in the history of my own family’s business throughout the years.
The Golden Rule gives us a test. Whenever we’re thinking about doing something that will affect another person, or group of people, in any way, we should always ask the question: “Am I treating everyone involved as I would want to be treated?” Other people respond to Golden Rule treatment and will find it difficult not to return the favor and treat us well in turn. I’ve come to think of this one rule as the single most important tool we have for ethical living. If you haven’t been acting in accordance with the Golden Rule in a certain context or relationship in the past, it’s never too late to start. When you take the initiative and begin to go down this moral high road, you can change things for the better to an extent that you may never have anticipated.
Of course, consulting the Golden Rule can’t guarantee that we’ll make the right decision in every situation. Some circumstances are indeed complicated, confusing, and tangled up with conflicting considerations. However, using this famous rule can slow us down, refocus our minds, remind us of the likely consequences of our conduct, and nudge us in the right direction. We all need its help in living the ethical life.
Great leaders treat others the way they would want to be treated.
Sometimes you might find it difficult to do the right thing under pressure. Basically good people can be tempted to break the ethical rules now and then in the same way they might drive five or ten miles an hour over the speed limit out on the interstate. But the ethical limits described by principles like the Golden Rule aren’t like highway laws. They are rooted in universals of human nature. We all know that, as important in many ways as our speed limits are, they could have been set a little higher or a little lower. It’s possible to violate them on occasion without any obvious harm and for what you feel is a greater good. The problem is that this can contribute to a relaxed, loose attitude toward all limits. But as Socrates taught us long ago, when we cross the moral line and do something unethical, it always causes harm, at least to us, in our own souls. When Draco Malfoy becomes increasingly involved with evil during his sixth year at school, he gradually begins to look physically ill. And Voldemort himself suffered great harm as a result of his attempt to murder Harry. Evil wreaks havoc in the world and always rebounds on itself. There is no proper room in life for lying to clients or family members, betraying people, cheating, stealing, and putting others down. Such actions dishonor and harm the other people involved. And they degrade and weaken those who are responsible for them. It’s of vital importance not to stray from the ethical path in anything we do. Unethical behavior always involves self-inflicted damage.
In our own day, more business leaders, and more people generally, are starting to realize a truth long known by the great thinkers. Unethical success is extremely fragile and is always self-destructive over the long run. As Dumbledore says at one point to Harry concerning their chief evil nemesis, recounting what happened when the Dark Lord murdered Harry’s parents and chose to target Harry himself, and referring to Harry’s resultant commitment to see him eliminated:
“Voldemort himself created his own worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one who rises up against them and strikes back!” (HB 51)
If you habitually treat people badly, someday someone will right the imbalance of justice in the universe. And you will feel the consequences. Unethical conduct always bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction. In our daily behavior, and whenever we are called upon to make an ethical decision, we should bear this in mind.
In every situation, it’s important to do the right thing. But what about the very toughest decisions, when the right choice isn’t easy to see? The late British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch pointed out in her little book The Sovereignty of Good that if we think ethically and act well in the normal course of business and life, if we pay attention to the proper things and value the right things, then, when a difficult decision-making situation arises, we may find to our surprise that the choice has already been made for us by those structures of value and care that we’ve long been developing. Life is habit, and the right ethical habits will serve us well. If we take care in the little things, the big things won’t be so hard to get right after all.
It helps to have friends and mentors with whom we can honestly discuss our trials and struggles. They can give us moral encouragement, and we can return the favor. It’s much easier to live ethically when we work with other people who share our basic commitments. But ultimately it’s up to each of us to remind ourselves what ethics is all about, and how the strength it creates can’t be had any other way. We have to learn how to resist and ignore the occasional protests and promises of our imagination that there are shortcuts to happiness, and quick fixes of satisfaction, to be had outside the realm of ethical action. In the final analysis, as Socrates, Plato, and all the great philosophers have reminded us, we each need to ask ourselves what sort of life is best worth living and whether our actions each day conspire in favor of that sort of life or undermine it. The real truth about ethics is that, ultimately, everything we do matters, and that the ethical path is the only reliable road to a life of fulfillment and meaning. It’s that important in life, and we see its importance in the various turns and twists of Harry Potter’s adventures.
Some people would object strenuously to reading J. K. Rowling’s entertaining stories for their ethical lessons. We’ll see what their objections are, and then we’ll see what the real truth about Harry and his moral journey might be. There are deep truths that can surprise us, and they certainly can enlighten us.
MORAL RELATIVISM AND REALISM
Some adult readers have claimed that the ethics of the Harry Potter stories are simply deplorable. These books have been accused of “moral relativism” and much worse. They have even been charged with promoting the attitudes and rituals of satanic witchcraft. This latter allegation is silly. The former is just wrong. Let’s look briefly at each.
Most of the witchcraft and wizardry of Harry Potter’s world has more similarity with the flying brooms and pointed hats to be found in Disney cartoons than with anything in Wicca, the very small, real-world, quasireligious sect of self-proclaimed contemporary witches and warlocks, with their informal priesthood of perpetual graduate students and coffeehouse radicals. And even Wicca itself has more in common with the New Age, Southern Californian, laid-back spirituality of incense and massage oils than with anything involving evil, nefarious actions, and demonic or satanic rituals. Those critics who can’t tell the difference just aren’t paying attention. Harry and his friends would probably feel right at home at the Magic Kingdom in Orlando or Anaheim, but would get as far away as possible from the dirty dungeons of a modern satanic cult, as fast as their flying broomsticks could carry them. There is no ritual mutilation of animals or perversely religious sacrifice of innocent humans going on at Hogwarts. It isn’t that kind of place at all. And there is nothing whatsoever in the stories to encourage anything like that in anyone’s life.
As to the charge of moral relativism, critics have often complained that Rowling doesn’t do enough in her books to portray a clear and absolute difference between good and evil. They claim that the good characters are not pure good and the evil villains aren’t evil enough. Ask them for examples of what they mean and you’ll often get answers as weak as “Well, Dumbledore is supposed to be such a good person and yet he is portrayed on occasion as getting very angry,” or “After all, Dumbledore at one point knowingly encourages Harry to sneak around in an invisibility cloak and do something to undermine the adult authorities,” or “Harry is supposed to be a good guy and he tells lots of lies. He even swears.”
First of all, we can draw a clear and absolute distinction between good and evil without thinking that either is ever found in a pure form in normal life. Rowling’s good characters have weaknesses, and her evil characters typically have at least some slim hope of potentially redeeming qualities, however deep down and presently diminished those qualities might be. No realistic depiction of good and evil in the world involves the caricature of deifying the good and absolutely vilifying and demonizing the bad. Rowling’s portrayal of good and bad as intermingled in many characters’ lives is not moral relativism but the most believable, straightforward moral realism.
Second, Rowling’s presentation of her good characters isn’t as tainted as critics complain. Consider the complaint that the good headmaster Dumbledore is occasionally described as angry. In our world, as well as in Harry’s, good people can get angry, even very angry, and indeed should, when confronted with tremendous injustice or evil. There is nothing inherently bad or wrong about an experience of anger—the moral issue resides in the question of how we control and use that anger. Dumbledore experiences a righteous and robust anger when confronted with gross injustice or evil that endangers others, but he never lets that emotion take control of him and deflect him from the path that goodness demands. Anger is a natural reaction of good to evil. And in the headmaster’s life, it acts as the fuel for proper action. When Dumbledore encourages Harry to put on an invisibility cloak and sneak around Hogwarts to do something that undermines an adult authority, the “authority” in question is altogether corrupt and is about to do something that is both terribly evil and irreversible and that, unfortunately, in the circumstances can be stopped in no other way.
