Quote from Naaga on May 20, 2023, 12:50 am

Dumbledore is either very saintly or very evil

It may be just about possible to make a canon-compatible reallyeevil!Dumbledore, if you go only by the books and assume that every good thing he says or does is insincere. But you can do that with most characters, and if you accept interview canon and authorial intent - which personally I do so long as it doesn't clash with the books - Rowling does seem to think that Dumbledore is still on average one of the good guys, even though her attitude towards him is equivocal. While we don't necessarily have to agree with her, that does mean that a fully canon-compatible Dumbledore cannot be so unpleasant that Rowling herself could not rationally consider him to be one of the good guys.

Conversely, there's a really creepy cult-like group of Snape fen on the net who believe that Snape was evil but then was redeemed by the love of a perfect, saintly Dumbledore. That doesn't work either, because Rowling has made it perfectly clear that even if Dumbledore is kind-of sort-of maybe one of the good guys, she intends him to be as dodgy as fuck.

One of the first things to remember about Dumbledore is that whether you like him or not, he certainly had a horribly upsetting childhood. His sister was attacked and badly damaged when he was only ten, and then he had to live for months or years with knowing that his father was in a sort of concentration camp, being tormented by Dementors until he went mad and starved to death, and there was nothing he could do to save him or alleviate his suffering in any way. At this time of huge psychological stress young Albus was almost certainly rather emotionally neglected, not in a malign way but because out of the three Dumbledore children he was the one who needed attention least desperately. His combination of intellectual vanity and emotional coldness may well have come about in part because as a child all the attention he could get was a "Well done, dear" whenever he won some new prize at school, so he associates emotional comfort with being seen to be brilliant.

That he was unhappy about ending up as Ariana's carer is understandable, if not very noble. Not only was he being asked, at not-quite-eighteen, to sacrifice all the brilliant future he had thought he had in order to spend his life hiding and protecting his mad sister, but she had just killed their mother during one of her magical seizures, and might at any point randomly kill him too. Then just a few weeks after his eighteenth birthday his sister died, in a way which left him so guilt-stricken that ninety-seven years later his desire to see her again and to apologize to her would cause him to put on a cursed ring which would precipitate his death; his brother became his enemy; and his first and, so far as we know, only love turned out to be a dangerous psychopath, all in a day.

In just a couple of months, then, he lost his entire remaining close family - mother, sister and brother - and both found and lost the love of his life. Aberforth lost his family too, of course, but he at least chose to reject his brother rather than being rejected by him, and he had nothing to feel guilty for - and even so he's not Mr Stability. So in Albus we are looking at somebody who, like Harry, Snape, Remus and Sirius, has a lot of trauma in his background; a badly damaged person whose emotional scars sometimes warp his behaviour.

In addition, I've always supected that Dumbledore is mildly autistic and has difficulty reading social cues, which he compensates for by using low-level Legilimency to monitor the effect his words and actions are having. The main reason is that most of the time he seems quite sensitive to what Harry is feeling, yet he seems unaware that suddenly refusing to speak to Harry or even look at him during fifth year will upset him - suggesting that when he has to avoid touching Harry's mind, he can no longer predict what the boy will feel. This would also explain why he is often spectacularly insensitive towards Snape, the Occlumens, even though there are indications that he is fond of him. Also it tends to run in families, and there is no doubt that both Aberforth and Ariana were a bit strange. Ariana's odd behaviour and extreme reaction to stress could be as much to do with her internal wiring as to trauma, and Aberforth's apparent preference for goats over human company would be fairly typical.

In GoF, Dumbledore says that "My own brother, Aberforth, was prosecuted for practising inappropriate charms on a goat. It was all over the papers, but did Aberforth hide? No, he did not! He held his head high and went about his business as usual!

Of course, I’m not entirely sure he can read, so that may not have been bravery ..." The goat reference is a standard British joke - anybody who is considered to be rural and unsophisticated is likely to be accused of being a "sheep-shagger". Albus is hinting that his brother has sex with goats, whilst at the same time not really suggesting he does, because he knows that everyone who hears him will know that it's a standard joke, and none of them will think he really means it. The reference to Aberforth not being able to read may be significant. It can hardly be literally true, since he attended Hogwarts, but it may mean that he is dyslexic - and dyslexia is one of the "autistic spectrum disorders" which are often associated with some degree of autism.

There are other hints, such as Dumbledore's exceptional intelligence and extreme tallness, the wild eccentricity of dress and manner which indicates that he doesn't give a damn what other people think of him, and the fact that he fails to use any tact or manipulation when dealing with Fudge, even though it would be in his best interests and those of the Order to do so. All of this would be consistent with Asperger's Syndrome.

