Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

"Excuse me," said the boy in a tiny voice, "I'm Neville Longbottom. I'm looking for my pet toad, I, I can't seem to find it anywhere on this carriage... have you seen my toad?"

"No," Hermione said, and then her helpfulness kicked in full throttle. "Have you checked all the other compartments?"

"Yes," whispered the boy.

"Then we'll just have to check all the other carriages," Hermione said briskly. "I'll help you. My name is Hermione Granger, by the way."

The boy looked like he might faint with gratitude.

"Hold on," came the voice of the other boy - Harry Potter. "I'm not sure that's the best way to do it."

At this Neville looked like he might cry, and Hermione swung around, angered. If Harry Potter was the sort of person who'd abandon a little boy just because he didn't want to be interrupted... "What? Why not? "

"Well," said Harry Potter, "It's going to take a while to check the whole train by hand, and we might miss the toad anyway, and if we didn't find it by the time we're at Hogwarts, he'd be in trouble. So what would make a lot more sense is if he went directly to the front carriage, where the prefects are, and asked a prefect for help. That was the first thing I did when I was looking for you, Hermione, although they didn't actually know. But they might have spells or magic items that would make it a lot easier to find a toad. We're only first-years."

That... did make a lot of sense.

"Do you think you can make it to the prefects' carriage on your own?" asked Harry Potter. "I've sort of got reasons for not wanting to show my face too much."

Suddenly Neville gasped and took a step back. "I remember that voice! You're one of the Lords of Chaos! You're the one who gave me chocolate!"

What? What what what?

Harry Potter turned his head from the window and rose dramatically. "I never!" he said, voice full of indignation. "Do I look like the sort of villain who would give sweets to a child?"

Neville's eyes widened. "You're Harry Potter? The Harry Potter? You?"

"No, just a Harry Potter, there are three of me on this train -"

Neville gave a small shriek and ran away. There was a brief pattering of frantic footsteps and then the sound of a carriage door opening and closing.

Hermione sat down hard on her bench. Harry Potter closed the door and then sat down next to her.

"Can you please explain to me what's going on?" Hermione said in a weak voice. She wondered if hanging around Harry Potter meant always being this confused.

"Oh, well, what happened was that Fred and George and I saw this poor small boy at the train station - the woman next to him had gone away for a bit, and he was looking really frightened, like he was sure he was about to be attacked by Death Eaters or something. Now, there's a saying that the fear is often worse than the thing itself, so it occurred to me that this was a lad who could actually benefit from seeing his worst nightmare come true and that it wasn't so bad as he feared -"

Hermione sat there with her mouth wide open.

"- and Fred and George came up with this spell to make the scarves over our faces darken and blur, like we were undead kings and those were our grave shrouds -"

She didn't like at all where this was going.

"- and after we were done giving him all the sweets I'd bought, we were like, 'Let's give him some money! Ha ha ha! Have some Knuts, boy! Have a silver Sickle!' and dancing around him and laughing evilly and so on. I think there were some people in the crowd who wanted to interfere at first, but bystander apathy held them off at least until they saw what we were doing, and then I think they were all too confused to do anything. Finally he said in this tiny little whisper 'go away' so the three of us all screamed and ran off, shrieking something about the light burning us. Hopefully he won't be as scared of being bullied in the future. That's called desensitisation therapy, by the way."

Okay, she hadn't guessed right about where this was going.

The burning fire of indignation that was one of Hermione's primary engines sputtered into life, even though part of her did sort of see what they'd been trying to do. "That's awful! You're awful! That poor boy! What you did was mean!"

"I think the word you're looking for is enjoyable, and in any case you're asking the wrong question. The question is, did it do more good than harm, or more harm than good? If you have any arguments to contribute to that question I'm glad to hear them, but I won't entertain any other criticisms until that one is settled. I certainly agree that what I did looks all terrible and bullying and mean, since it involves a scared little boy and so on, but that's hardly the key issue now is it? That's called consequentialism, by the way, it means that whether an act is right or wrong isn't determined by whether it looks bad, or mean, or anything like that, the only question is how it will turn out in the end - what are the consequences."

Hermione opened her mouth to say something utterly searing but unfortunately she seemed to have neglected the part where she thought of something to say before opening her mouth. All she could come up with was, "What if he has nightmares?"

"Honestly, I don't think he needed our help to have nightmares, and if he has nightmares about this instead, then it'll be nightmares involving horrible monsters who give you chocolate and that was sort of the whole point."

Hermione's brain kept hiccoughing in confusion every time she tried to get properly angry. "Is your life always this peculiar?" she said at last.