Third, and we’ll have to talk about this at length in the next chapter, it’s true that the young Harry and his friends all tell lies—fairly frequently and apparently with ease. We also are informed that the adolescent Harry on occasion swears. We aren’t told what he says, but only that he can speak in this way when frustrated. Rowling doesn’t present lying or swearing as a good thing, or as in any way admirable or commendable behavior. She just represents it as actually going on in the lives of these young people. In particular, she doesn’t portray the students’ casualness about truth as right, only as rife. Again, this does not intimate any form of moral relativism; it’s just a display of moral realism. By all current ethical surveys in the real world, this is, sadly, how lots of young people act. Over 90 percent of children under the age of eighteen who were questioned in a recent ethics survey admitted that they lie to their parents. They tell lies to others, too. In another survey, almost 100 percent of adults admitted that they lie, dissimulate, prevaricate, or stretch the truth beyond its proper bounds on occasion. This is how we are. It’s nothing to be proud of, and it’s certainly nothing to endorse, but it’s part of the human condition. The only people who claim never to have engaged in such behavior tend to be either individuals with very bad memories or else people who are doing the very thing they deny in the act of denying it.
We’ll return to this topic as our main focus in the next chapter, because it is so important in our personal and business lives. We live in a culture where it’s become more common, more expected, and, unfortunately, more accepted to engage in unethical forms of deception. Some people in the world of business see this as a normal part of negotiating and as a standard tool in their tactical arsenal. Others, unfortunately, also view it as an inevitable element of marketing. And yet we are almost all still morally offended when we discover that we’ve personally been told lies and deceived. Most of us understand, deep down, that lies always detract from the best sort of life and prevent the building of the best and most healthy relationships.
Surveys have shown repeatedly that lying is remarkably pervasive in high schools and colleges throughout the nation. No wonder, then, that this can be a problem when people enter the world of work. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in 1918, “The child is father to the man.” Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt recently wrote a surprisingly bestselling little book titled On Bullshit, in which he contends that, throughout the culture, we’ve lost our sense of the importance of truth. One man I know recently told me that he had been fired from a sales job with great responsibility. When he asked why, his boss replied, “Because of your ethics.” The executive went on to explain that in this important sales position, the young man had to be willing to do whatever it took to make a sale, and that this included an openness to using even deception and outright lies whenever necessary. My friend was known to be a man committed to truth and honesty, and his moral stance was deemed to be completely unacceptable for his job. It can get that bad.
Truth is ultimately a friend, even when it looks like a threatening stranger.
From the point of view of what I know, believe, and value now, it’s a source of great embarrassment for me to look back on my life so far and to have to acknowledge, even to myself, that I’ve actually told some lies—not as a matter of course, or at all frequently, and mostly in my youth, I’ll hasten to add, but on at least some fairly rare occasions. Over a period of years in the past, to my current regret, I at times resorted to delicate and diplomatic untruth, usually to protect the feelings of another person, but on a few and especially shameful occasions, merely to safeguard myself from embarrassment or trouble. I never let this creep into my classroom work as a student, into my own professional endeavors as a teacher, or into any of my business relationships, but I allowed it just enough incursion into my life to understand from firsthand experience how the young Harry Potter could fall into this easy “out” on many occasions. Owing to the same range of experience, I also now know without any doubt that, in the final analysis, it’s not a good thing to do. I didn’t always skip the odd social occasion or miss the occasionally inconvenient commitment because I really wasn’t feeling well, but I later actually felt pretty bad about claiming it at the time. Not even my best psychosomatic skills could cause my physiology to match my excuses every time. Now, years later, I believe that, in my maturity, I have learned my proper lessons about all this, and I wish I had understood it at a much younger age. It’s been a long time since I’ve offered another person even the smallest little white lie to avoid offending, or used any sort of artful dodge to slip the noose of trouble I felt I didn’t need. And the surprising discovery I’ve made is that it was never necessary at all. In addition, for all the time since then, I’ve enjoyed tremendously the difference of how it feels to live more thoroughly in the truth and have come to understand what good can be done and what can be built in the world, only by consistently using the reliable, unshakable foundation of fact.
Most of us normally experience good and evil in fairly subtle and less than dramatic ways throughout our day-to-day experience. All good is important, and all evil is damaging, but most of what we encounter in our normal lives in developed societies tends to be fairly far from either extreme end of the spectrum. We confront horrible evil and we see the most exalted forms of good more often in art and history than in the ordinary course of daily life. But certainly, a clear distinction between good and evil is never just something for books, movies, and crime dramas on television, perhaps in addition to what we read in the news about events in faraway places. It matters deeply in the reality of our normal daily lives. It also matters a great deal in the world of Harry Potter.
Let’s think for one more moment about the charge that in the Harry Potter stories evil isn’t portrayed in an absolute way. I wouldn’t want to come across a figure more evil than the vile Lord Voldemort. This is a completely corrupt wizard questing for the ultimate power, an ascendancy over life and death. And he seems to enjoy killing anyone who stands in his way. He takes over lives, perverts the souls of others, and has no regard whatsoever for any positive value. The fact that he may have begun life as an apparently normal little boy, and then increasingly become so evil over the course of the years, doesn’t make him any less wicked, as if he is somehow a junior upstart compared to a possible figure of eternal evil. Even the Satan of the Bible once fell from grace. A person can embody evil, and perhaps even something like absolute evil, despite the fact that it has taken him some time to get into that condition.
There are absolutes of good and evil in the Harry Potter stories just as there are in real life, but most of the characters there, just like the people here, move around day to day along the moral spectrum moderately far from either extreme. Rarely do we encounter pure good or unalloyed evil, but, more commonly, some mix of each. Most of the main characters in the magic world of Harry Potter are young people moving through a fog of insight and illusion, groping their way forward to increased moral clarity, like most of us in the real world. We shouldn’t just condemn them for their foibles, but applaud the compelling depiction of their journey from a considerable degree of naïve carelessness with good and evil into a greater wisdom that clearly sees the difference. It’s ultimately this that Rowling gives us. And in doing so, she helps us to appreciate the real nature of ethics in the world.
ETHICAL AND UNETHICAL PEOPLE
A genuinely ethical person believes that some personal qualities are objectively good—trustworthiness, for instance—and others are objectively bad—untrustworthiness would be an equally good example. He or she also believes that some actions are objectively right—helping a good person who is in need, for example—and others are objectively wrong—intentionally harming an innocent person for no good reason would be an uncontroversial case. The ethical person holds a conviction that the good and the right are to be embraced, and the bad and the wrong are to be avoided. From the perspective of ethics, anyone who fairly consistently embodies the good and the right, with no radical departures from that pattern, is deemed morally good. A person who embodies predominantly the bad and the wrong is for that parallel reason morally bad. In addition, any extreme and apparently irredeemable version of the morally bad or morally wrong is most often characterized by an ethical person as evil. The completely unethical or amoral person, by contrast, most often has a very different view of life. From his perspective, good and evil don’t even exist as objective features of existence.