I have had one person with mild autism say that Dumbledore is too good at deceit to be autistic, and another ditto say that actually they themselves are quite good at deceiving; but in any case being a Legilimens should make it easier for him to be deceitful because he can tell whether or not people are believing what he says, and can learn what works by trial and error instead of having to read social cues. At any rate, it's a possibility, and one which means that his sometimes crashing insensitivity, especially to Harry, to Snape and to Sirius, may not be intentionally cruel.

Accusations have been made that Dumbledore is a narcissist or a psychopath. Although he can be ruthless and emotionally cruel at times, he seems to have loved Grindelwald, to wish that he could protect Harry from the coming war and to be genuinely moved by Snape's devotion to Lily's memory, all of which would be unlikely in a psychopath, as is the fact that he submitted to Harry feeding him the torturous potion in the cave, to serve a cause which could no longer be of any benefit to himself. If he is a psychopath, he's one whose underlying nature is so good that being born without social controls or empathy has not deprived him of the will to sacrifice himself for others.

As for being a narcissist, he boasts openly of his own abilities and doesn't so much blow his own trumpet as an entire brass band, but he doesn't seem to care much, if at all, what other people think of him, whereas narcissists crave fawning admiration. In the scene in GoF where Karkaroff spits on the ground at Dumbledore's feet and Hagrid attacks Karkaroff in retaliation, Dumbledore becomes sharp and angry not with Karkaroff but with Hagrid, which hardly seems the action of a narcissist. Indeed it is McGonagall who acts like a narcissist when she is flattered, not enraged, by the fact that Harry Cruciates Amycus Carrow and throws him through a sheet of glass just for spitting at her. It seems to me far more likely that Dumbledore's open praise of and irritating smugness about his own genuinely high abilities echoes Sherlock Holmes - a fictional character who is most definitely a high-functioning autist - when he said that false modesty was as dishonest as false vanity; especially given that Rowling is an avid fan of early detective fiction and probably knows Sherlock's statement well.

Canon Dumbledore is dishonest, although, like the Trio, it is likely that he is (at least sometimes) dishonest for good reasons. There is no doubt that Rowling means him to be a liar, by omission if not commission. In Beedle she quotes Dumbledore's speech from the first book, where he says that the truth is a beautiful and terrible thing which must be treated with great caution, in the context of an essay supposedly written by Dumbledore in which he presents himself as not being one of the credulous people who believe that the Deathly Hallows are real - written at a time when he had the Elder Wand in his possession, could lay his hands on Death's Cloak at any time, and was hot on the trail of the Resurrection Stone. It's clear Rowling is enjoying rubbing it in that she had signalled right there in the first book that Dumbledore was a bit dodgy, but most people didn't notice.

Rowling's attitude to Dumbledore isn't as warm as it sometimes appears. Among other things she said at interview that she really liked the idea that all the time these two old men, Dumbledore and Riddle, were making their grand plans, the mastery of the Elder Wand was decided by a scuffle between two schoolboys. And we can see absolutely that she means Dumbledore to be fallible, because after all the emphasis on Dumbledore solemnly advising Harry to say the name "Voldemort", and what sage counsel it seemed to be at the time, it turned out to be disastrously bad advice. Rowling is rather fond of setting up scenes where a character expresses views in a solemn, sententious way which makes it seem as if they are The Voice of the Author, and then having them turn out to be flat wrong - I think particularly of the bit where the centaurs advise Hagrid that his attempt to civilise Grawp is doomed to failure.

I'm not sure if the discrepancy over exactly when Dumbledore borrowed James's Cloak is meant to be a sign of his dishonesty, or a sign that the Dumbledore at King's Cross is just a figment of Harry's imagination, or whether it's just a continuity error. Be that as it may, in the King's Cross scene Dumbledore tells Harry that he saw the Cloak for the first time, and borrowed it, in the last week of October 1981, a few days before the Potters died. Yet, Lily wrote a letter to Sirius some time shortly after Harry's first birthday party, in which she refers to the fate of the Mackinnons as if it is recent bad news, and comments that Dumbledore "still" has James's Invisibility Cloak, which he has evidently had for long enough for James to get frustrated at no longer having it. If Dumbledore indeed borrowed the Cloak only a few days before Lily died, she must have written this letter immediately before her death (and James was getting impatient after only a few days without his Cloak).

