Severus Snape: Hero or Villain?

@thenerve But that opens the discussion for things like, “if a man who molested his daughter for years goes on to rescue people from a burning house, then is he a villain or a hero.”  The answer is always, “It depends on those involved,” and it is most certainly not a “fact.”  Labels like hero, beautiful, slutty, those are all matters of opinion.

@oniongirl – The labels might be. The facts are not. And using the molester argument is engaging in logical fallacy, as that situation is most certainly not at all the same as Snape’s.

@thenerve, it’s not a logical fallacy.  It’s a parallel that invokes outrage because we think of innocent children being victimized.

We know that they were killing Muggles who had no means of defending themselves.  Is that any less despicable than a crime against a child?

It’s a logical parallel.  We don’t know what Snape did as a Death Eater, but we can certainly assume that he was just as much a part of the torture and murder of the innocent as any other Death Eater.

my point is that it doesn’t have to be an either/or question.  Snape was a complicated man who sold his soul and spent the series trying to earn it back.

@oniongirl – It *is* a logical fallacy because the parallel does not have a premise whose elements are equivalent to the original argument. The reasons for a child molester to be what he is are completely different for those Snape had to become what he became. The former does it for selfish reasons, while the latter for selfless ones. If you want a sound argument free of fallacy, you need to have comparable premises.

@thenerve, First, I want to be sure that we are having the same argument.  You said, and I paraphrase, that Snape became what he became for selfless reasons.  If I am understanding you, you are under the impression that Snape became a Death Eater to infiltrate on Dumbledore’s behalf.

This is not true.  Snape was the one who delivered the incomplete prophecy to Voldemort.  He was associating with wannabe Death Eaters when he was a student at Hogwarts.  It is reasonable to assume that in the time before Lily was killed, Snape was performing all of the atrocities that other Death Eaters were performing.

Assuming that I am mistaken about your understanding of Snape’s timeline, I disagree with your assessment that my comparison is a fallacy, because I happen to find torture and murder of human beings to be as disturbing as molestation.  And, like Snape’s motivation for becoming a Death Eater, molesters often become so because they too were abused.

So that we can move past this, however, let’s use Nazis.  Nazis were just obeying orders when they, raped, tortured, and murdered men, women, and children whom they deemed inferior.  Can we call anyone who committed such atrocities a hero just because after Hitler killed the woman he loved, he decided to help in taking him down?

@oniongirl – You’re still not using comparable circumstances, as joined in because they believed in their cause.  I understand Snape’s timeline perfectly, but as I see that you’ve made up your mind about what you choose to see/believe, there is no point in continuing an exchange. I wish you well.

@thenerve back at ya.

@justamillennial exactly

@e3 😪