At one point, Harry discovers in a surprising way that one of his recently hired instructors at Hogwarts is secretly a servant of the evil wizard Voldemort. As their confrontation is happening and the truth is coming out, Professor Quirrell suddenly speaks of himself in the past, in his own youth, perhaps even hoping to influence Harry and win him over to the dark side, by saying:
A foolish young man I was then, full of ridiculous ideas about good and evil. Lord Voldemort showed me how wrong I was. There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it. (SS 291)
The unethical person thinks that life is one big game. Power is its goal, as well as the main implement for playing it. This philosophy of life can be found represented in human history from the earliest times, but it has perhaps its most famous embodiment in some of the work of the Renaissance philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli. It seems that Machiavelli believed the meaning of life to be just power—getting it, exercising it, and maintaining it. Everything else is secondary. You want money? Get enough power and you will be able to acquire it. Do you crave fame? Again, sufficient power can make it happen. Comfort? Security? Reputation? Powerless people can only dream. Whatever you want, the right amount of power can put it within your reach. Therefore, you should seek power, Machiavelli and all like-minded philosophers have urged. In more recent times, the nineteenth-century German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche developed a similar take on life, and his works influenced various Nazi theorists in later years.
It’s ironic that the alternative to an ethical life is the unbridled pursuit of power — since the deepest source of genuine power is living the ethical life.
This is the life philosophy of the wizard referred to by people who fear him as “You-Know-Who” or “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” the evil Lord Voldemort, Harry’s archenemy and nemesis. Voldemort seeks power over other people, power over all of life, and ultimately power over death. He says to his followers:
“You know my goal—to conquer death.” (GF 653)
Professor Quirrell’s downfall was to follow in Voldemort’s footsteps and serve to do his bidding in all things, hoping in that way to obtain a share in his power.
Recall the famous claim of Lord Acton in 1887: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The lust for power is an inherently corrupting quest. The more of it that an unethical person gets, the more he wants, and the further he drifts from a proper perspective on life. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with power. Power can be used for good or evil. Great power can put a person in a position to do great good. What is wrong, and is inevitably corrupting, is a focal quest after power for its own sake—which is to say, ultimately, for one’s own sake. This is a life path that is inherently self-absorbed and that falls into the category that traditional monotheistic religions label as “idolatry.” An all-consuming pursuit of power easily becomes a worship of power and plunges a person into a state of corruption that cuts him off from all the higher values in life. Like traditional forms of idolatry, this pursuit ends up being self-defeating and self-destructive.
When Harry first visits the Gringotts Bank, where the wizards of his world keep their gold, money, and other valuables, he sees engraved on some inner entrance doors a short poem about greed that is meant to serve as a warning to all prospective thieves. It actually conveys a broader cautionary word than that, and applies to any form of greed for other people’s money, for power, or for any other form of desired status or personal resources. It says, in part:
Enter, stranger, but take heed
Of what awaits the sin of greed,
For those who take, but do not earn,
Must pay most dearly in their turn. (SS 72–73)
Seeking and taking anything that isn’t properly ours will bring with it the unpleasant surprise of some form of proper punishment. The unethical person doesn’t typically understand this, and so is often baffled at the true consequences of his greed for power or things. The danger in chasing the wrong things, or in pursuing any goals in the wrong ways, is that we’ll find to our surprise that the totality of what we get will end up being very different from what we had wanted and hoped to attain.
THE DANGERS OF CORRUPTION
There is another dangerous process evident in these stories. Nearly all of the people who associate with Voldemort are thoroughly corrupted by his company as they become ensnared by his vision. This is a danger noted by all the great philosophers, and one that results from a tendency in human psychology that we’ve already considered in our look at Harry’s courage. There is an incredible malleability to human personality. We tend to become like the people we’re around. In the New Testament, the apostle Paul quotes a Greek proverb that goes back at least as far as the work of the ancient poet Menander (c. 342–292 B.C.) when he says in his first letter to the Corinthian church, “Do not be deceived: ‘Bad company corrupts good morals.’” George Herbert much later said it like this: “Associate not with evil men, lest you increase their number.” No greater advice has ever been given. Let’s call this “The Principle of Association”—we are influenced by and in many ways eventually become like the people we’re around.
I watched a small lizard outside my back door yesterday. When he was sitting on a bright green plant, he was every bit as green as the stem supporting his weight. Then he jumped off onto the brown and rusty braided wire handle of an old wicker basket. Within a surprisingly short time, he was nearly as brown as the wire. We human beings don’t change our color, but our personalities and actual characters can mold themselves to our environment in unexpected ways. This is why it’s so important to choose our friends and close associates wisely. Their impact on us can be dramatic, and if it’s bad, insidiously so, because we’re typically unaware of what’s happening as we begin to be transformed by the example of their presence.
The number of widespread ethical failures to hit the business headlines in the past several years has been astounding. And in each case, corrupt individuals have had an insidious influence on their associates, corrupting them in turn, and often convincing them to do things they might not otherwise have even thought of doing. We may feel like we’re strong enough to be around any kind of person without being influenced by them, but that’s usually not a very realistic opinion. Bad people can have terrible effects on us in many ways, even if we’re never actually tempted to follow them into their misdeeds.
We become like the people we surround ourselves with.
Rowling illustrates something closely akin to this principle in a particularly vivid way. The dementors are horrible and frightening creatures used as guards at the toughest prison for criminally convicted wizards, a place called Azkaban. Their role in the punishment of wrongdoers ends up, however, going far beyond that of providing security. Just being around them amounts to a terrible punishment itself. The good and helpful Professor Lupin explains to Harry that dementors are among the worst creatures on earth, both living in and loving decay and despair. He tells Harry that they drain or eliminate any shred of peace, hope, good feeling, or happiness from anyone and anything around them. He adds:
“Get too near a dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself . . . soulless and evil.” (PA 187)
Unfortunately, this may remind you of a hated professor, or a particularly bad manager, or some other unpleasant person in authority that you’ve worked with over the years. It’s not a pretty description. Think about the terrible effect of merely being around such a monster. Something interestingly similar to this often happens to anyone who associates closely with any sort of evil or unethical person. Their goodness, kindness, happiness, general optimism, and positive life force can all be slowly drained away, and a real transformation can occur. That is the destructive force of evil and the insidious power of association with it.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNETHICAL MIND
It has often been said that the difference between an ethical and an unethical person is very simple: An unethical person loves things and uses people; an ethical person loves people and uses things. The unethical person’s philosophy of life can typically be summed up in two beliefs:
Power is to be pursued.
People are to be manipulated.
This second belief is just another way of expressing the old immoral philosophy of life that “the end justifies the means.” An unethical person is always manipulative, never treating others the way he would himself want to be treated, but in every way using other people for his own personal ends or goals.
The Hogwarts sorting hat at one point describes the Slytherin house students in a song as “cunning” and says that they are prepared to use any means whatsoever to accomplish their aims (SS 118). Using any means can involve lying, cheating, stealing, betraying, and even killing. The great enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant repeatedly characterized this approach to life as absolutely wrong. He insisted that there is a universal duty never to treat another human being as a mere means to your ends and not at the same time as “an end unto himself.” What this comes down to is that we should never treat other people as mere tools or instruments of our will. Human beings are not just of instrumental value. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with asking someone to do something for us. We have to do that with associates and friends all the time. When you lead an organization, or if you manage other people, that’s just your job. But what matters is how you use the talents and energies of others, the attitude with which this is done, and the tone with which you do it. We all have intrinsic value and we all should be treated as such—with respect and dignity. That is the ethical stance.