We know that the Mackinnons were killed two weeks after the Order group photograph was taken, so Lily's letter must have been written three or four weeks after the photo' was taken. Moody lists a very large number of events which happened between the Order photograph and Voldemort's downfall, such that it is not really credible that the photo' could have been taken only three or four weeks before the end of the war. Rather, it looks as though Lily's letter was written just when it sounds as if it was written, in early to mid August soon after Harry's birthday, and the photo' was taken three or for weeks previously. Dumbledore must in fact have borrowed the Cloak no later than late July 1981, and probably some weeks earlier.

Whether this is really due to a continuity error or not, in-universe we have to say that either the Dumbledore Harry sees at King's Cross is just a figment of Harry's imagination; or if he is really Dumbledore, either he is blatantly lying to make himself appear better to Harry even at a time when what he is saying is meant to be full of great emotional truth, or he is fooling himself to make himself appear better to himself, or his memory has genuinely been scrambled by old age. Or - and if this were a real-world psychic experience this would be the most likely, and it may well be what JKR intends - the Dumbledore at King's Cross is really Dumbledore but the process of his manifestation is a joint exercise between himself and Harry, and sometimes Harry's imagination gets in the way and changes how Dumbledore manifests. Either way, it means that if the Dumbledore Harry speaks to in the astral King's Cross is really and purely Dumbledore, then either Dumbledore is prepared to lie by commission as well as by omission, or his memory is very unreliable: at any rate, that anything he says has to be treated with caution.

Nick Moline of the Harry Potter Lexicon team has suggested that perhaps Dumbledore borrowed the Cloak twice, and then conflated the two in memory. For example, he might have borrowed it in July for another Order member to use, given it back in August, then started to wonder about its properties, and borrowed it again in October to examine it more closely.

Terri_testing has suggested that Dumbledore borrowed the Cloak from James with the deliberate intention of depriving him of it in the event that Voldemort should break through the Fidelius and arrive at the house. If, which I don't think we know, Dumbledore was already aware that Voldemort was in possession of the Resurrection Stone, he would clearly not want Voldemort to get hold of the Cloak as well, raising the possibility that if Voldemort were ever to defeat him, Dumbledore, in combat he would become master of the Death Stick as well, complete the Hallow set and become Master of Death.

A number of things which Dumbledore does raise questions about wartime conduct and how far the end justifies the means. Voldemort is undoubtedly a very destructive force, especially when combined with Umbridge, and his victory would result in widespread oppression and many innocent deaths. Combatting him is undoubtedly a Good Thing, but then there are questions about how far that justifies the Order side in carrying out acts which are themselves morally dubious. To a considerable extent this is a matter of personal opinion, but it does make it hard to portray a canon-compatible Dumbledore as either wholly good (because he does a lot of morally dubious things) or wholly bad (because he does most of them in an attempt to save the world from Voldemort).

Another complication is that the plot is written in such a way that even wild schemes by Dumbledore usually turn out all right. One could say that the fact that his schemes usually do (by the grace of the author) turn out OK does not absolve him from having taken stupid risks with other people's lives. On the other hand, we are shown that at least some of the mysterious silver instruments in his office are artificial clairvoyance machines. We do not know how effective or accurate these are, but if they work well then the risks Dumbledore takes are probably much smaller than they seem, because he has a method of choosing schemes which he knows are likely to succeed, however wild they may appear.

Involving pre-pubertal or barely pubertal children in a war is the sort of thing which in the real world lands people in front of a war crimes tribunal. Yet, short of closing the school or moving it to a new location, which the Ministry probably wouldn't have allowed, Dumbledore didn't really have a choice about the students being at least to some extent involved in the war, because Voldemort had decided to make Hogwarts in general and Harry specifically his target. Much depends, then, on whether you think Dumbledore put Harry and/or the other students in more or less danger than they would have been in without his intervention; and if you conclude that he did put Harry in increased danger, was this justified in order to help save the wizarding world from a ruthless dictator, or not?

It is implied in canon, though not absolutely proven, that in order to reinforce Snape's position with the Dark Lord Dumbledore sometimes has him betray Order members, some of whom die as a result. If so, you have to ask whether he is justified in sacrificing as passive pawns people who trusted both him and his judgment, who had indicated a willingness to die in battle by joining the Order but whose consent to becoming murder victims in order to further the cause had probably not been sought in advance.

