The Wisdom of Harry Potter: What Our Favorite Hero Teaches Us about Moral Choices (review)

Even as the fifth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, sold on its June 2003 publication day at the rate of 23 copies per second in Great Britain alone, controversy has continued to rage over the underlying ethical values expressed in Rowling's phenomenally popular series. From the religious right, critics charge that the books encourage Satanic witchcraft and dark magic; from the political left, that the books replicate a sexist, classist, hierarchical status quo. Kern's exploration of the ethical issues in the Harry Potter books enters the debate in defense of the deeply moral character of Rowling's creation. Kern argues that Harry Potter embodies a neo-Stoical moral ethic that focuses on free choice within the constraints of fatalism: "Rowlings develops an essentially Stoic moral philosophy through the ethical dilemmas in which she places Harry and his friends, dilemmas requiring them to think in complex ways about right and wrong . . . elaborating, along the way, upon several key Stoic themes as fatalism, endurance, perseverance, self-discipline, reason, solidarity, empathy, and sacrifice" (19).

Kern provides a detailed examination of each of the first four Harry Potter books; the fifth he assesses in an appendix written after the body of his text, immediately following release of the most recent title. Kern reads Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as developing the theme of Harry's ability to make choices in the face of fate, in particular the universal fate of death itself, which the sorcerer's stone is crafted (unwisely) to cheat. The culminating moral moment in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets is Dumbledore's profound pronouncement to Harry: "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities" (62). The Prisoner of Azkaban is "a single, extended commentary upon the tensions between rules and the moral principles they are intended to sustain . . . The book's entire plot suggests that truth-telling, submission to authority, and following the rules are not always the moral things to do, particularly when the stakes are high" (72). The Goblet of Fire returns to a variation on the theme of Chamber of Secrets: "special abilities are far less important than the desire to do the right thing" (87).

While Kern makes, in my view, a completely convincing case that the Harry Potter books present Harry as an appealing hero struggling with real and significant moral choices, he is less successful in representing the moral framework of the series as distinctively Stoic. Many other schools of moral philosophy stress the importance of making moral choices: Aristotelianism, Kantianism, existentialism. Whenever Rowling's implicit moral philosophy diverges from standard Stoicism—most notably, from the famous Stoic distrust of emotion—Kern simply says that Harry Potter embodies an "admittedly updated" neo-Stoic theory (19). But there seems no compelling need to strain to identify Harry's moral theory with that of any one historical school, and especially not to go as far as Kern, who sees neo-Stoicism as also "on display in the works of Tolkien, Lewis, or Pullman" (39), as well as in the national reaction to the events of September 11, 2001. Not all appeals to "denial of the self" in order to act "on behalf of an apparent greater good" (39) are distinctively Stoic in any way—rather than Judeo-Christian, Aristotelian, Kantian, or utilitarian.

After laying out his lengthy analysis of each book's embodiment of Stoic philosophy, Kern engages the current controversies over the moral value of the books, providing a helpful, thorough review of the ethical criticism of the book to date, including both the more extreme and more moderate books penned by the religious right, and a number of scholarly articles attacking the book from the left. Kern is especially well positioned to engage with the witchcraft accusations of the religious right, as a historian (professor of history at Lawrence University in...