The great Jewish theologian and philosopher Martin Buber once made this point in a related way in his enormously influential book I and Thou. He explained that there are two fundamentally different orientations possible between any two human beings. One he called the “I-It” relation. This is the mind-set that treats another person as an object, a mere thing to be manipulated and used—just another piece of the furniture of the universe. The other relation he called the “I-Thou” relation, using a very formal term in his native German language for ultimate respect. This is the mind-set that treats another person as a sacred soul deserving of honor and high regard. That is the ethical stance.
The unethical person is always a user. In a moment of confrontation, one of the bad guys Harry has to face says to him:
“Decent people are so easy to manipulate, Potter.” (GF 676)
And the evil antagonist, Tom Riddle—the original and secret identity of Voldemort—boasts:
“If I say it myself, Harry, I’ve always been able to charm the people I needed.” (CS 310)
A smiling face is no guarantee of a good heart. Neither is a charming personality. Some of the worst people on earth can be amazingly engaging and pleasant to be around—as long as it suits their needs and desires for the moment. Affability is no sure sign of goodness. Unethical people can use a world-class winning smile or a pleasant-seeming personality as they use everything else—for their own selfish purposes.
Dolores Umbridge, the unqualified teacher sent to Hogwarts by the Ministry of Magic in Harry’s fifth year, is a particularly loathsome creature to readers because it is so easy to see through her showy affectations of pleasantry, a forced, sickly smile and her horribly saccharine voice. Her genuinely cruel intentions are not easy for her to hide. But many of the bad characters in the Potter stories, as well as in the real world, are much better at disguising their true purposes. This is what makes them particularly dangerous. Unethical people think of every other human being as a mere object to be manipulated and used or else to be avoided, ignored, or even eliminated.
Why, indeed, is it true that decent people are often so easy to manipulate? Why are basically good people sometimes so easily charmed? It’s really quite simple. Most good people are inherently trusting. They act honestly most of the time, and so they naturally expect others to do roughly the same. We all tend to view the world through the lens of what we know. Trustworthy people just instinctively expect others to be worthy of trust as well. Deceptive people, by contrast, are always on their guard. The most suspicious people in the world tend to fall into either or both of two categories: those who very often have acted dishonestly themselves, and so typically expect the same of others, and those who have been severely burned by dishonest people in the past and desperately want this never to happen again. The lesson here is not at all that good people should be less trusting of others, but that we all should be cautiously open and suitably careful in granting our trust to other people. And we should not expect the unethical individuals among us to be as easily identifiable as Professor Umbridge. Harry and his friends are sometimes fooled. And so are the rest of us.
RECIPROCITY AND RESTRAINT
So what exactly is the ethical approach to life that’s exhibited by the good wizards in Harry’s world? What does it require? What does it involve? How can you spot it in another person? How can you test it in yourself? Are there some general contours to the ethics of the wizards from which the rest of us can learn?
Let’s answer these questions gradually. First, let me draw your attention to a common approach to life. When you carefully observe human nature as it actually is, you begin to notice something pretty soon. People tend to treat others the way they have been treated. This is not a universal law, but it is a very general tendency. To put it another way, most people tend to reflect back the conduct they themselves receive. This is what philosophers sometimes call “reciprocity.” We see this habit occasionally in Harry’s life—as, for example, when his uncle Vernon once growls a warning at him to behave himself when he talks to his very unpleasant aunt Marge during her upcoming visit, and Harry basically says that he’ll act politely toward her if she first acts in this way toward him (PA 19). He’s prepared to be a gentleman only conditionally and plans to fling back at his aunt exactly what she dishes out to him, or worse. And that, of course, isn’t the ethical stance. Reciprocity is a pressure that, unfortunately, most people seem to give in to most of the time—we rise or sink to the level of the people around us. If they’re nice to us, we’re all smiles and sweetness, but if they’re rude to us, they may be amazed at how sharp and nasty we can be in return.
In every facet of life, what you give, you tend to get.
Around Draco Malfoy, arguably the nastiest little boy at Hogwarts, an arrogant upstart from a wealthy “pure blood” wizard family, Harry often loses control of his temper and is almost irresistibly tempted to stoop to his level in retaliation. Even the sensible Hermione once completely loses her composure in response to him and slaps his face. Several times, Harry hears this malicious troublemaker speak disparagingly of Hagrid, the groundskeeper who is a good friend to Harry, and we are told that it takes all his inner willpower to resist the temptation to follow Hermione’s lead and hit Malfoy squarely in the face (PA 316). The fact that Harry doesn’t pummel Draco in all these situations is due more to a concern for staying out of unnecessary trouble than it is to any more principled moral stance on his part. But he is still in the early stages of his moral education.
Stooping to the level of the worst people around us isn’t the moral path, and it isn’t an approach to life that works very well. At one point, Harry completely loses his self-control and duels with Malfoy to defend Hermione’s honor. The terrible, unintended result is that Hermione is injured (GF 298–299). The irony here is a cautionary tale in itself. Unethical means should never be employed in the effort to attain good ends.
This is not the ethical way. Reciprocity is the path of an amoral puppet, a person who lets others call the shots and pull his strings. The ethical person is an individual who always takes the initiative and tries to do what is right in any circumstances, regardless of how other people are acting. He or she doesn’t just reflect back the conduct of others, but instead always seeks to do what ought to be done, even if that means swimming against a strong current or standing utterly alone. The moral person has a higher standard of conduct than just the question of which way the wind is blowing now.
There is an interesting parallel between the natural lure of reciprocity in social interactions between people and the pull of the crowd away from principled actions generally. Energy conservation is of increasing importance in our world. It matters what sort of transportation we normally rely on, how we heat and cool our homes, whether we conserve and recycle paper and packaging materials, and even how we use electric lights in our business environments as well as in our homes. Many people, when urged to exercise more caution in their daily use of electricity—for instance, turning off lights when they’re not needed and taking other conservation measures, however small—can easily be tempted to reply in protest, if only in their own minds, “Why should I go to all that trouble when most people aren’t? What good will it do for me to go out of my way to conserve energy when others will just continue to be wasteful?” But the ethical stance is never to measure and direct our own conduct by the actions of “most people” or the inclinations of the crowd that happens to be around us. The world needs more ethical lights in the darkness. The fact that many others aren’t providing any of this light, rather than being a reason not to do so ourselves, is precisely more of a call to each of us to light our own little torches and provide whatever measure of illumination we can. An ethical person is always less concerned about what is popular, or what is customary, than with what is right. To take the ethical path, we sometimes have to resist strongly the influence of at least some of the people around us.
Although Hermione Granger does lose her composure and slap her nasty classmate Draco Malfoy in one situation, when he is making deeply insulting remarks about a good and noble friend, she is usually the voice of reason, virtue, and restraint. We often see her urging Harry not to let Malfoy and others make him mad. Once, when the opportunistically unpleasant Malfoy is mocking Harry, his wise friend steps in and tells him to completely ignore him. She repeats:
“Just ignore him, it’s not worth it. . . .” (PA 96)
Harry often has trouble keeping his cool in Professor Snape’s Potions class. Snape has a visceral dislike of Harry that derives from an old animosity with Harry’s father in their own school days, and he allows the Slytherin House hooligans, Malfoy’s friends, to torment Harry in class, often stooping so low as to join in himself. We are told at one point that Harry has about had it with this treatment and is on the verge of responding in kind when, again, Hermione intervenes with what has become almost a mantra of “Ignore them”—repeated over and over again (GF 297). Even when she is the one being insulted and Harry is about to come to her defense, Hermione offers restraint as the proper course, both telling Harry to ignore it and then showing in her own behavior how this can be done (GF 316). On these occasions, and in many other situations, Hermione characteristically displays the dignified self-control and poise of a Stoic philosopher.
