Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

'And is it true?' Harry said. There was a buzzing sensation filling him, his body growing more distant. 'What Draco said, that Narcissa Malfoy never got her hands dirty, that she was only Lucius's wife? She was an enabler, I get that, but I can't back that deserving being burned alive.'

'Nothing less would have convinced them that I was done with hesitation.' The old wizard's voice brooked no question and no refusal. 'Always I was too reluctant to do as I must, always it was others who paid the cost of my mercy. So Alastor told me from the beginning, but I did not listen to him. You, I expect, shall prove better at such decisions than I.'

'I'm surprised,' Harry said, amazed that his voice was almost steady. 'I would have expected the Death Eaters to go after another Light family and start a cycle of escalating retaliation, if you didn't get them all with your first strike.'

'If my opponent had been Lucius, perhaps.' Dumbledore's eyes were like stones. 'I am told that Voldemort laughed at the news, and proclaimed to his Death Eaters that I had finally grown, and was at last a worthy opponent. Perhaps he was right. After the day I condemned my brother to his death, I began to weigh those who followed me, balancing them one against another, asking who I would risk, and who I would sacrifice, to what end. It was strange how many fewer pieces I lost, once I knew what they were worth.'

Harry's jaw seemed locked, like it took a massive effort to make his lips move. 'But then it's not like Lucius was deliberately taking Hermione for ransom,' Harry's voice said thinly. 'From Lucius's perspective, someone else broke the truce first. So with that in mind, how many Galleons was Hermione worth, exactly? Leaving aside the Danegeld thing, if it was just some ordinary threat to her life, how much should I have paid to save her? Ten thousand Galleons? Five thousand?'

The old wizard did not answer.

'It's a funny thing,' Harry said, his voice wavering like something seen through water. 'Do you know, the day I went in front of the Dementor, what my worst memory was? It was my parents dying. I heard their voices and everything.'

The old wizard's eyes widened behind the half-moon glasses.

'And here's the thing,' Harry said, 'here's the thing I've been thinking about over and over. The Dark Lord gave Lily Potter the chance to walk away. He said that she could flee. He told her that dying in front of the crib wouldn't save her baby. 'Step aside, foolish woman, if you have any sense in you at all -'' An awful chill came over Harry as he spoke those words from his own lips, but he shook it off and continued. 'And afterward I kept thinking, I couldn't seem to stop myself from thinking, wasn't the Dark Lord right? If only Mother had stepped away. She tried to curse the Dark Lord but it was suicide, she had to have known that it was suicide. Her choice wasn't between her life and mine, her choice was for herself to live or for both of us to die! If she'd only done the logical thing and walked away, I mean, I love Mum too, but Lily Potter would be alive right now and she would be my mother!' Tears were blurring Harry's eyes. 'Only now I understand, I know what Mother must have felt. She couldn't step aside from the crib. She couldn't! Love doesn't walk away!'

It was like the old wizard had been struck, struck by a chisel that shattered him straight down the middle.

'What have I said?' the old wizard whispered. 'What have I said to you?'

'I don't know!' shouted Harry. 'I wasn't listening either!'

'I - I'm sorry, Harry - I -' The old wizard pressed his hands to his face, and Harry saw that Albus Dumbledore was weeping. 'I should not have said, such things to you - I should not, have resented, your innocence -'

Harry stared at the wizard for another second, and then Harry turned and marched out of the black room, down the stairs, through the office -

'I really don't know why you're still on his shoulder,' Harry said to Fawkes.

- out the oaken door and into the endlessly turning spiral.

Harry had arrived in the Transfiguration classroom before anyone else, before even Professor McGonagall. There was Charms class earlier, for his year, but that he hadn't even bothered trying to attend. Whether Professor McGonagall would make today's class he didn't know. There was something ominous about all the empty desks beside him, the absence at the board. As if he stood alone in Hogwarts, with all his friends departed.

According to the class schedule, today's lesson was on sustained Transfigurations, all the rules of which Harry had learned by heart back when he was Transfiguring a huge rock into the small diamond that shone on his pinky finger. It would be a theoretical subject, rather than practical, for the rest of the class; which was a pity, because he could have used a dose of Transfiguration's trance.

Harry noted distantly that his hand was trembling, to the point where he had trouble undoing the pouch's drawstring as he drew forth the Transfiguration textbook.

You were monstrously unfair to Dumbledore, said the voice Harry had been calling Slytherin, only now it also seemed to be the Voice of Economic Sensibility and maybe also Conscience.

Harry's eyes dropped down to his textbook, but the section was so familiar it might as well have been a blank parchment.

Dumbledore fought a war against a Dark Lord who deliberately set out to break him in the cruelest possible way. He had to choose between losing his war and his brother. Albus Dumbledore knows, he learned in the worst possible way, that there are limits to the value of one life; and it almost broke his sanity to admit it. But you, Harry Potter - you already knew better.

'Shut up,' the boy whispered to the empty Transfiguration classroom, though there was nobody there to hear it.

You'd already read about Philip Tetlock's experiments on people asked to trade off a sacred value against a secular one, like a hospital administrator who has to choose between spending a million dollars on a liver to save a five-year-old, and spending the million dollars to buy other hospital equipment or pay physician salaries. And the subjects in the experiment became indignant and wanted to punish the hospital administrator for even thinking about the choice. Do you remember reading about that, Harry Potter? Do you remember thinking how very stupid that was, since if hospital equipment and doctor salaries didn't also save lives, there would be no point in having hospitals or doctors? Should the hospital administrator have paid a billion pounds for that liver, even if it meant the hospital going bankrupt the next day?

'Shut up!' the boy whispered.