The Stoics were a group of ancient thinkers who emphasized that we may not often have the measure of control we’d like over the circumstances we find ourselves in, but we can always take control of our own attitudes and reactions toward those circumstances. In particular, we can’t control how other people behave, but we can govern our own emotions and actions in response to their behavior. We can choose to be wise and ignore what would otherwise make us extremely mad. We can rise above it, or—to use a philosopher’s term—we can transcend it. I’ve often had to take myself mentally outside a difficult and emotionally charged situation while still physically immersed in it, reminding myself to “rise above it” and take up the stance of an objective anthropologist, sociologist, or psychologist observing what was going on without becoming caught up in it. And I’ve found that this Stoic maneuver can be very effective. When you refuse to let other people’s agitation or hostility dictate your own emotions, you keep yourself in the best state for making good decisions, and you retain at least the possibility of steering the situation in a more productive direction. The Stoic sensibility does not allow external events to dictate our inner attitudes and decisions. The Stoic stands firm on her own values and rests in the dignity of her own character.
Until sometime early in the twentieth century, most educated people read and appreciated the Stoics. My father, who never went to college, had books with essays of the Stoics proudly displayed in the living room. He read Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius for advice about life and business. He absorbed and used their insights and passed them along to me. My dad’s ongoing project of self-education immersed him in Stoic wisdom. The importance of it all came rushing back to me one day as I sat down in seat 1A on a US Airways flight about to leave Orlando and noticed the gentleman next to me reading Tom Wolfe’s big novel A Man in Full, about a month or two after it was published. I asked him how he liked the book, and he replied, “I love it! And I really like all the Stoic philosophy in it. Everybody in the world of business needs to read the Stoics!” I heartily agreed, then asked him what had led him to this conclusion. He thought for a second and said, “I was here in Orlando for a big convention. My company manufactures golf clubs. We were going to feature in our booth the newest model that we’re really excited about. But when we got here, the clubs hadn’t arrived. We checked on them, and no one seemed to know where they were. People started getting really panicky. This was the night before what was supposed to be our big launch of the product. I saw some of our executives really losing it, yelling and screaming at people, being really irrational. I had just been reading in Wolfe’s book about Stoic composure and Stoic cool. A big dose of that could have made a huge difference in those circumstances.” He went on to explain how the situation was eventually resolved, but only when a few clear heads calmly took appropriate actions—when a modicum of Stoic objectivity and poise finally was allowed to blow like a fresh breeze through this otherwise superheated turmoil.
People in the world of business do need a dose of the Stoic perspective on life. Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to find the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in any bookstore. But it’s much harder to locate good translations of Seneca or Epictetus that are easily available for the hurried executive. So I set it as a personal goal to discover all the best passages from these three great Stoics—one a slave, one a lawyer, and one the Emperor of Rome—translate them into the best language of our time, and help people see how to read and use their incredibly effective ideas. This ended up being a long project of study and education for me that significantly deepened my perspectives on life and how we react to it. It also culminated in a book called The Stoic Art of Living: Inner Resilience and Outer Results that basically provides a manual for understanding some of the most admirable traits of both Dumbledore and the young Hermione as they confront the difficulties that cross their paths. The reaction of people who have a chance to meet the Stoics in print and master their perspectives is genuinely remarkable. My seatmate was right. The world of business needs the Stoics. But, as we can see in all of Rowling’s stories, so does the world of Harry Potter—and so do we all. The techniques of self-mastery that my father practiced, that Dumbledore lives, and that normally govern the emotions and actions of a young girl like Hermione are exactly what Harry Potter needs in order to best use his distinctive talents for the good of others as well as himself. It’s often a challenge for Harry, as it is for most of the rest of us. But the disciplines of self-control and self-mastery described and practiced by the great Stoic philosophers can provide us with the psychological poise we need in even the most turbulent of circumstances. The Stoics give us that key to moral independence that allows us to stand firm in the right and treat people as we ought, regardless of what might be happening all around us.
We can eventually see that Hermione’s repeated Stoic advice has an effect on Harry over the long term. Much later, when his friend Ron is being taunted, we witness Harry coming to his rescue with the very same advice:
“Ignore them,” he said . . . (OP 290)
Sometimes a good person has to confront evil and resist it, even with force. But more often than not, the little irritations and insults of life just need to be ignored. Hermione frequently urges Harry to rise above a situation, to transcend the moment and not to let little things bother him. She is advising him to stay on an ethical path and not descend to the level of retaliating against evil with just more evil. Then Harry eventually does the same thing for Ron. Anyone who uses this advice can break the cycle of negativity that otherwise often threatens to get out of control and take over a situation, bullying even good people to do what they know isn’t right. The tools of self-control that the Stoics give us with their reflections and mental techniques can make all the difference in how such situations play out and in how we later feel about what we have done. They can also make the difference between winning and losing, in business and in life.
RESPECT FOR RULES
Hermione Granger is often the coolest head among Harry’s friends. Her mind works logically and rationally. An academically talented girl, she is very self-disciplined and hardworking, a real high-achiever, and she arrives at Hogwarts as someone who believes in following the rules. She respects the rules of logic, the rules of language, the rules of the school, and the rules of fair play. She watches the boys, her friends Harry and Ron, engaged in all their foolishness, and often acts as almost a mother in residence, urging them on to the path of common sense or pulling them back from the edge of trouble. The boys are a good bit more casual about rules. Professor Snape at one point expresses with tremendous irritation his belief that Harry is perversely intent on breaking rules and crossing lines whenever he can, and on another occasion confronts Harry about this, snarling:
“To me, Potter, you’re nothing but a nasty little boy who considers rules to be beneath him.” (GF 516)
Snape certainly appears not to be the best judge of character, and he’s especially biased when it comes to Harry. But he’s right that Harry sometimes ignores, or works to get around, the rules at Hogwarts when doing so suits his purposes. And he’s often joined in this by Ron, his best friend. It’s not that Harry and Ron actively disparage rules. They aren’t anarchistic rebels who reject all rules and break them purposely to make a point. Neither are they callous young men who just simply don’t care about other people’s rules and regulations. The truth is that, on one level, they are just normal kids who occasionally enjoy doing something that seems in itself harmless, fun, and exciting, even if it involves stretching or actually ignoring some school rule. And, on another level, they may even realize the limits of rules in life.
We’ve all had the experience of being up against rules that just seem crazy—if you’re a gainfully employed adult, you may think, for example, of what you confront at tax time. Or consider how it feels when you discover that the ultimate rules in the fine print concerning what your health insurance will or will not pay for sometimes seem to have been decided by a blindfolded man throwing darts randomly at a board across the room. If you’re a younger person, you may be able to bring to mind some school rule, or even a family rule, that you think isn’t reasonable at all. Not all rules seem to make sense. We’ve all chafed under the restricting irritation of rules, regulations, and even laws that struck us as outmoded, awkwardly formulated, and counterproductive in their application. And we’ve usually also encountered the sort of person bound and determined to enforce the rules, whether or not they even remotely made any sense in the particular situation. I have to admit that I’ve been a bit amazed whenever I’ve seen this in my own experience.
I was the first professor at the University of Notre Dame ever to direct a Summer Seminar for School Teachers, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Fifteen teachers of grades K–12 were going to be selected in a national competition for the best and brightest, then invited to Notre Dame to live together and discuss philosophy with me for a month. Our topic was “Pascal’s Pensées: Faith, Reason, and the Meaning of Life.” We were going to be studying one of history’s great mathematical, religious, and philosophical thinkers, along with the application of his ideas to modern life. The lady who at that time ran the Housing Office at Notre Dame—like a marine drill sergeant would run a barracks—informed me that, unfortunately, there was a problem with my plan. It was impossible to do as I was suggesting. There was a rule at Notre Dame, long on the books: Men and women could not stay in the same dorm, even in the summer. This, of course, was not so different from Hogwarts, where boys and girls in the same “house” still sleep in physically different accommodations. The rule apparently was made to keep frisky young students away from the other gender in all residential aspects of campus life at this great Catholic university.
“But,” I told the head of housing, “these people are mature, adult teachers, chosen in a national competition. They are allowed to live in the same dorm at every other university in the country that is honored to have an NEH seminar on campus. The residential formation of an intellectual community is part of the seminar experience, and”—to me this was the absolute clincher—“some of the selected participants are married and will be arriving with spouses. So we have to house both genders in the same dorm.” This was all met with a blank look and then, after a moment, a determined one. “I’m sorry,” the authoritative lady said with an obvious firmness of voice, “the rules will just not allow it.” To make a very long story short, I finally got everyone in the Housing Office to see reason, or at least to just give up and let me have my dorm, but not before I had to appeal the situation to the highest levels of the administration. And still, all summer long, whenever I needed to approach the Housing Office about anything, the first response I heard would always be “Well, there’s a problem with that.” I learned quickly that my immediate reply should be to smile and say, “That’s okay. I’m a problem solver. And I’m sure we can come up with a good solution together. What’s our challenge?”
Corporate life is often no different in this respect from university life. People have turf and often control it with rules that can seem just silly, outrageous, or plain wrong. We have to expect rules to be misused in life—isn’t everything else? And we should be prepared to work both creatively and persistently to overcome any rules, or applications of rules, that block sensible actions that will be for the good of all concerned. It’s human nature to hide behind rules. To let this get us all worked up and angry is usually counterproductive and not at all necessary. It’s a bit like getting mad at the weather. Some rage at the storm, while others simply put on galoshes, grab an umbrella, and carry on with what they need to do. I realized long ago that there is no point in getting angry when confronted by rules that make no sense. The most sensible choice in most cases is either to comply, when very little is at stake and resistance isn’t worth the trouble, and perhaps create a novel route around the situation or else to take action to change those rules, or at least to alter their application in the particular situation.
The poet Ogden Nash once wrote, “In a world of mules / there are no rules.” Human life depends on social coordination, and thus, on rules. Without any rules and regulations that are for the most part obeyed by people, the world would be utter chaos most of the time. No human being in a society can live in utter disregard for rules. When the rule of law breaks down in any nation, we see the sad and often terrible consequences right away. However, some of the rules of any society are quite contingent or arbitrary. They could have been different from what they are, and indeed in other parts of the world, the relevant rules are different—consider, for example, the rule about driving on the right side of any two-way, two-lane road in America and on the left side in Britain or, for instance, Bermuda. It’s necessary only that everyone knows and obeys the rule, whatever it might be, in each individual place. Politeness still requires, in certain parts of the American South, that verbal responses to any questions and requests that have been asked by adults should be of the form “Yes, ma’am” and “No ma’am,” “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” while such phrases of honor will often just elicit uncomprehending stares in other areas of the United States. And then, as a child growing up in America, I have to admit that I loved to inform my mother on a regular basis that burping was polite in China, or at least somewhere exotic far outside our house. How do you hold a fork during dinner, and where do you put it when you’ve finished eating? What do you wear in this situation and in that one? All these are contingent rules. They could have been otherwise. And that deeply bothers some young people before they realize the importance of social coordination in life and the value of even contingent expressions of respect and regard.
Rules are important. Rules define human enterprises and generate reasonable mutual expectations in any social activity. Likewise, rules are fundamental in early-childhood training, and for learning any new skill. Rule-governed behavior is crucial for any form of long-term business success. And so it can seem very natural for some sincere people to assume that all rules are of equally inviolable importance—as if the order of society hangs above a sea of roiling chaos by a single thread, a slender support that will be torn asunder completely by any small violation of the rules. But that clearly goes too far. Not all rules are created equal.
There are well-intentioned people who think that ethics is just all about rules. Morality, in this view, means following all the rules, in letter and in spirit. For people who think like this and believe that ethics is simply about rules, it’s easy to view both Harry Potter and his creator, J. K. Rowling, as outrageously unethical individuals, because of their apparently slack view of rules. A magical map that Harry gets his hands on—a map that shows where everyone is at any given time on campus, and that also indicates secret passageways for escaping campus—is at one point described by the apparently sympathetic author Rowling as “the most useful aid to rule-breaking Harry owned” (GF 458). But she is just being facetiously playful in this passage, characterizing the map as one of Harry’s school chums might, or as Harry could well be imagined thinking about it in the excitement of his own mind. She is not herself endorsing or supporting a philosophy of rule-breaking for its own sake or a worldview of contempt for rules. Any reader who accuses her of immorality or an unethical attitude from the sheer occurrence of this sort of passage is simply misreading it quite uncharitably.
A critic who concludes from such a statement that Rowling, or Harry, isn’t an ethical person is also just misunderstanding ethics. Rules play a central role in all ethical systems and in the lives of all ethical people—but not just rules, and not all rules, and not all the time. People who think that ethics simply consists of fastidiously obeying lots and lots of rules fail to see a few things that any good philosopher could point out.
Ethics can’t just consist of rules. First, rules need interpreting. If the interpretation of one rule were always supplied by another rule, and the interpretation of this further rule was given by yet another rule, we’d end up having infinitely many rules to guide us in life, which is absurd and impossible. Second, rules can conflict. To settle any case of conflicting rules, we need something more than just those rules. Third, we can never have enough rules, and so we often get too many. I realize that this may sound like a typical philosopher’s paradox, so let me explain it a bit more.
There can’t be a rule for everything. Rules are general and always a little vague. Life is particular and always very specific. No matter how elaborate and well thought through a given set of rules is, it can never anticipate every eventuality in all its complex detail. Because of that, for every rule there is a loophole awaiting the discovery of a sharp attorney, a creative mischief-maker like Fred or George Weasley, or any other shrewd operator. We can never have enough rules to eliminate all the possible loopholes. But if we think we need to try, we end up with far too many rules. Consider the U.S. Tax Code again as a prime example. An immensely complex tangle of rules is no clear guide for anyone. In addition to having rules for life, we need a good dose of wisdom and virtue to round things out. Rules alone can never suffice. Wisdom and virtue are guides beyond the rules, and they are the interpretive powers we have for properly understanding rules. This just means that ethics is ultimately about wisdom and virtue.
Wisdom is insight for living. Virtue is the habit of acting in accordance with wisdom. Wisdom tells us what’s right, and virtue helps us do it. The wise person, as Aristotle saw, understands rules and respects good ones, but is also able to see beyond the letter of the law and into the heart of justice. The virtuous person is guided by wisdom and acts in accordance with goodness, kindness, justice, fairness, patience, compassion, respect, honor, forbearance, honesty, and all the other traits we often refer to as individual virtues. As we grow in the two general qualities of wisdom and virtue, we are better able to see what we should do in any situation, and we are more reliably able to do it.
The ultimate keys to ethics are simply wisdom and virtue.
What is good? What should I do? How is this situation to be handled? There can’t be enough rules, and there can’t be rules good enough, to answer all our questions and eliminate for us the occasional task of hard and sustained thinking. There will never be the equivalent of a simple moral software program, an ethical calculator where you can plug in all the relevant details of your situation and you will be given automatically a specification of exactly what you should do. The world doesn’t work that way, and neither does ethics. We often think of moral decision-making as being like a True-False test, where we’re always hoping to get the right answer, but it’s sometimes more like an act of artistic creation, where we’re just trying to make something beautiful, with each stroke of the brush contributing properly to the final result.
Harry Potter occasionally breaks rules. But that doesn’t prove he is an unethical, nasty little boy. He is struggling like any young person to find his way in the world, and he doesn’t start off like Hermione, as an almost evangelistic follower of rules. Sometimes his rule-breaking is frivolous and irresponsible, but at other times it saves lives and defeats evil. Throughout the stories, Hermione loosens up a bit, and Harry grows in the direction of a greater maturity from his distinct direction as well. That means he grows in wisdom and in virtue. And it seems that, as he ages, he doesn’t break as many rules as casually and carelessly as he once may have.
THE GOLDEN RULE
As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, there is one moral rule recognized in some form in every great human culture. It’s probably the best general guide to behavior ever articulated. Like every other moral rule, it requires proper interpretation and application, and this always depends on some basic measure of wisdom and virtue. But it is one rule that is undeniably of central importance in normal human life. And we can see it being acknowledged in the conduct of every good wizard in Harry’s world of magic as well. It’s the famous Golden Rule, as stated earlier: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Treat others the way you’d want to be treated if you were in their place.
Dumbledore lives the Golden Rule. So does his trusted associate, Professor Minerva McGonagall. Hagrid extends this rule to the most unlikely members of the animal kingdom, treating even dangerous magical beasts the way he would want to be treated if he were in their place. Examine the behavior of any of the good wizards in Harry’s world and you’ll see the same thing, more or less consistently. They seek to live by the Golden Rule. The bad characters are the opposite. Like his father Lucius Malfoy, young Draco is no follower of the Golden Rule. Neither are his beefy cohorts, Crabbe and Goyle. Least of all is Lord Voldemort himself. They never treat others the way they’d want to be treated. They treat others any way they please and in any manner that suits their selfish, petty personal interests.
Throughout the adventures and difficulties faced by Harry and his friends, all the good wizards tend to interact with the people around them in accordance with the Golden Rule, and the others do quite otherwise. This reflects well the fundamental truths about ethics in the world. Good people care about others. And good people treat others well. Immoral and unethical individuals stand apart by acting precisely in a contrary manner. They recognize no external constraints on their conduct, apart from any they might think could serve their own narrow and base aims.
The older and wiser Sirius Black once says something very insightful to young Harry, when talking about a man who had corrupted his own character in a fight to get to the top in a highly politicized government ministry. He advises his young friend:
“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” (GF 525)
A man who treats his superiors well can just be courting their favor. Someone who treats his equals well may just be hedging his bets. He might just be thinking, “Who knows? One of them may someday be in a position to be of use.” We have more reliable evidence of good character on the part of another person only when we see him treat well those people around him who seem to have no apparent power to reciprocate and no immediate prospects of such power.
One of my philosophy students long ago, Kevin Fleming, is now a very insightful psychologist and much-sought-after executive coach with clients in significant positions of power and influence. Dr. Fleming has told me that he can learn a lot of important information very quickly about the character of a high-powered businessperson by noticing how he or she treats the waitstaff and other employees at a restaurant. Raytheon’s highly respected CEO, Bill Swanson, also has commented on this phenomenon in his now famous booklet, privately circulated among CEOs and top corporate executives, Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management, saying, “A person who is nice to you but rude to the waiter—or to others—is not a nice person.” He even adds in parentheses, for heightened emphasis, “This is a rule that never fails.” If we see a person living with kindness and consideration to all, regardless of position and power, treating all others around him the way he’d want to be treated if he were in their place, then we have strong positive evidence that we are dealing with a genuinely good and ethical individual. If we see the opposite, then we have right there very good evidence of a distinctly bad character.
How a person treats others is generally a good test of character.
Sirius Black voices for us here the reason that Harry, Ron, and most of us readers don’t really trust Professor Severus Snape from our very earliest introduction to him. Formerly a “Death Eater,” a follower of Voldemort, he has come to work at Hogwarts and generally appears to have aligned himself with Dumbledore. The headmaster trusts him to have changed his allegiance wholeheartedly. And he accordingly becomes a member of the Order of the Phoenix, the secret band of wizards who are led by Dumbledore and are working to thwart Voldemort’s schemes and rescue their world from the threat of evil. Yet we see Snape often unable to live with any measure of compassion and love for his fellow man, including Sirius Black and, most notably, Harry. With some of the information about this mean-spirited professor that comes to light during Harry’s fifth year, a charitable reader can easily conclude that it could just be that a background of abuse and extensive association with evil have left long-term scars on Snape’s personality that will take much more time to heal. Nonetheless, if he genuinely has undergone a thorough change of heart and has come over firmly to the side of the good, there seems to be much work yet to be done before he will have become a fully good and ethical person.
At the culmination of year six, as recorded in what is perhaps the most shocking passage in all the Harry Potter books, we see something happen in The Half-Blood Prince that seems to untangle decisively and totally disambiguate the paradoxical character that is Snape. And still, things are not always what they seem. Many readers continue to wonder whether the full truth is yet evident about this mysterious wizard. He could be playing an important and elaborate role in the ultimate fight against evil as he engages in his most shocking actions—a role very dangerous for his own soul—or he could be showing his true colors. Regardless of the ultimate story, this much is clear: Whatever Snape is at his core, there seems to be plenty built up around that core that strikes us as morally despicable. And this is typically manifested through his many violations of the Golden Rule.
The particular Golden Rule test that Sirius Black articulates so well is one that even he occasionally fails—for example, in the way he customarily treats his family house-elf, the unpleasant and mean-spirited little creature named Kreacher. The Golden Rule is certainly a high moral standard that is difficult for most people to live up to, and consequently few of us do so with complete consistency. It is also a general litmus test for ethical living that the members of Harry’s unpleasant guardian family, the Dursleys, fail all the time.
From the day he was orphaned, at about the age of one, and until he was eleven, Harry lived full time with the Dursley family at number four, Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey. Since going off to Hogwarts as a residential student, he still spends most of each summer vacation in their care. For deeply magical reasons that are not revealed until the end of the fifth book, The Order of the Phoenix, Dumbledore entrusted the infant Harry into the safekeeping of the Dursleys right after the murder of his birth parents by Voldemort. Petunia Dursley, the Muggle sister of Harry’s wizard mother, is to be his protector. Her power to keep him safe consists not in any magical skills on her part but in the nature of the blood she shares with her sister and the magical power that resides there. Harry is safe from harm by Voldemort as long as he is in her home.
But Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia treat Harry horribly. There is no Golden Rule in use at the Dursley house. Everything there is about middle-class appearances and the manipulation of others for the sake of social status. Vernon and Petunia view Harry as a misfit, and he is nothing more than an object of their contempt, resentment, and petty cruelty. Their son Dudley is just as bad as they are, and this of course should be no surprise. Harry is forced for many years to live in a cramped space under the stairs, he’s given almost nothing to eat, and he’s compelled out of absolutely no financial necessity to wear hand-me-down clothes that don’t even remotely fit. His birthdays are ignored, and in every other way he is treated worse than Cinderella ever was. The Dursleys fail the Golden Rule test every day and they do so quite miserably. They model for Harry the worst sort of ordinary behavior throughout the most formative years of his childhood. We shouldn’t be at all puzzled that, as a result, he has to struggle on occasion in his own conduct to find the more ethical path. What we should be genuinely amazed by is that he does seem to have all the right core values, and that he is indeed developing along a fundamentally ethical path, despite the tremendous disadvantages of this background. There is an old saying: “A stream never rises higher than its source.” Harry seems to live as an ongoing disproof of its pessimism. He has certainly risen far above his upbringing. And in our world today, that is a source of hope for many of Harry’s fans.
HARRY’S MORAL JOURNEY
Harry Potter learns from every situation he encounters and from everyone he meets. His time at Hogwarts is a journey of moral awakening and moral formation. We judge him best as a person not by looking at any single moment in time, or at any one thing he does, but by tracing the whole path of his moral education and development throughout the years of his young life that we are privileged to see. He shows us flashes of courage and honor, unselfishness, and kindness in many situations. And then he tells a little white lie, or a great big whopper, or else he lashes out in anger and irritation at someone close to him, and we are set back on our heels wondering what manner of young man we actually are encountering. But if we look more deeply, and think carefully about what we are seeing, we can come to the conclusion that Harry is indeed an Aristotelian work of moral art, undergoing a deep and dynamic character formation far beyond the experience of most of his peers. He is gradually in the process of becoming what he is capable of being, with fits and starts and temporary reversals for sure, but with definite and discernible movement in the right direction. To an important extent, Harry is lured on in the right direction by his great example, Dumbledore, who acts toward him in a way that ultimately he can emulate—and in so doing he can attain for himself the high road of the proper ethical path.
All fans of Harry Potter are excited about what we think we see him becoming. It’s easy to imagine him someday serving in Dumbledore’s place, running Hogwarts, serving as the most admired leader in the wizard community, and doing for some other young person exactly what Dumbledore is now doing for him. Goodness always wants to produce more of itself. That is at the core of the ethical life. But that is still a long way off, and the journey from here to there will certainly be an exciting one.
On the issue of what Harry ultimately is, and will become, we should perhaps let his older friend Hagrid have the last word:
“Well yeh might’ve bent a few rules, Harry, bu’ yeh’re all righ’ really, aren’ you?” (GF 391)
THE SIX TESTS OF ETHICAL ACTION
Before we leave our general topic of ethics, and go on to examine more specifically some important questions about truth and lies that are posed throughout the Harry Potter stories, we should take a moment to look at six quick thought experiments that will help all of us, workers or wizards, to make the properly ethical choice in any given situation.
Over the centuries, wise people have come up with some simple and helpful tests that we can use to evaluate the ethical appropriateness of anything we’re considering doing. These little thought experiments can help us gain mental clarity in a difficult situation and get our moral bearings, especially when some measure of financial gain, power, or status is at stake, and we might be tempted to rationalize an action that we really know to be wrong. Oscar Wilde famously admitted, “I can resist everything except temptation.” These tests can help us to resist even that.
Simple thought experiments can help us envision the consequences of our actions.
The Publicity Test: This test consists in asking, “Would I want to see this action that I’m about to take described on the front page of the local paper or in a national magazine?” Or “How would I feel about having done this if everyone were to find out all about it, including the people I love and care about the most?” Harry Potter has an invisibility cloak that allows him to go about and do things without being seen. Most of us, when we contemplate doing something we really know to be wrong, imagine ourselves with the existential equivalent of that invisibility cloak. We think no one will ever know. And we’re very often wrong. By just supposing that people will know, we are brought to confront what we really think about a potential action, as seen by others as well as ourselves.
The Moral Mentor Test: Many ancient philosophers advised us to carry around in our minds the image of a wise and good person we admire, whether a parent or friend, a mentor in our field, or a great moral example from history, like Jesus or Gandhi, and ask: “What would my moral mentor do in this situation?” We can easily imagine Harry, Ron, and Hermione asking, “What would Dumbledore do?” By imaginatively placing an admired mentor in our position and tracing out his or her likeliest responses and initiatives, we can give ourselves the guidance that this person would most probably pass along to us if they stood by our side at the time of moral decision-making.
The Admired Observer Test: A variant on the two tests just given, this one recommends that we ask ourselves, “Would I want my moral mentor to see me doing this?” “Would I be proud of this action in the presence of a person whose life and character I really admire?” Or even: “What would make my moral mentor most proud of me in this situation?” Imagine that some person you respect and admire the most could magically witness your actions and overhear your innermost thoughts. How would that affect what you’re contemplating now? Would you continue in your current train of thought, or would you shake yourself hard and quickly reverse course?
The Transparency Test: This involves asking, “Could I give a clear explanation for the action I’m contemplating, including an honest and transparent account of all my motives that would satisfy a fair and dispassionate moral judge?” Would someone like Headmaster Albus Dumbledore accept your reasoning and your conclusions? Would the stern and strict Professor Minerva McGonagall approve and endorse your action or at least understand how a morally good and well-intentioned person could have chosen it? If not, then perhaps you need to move in another direction.
The Man or Woman in the Mirror Test: Avoiding all irrelevant questions of weight, hair color, the exigencies of a very bad hair day, baldness, bloodshot eyes, bags, double chins, jowls, and wrinkles, this simple thought experiment urges us to ask, “If I do this, will I be able to look at myself in the mirror and respect the person I see there?” A mirror doesn’t have to be magical like the Mirror of Erised, which we’ll discuss later, in order to have an extraordinary impact on our self-awareness and self-image. That one reflection can give us the little taste of objectivity and self-reflective intimacy we sometimes need in order to get real with ourselves and face the facts of our actions.
The Golden Rule Test: “Would I like to be on the receiving end of this action and all its potential consequences?” “Am I treating all the other people involved in the way I’d want to be treated if I were in their place?” This, as we’ve seen, is perhaps the most powerful guide to ethical action on any given occasion for any person who has built a basically good character in the past and has any shred of the sort of empathetic imagination it takes to anticipate the likely and unlikely consequences of an action. We often forget to consider the feelings and legitimate needs of people affected by our decisions and deeds. The Golden Rule has been as important to the wise people of our world as it has been to the wizards of Harry’s world. It is the best rule of thumb for ethical behavior at work and for life generally. We ignore it to our great detriment.
If a mature Harry Potter ran General Electric, I believe that a concern for ethics would be at the core of all his leadership training. He would have seen the power of Dumbledore’s character and the difference it had always made to what that moral master could accomplish. And I think that Harry would not want to settle for anything less—in his own life, as well as in the lives of the people around him.
The ethics of wizards are very much like the ethics of people in our real-life world of work. There is a spectrum of admirable, acceptable, and unconscionable conduct to be seen. The very best wizards, like the most enduringly successful people in our world, follow the high path of ethical conduct, apprenticing themselves to masters who are farther along the road and leading others to join them on their moral journey. The Harry Potter stories can give us some interesting and important insights into how these issues play out in our own lives every day.