Dumbledore definitely has a vicious streak. He enjoys baiting the Dursleys with the floating glasses, although they are defenceless against magic. He is absolutely vicious and abusive towards Snape when he comes to defect (and one has to remember, when a character whom Rowling seems to like behaves abusively, that she herself married somebody who turned out to be a wife-beater, so there must be a level on which she finds those traits attractive and the fact that she likes a character doesn't necessarily mean that they're not abusive). He accuses Snape of ridiculous things - of course Snape had only asked Voldemort to spare Lily, there was no possible excuse he could have given him for sparing James and Harry; and it was irrational to suggest that Snape had offered Voldemort James and Harry's lives in exchange for Lily's, since Snape wasn't so far as we know in a position to put Harry and James in any more danger than they were already in. That we know of, once he had inadvertently drawn the Dark Lord's attention to the Potters by relaying the partial prophecy, there were two possibilities confronting Snape: James, Harry and Lily die, or James and Harry die and Lily lives.

It was not in Snape's gift to save James and Harry, other than by defecting to Dumbledore, which he did. Dumbledore then sacrificed any moral high ground by then suggesting that he wouldn't act to save the Potters unless Snape gave him something in exchange. And then he borrowed James's Invisibility Cloak which was meant to hide the wearer from Death, and hung on to it for months when he knew James was in danger.

After Lily's death he tormented Snape when he was in an agony of grief, lacerating him with harsh reminders of Lily when it would have been quite sufficient just to say "There is still something you can do for her: you can protect her son." When Barty Crouch Jnr is unconscious Dumbledore rolls him over by kicking him over with his foot - which isn't as bad as Sirius bashing unconscious Snape's head against the ceiling, but is considerably rougher than Snape's careful conjuring of a stretcher for unconscious Sirius.

He showed a crashing insensitivity not just to Snape but to all the Slytherin students when he took the House Cup away from them in first year, especially as it was done publicly and slowly, keeping them on tenterhooks as they waited for their success and pride to be unfairly taken away from them. He behaved equally insensitively towards Sirius when he excluded him from any decisions to do with his own godson and then set up lessons between Harry and Sirius's rival Snape, in Sirius's own house, without even warning him - and in VWI he had apparently been quite willing to believe that Sirius was a mass-murderer, without a trial.

Aberforth speaks about how ruthlessly Dumbledore uses his agents. Dumbledore says himself (or the him in Harry's head says) that he delayed confronting Grindelwald - leaving him free to go on killing and oppressing for longer than was necessary - out of emotional cowardice; that he did not trust himself with the power he would have had as Minister for Magic; that he was not a suitable person to wield the Elder Wand. He tells Harry that the ability to love is "The only protection that can possibly work against the lure of power like Voldemort's!" - that is, he (or perhaps Rowling herself) cannot conceive of anybody simply not being interested in power.

Yet, there are mitigating circumstances for most of this. The fact that he knows himself to be an untrustworthy person to wield power suggests that he is genuinely trying to be better, and in some ways it's more admirable for an unpleasant person to strive to be good than it is for somebody like Neville for whom goodness comes naturally. If he is an autist then he may not understand how terrified the Dursleys are of magic, or how cruel he is being to Snape, or how miserable and frustrated Sirius is, unless he makes the effort to read them (which in Snape's case may be impossible). And it seems to me that his viciousness to Snape - an Occlumens whose true motives he cannot access - surrounding the endangerment and death of Lily was because he was projecting onto Snape his own guilt about Ariana, and assuming that Snape was as careless and self-centred as he himself had been at that age. And when Snape reminded him that he had said he would keep "her" safe, and had failed, it was probably Aberforth against whom Dumbledore then lashed out - although it was Snape who suffered for it.

Still, it's quite creepy to think that in the very first scene of the very first book, where Dumbledore is brushing off McGonagall's questions about the death of the Potters by concentrating on sucking sweeties in a disingenuously childish way, he had come there fresh from lacerating Snape with his verbal and emotional cruelty while the man was helpless in an agony of grief, to punish him for reminding Dumbledore of his own teenage failure to save his sister. And this was after he, Dumbledore, had knowingly deprived the Potters of the cloak which "hides from Death" at a time when he knew they were in grave danger, either to satisfy his own greed to possess the Deathly Hallows or to reduce the risk of Voldemort getting hold of them. [As it turned out it was unlikely that having the Invisibility Cloak to hand would have made a difference to the Potters' fate - but Dumbledore didn't know that when he deprived them of it.]

I do not hold with those who blame Dumbledore for sending Snape into danger. The war against Voldemort was Snape's fight at least as much as Dumbledore's, and a good commander does not hold particular soldiers back from the battle just because they are friends of his.

Dumbledore could certainly have done more to ensure Harry's well-being at the Dursleys', and indeed to ensure the Dursleys' well-being, after he had embroiled them in a wizard war without asking first: they would probably have resented Harry less had they been given any money to help with his upkeep, and feared him less had they been given any counselling on how to deal with his developing magic. Yet, it's probably understandable if Dumbledore expected the Dursleys to be more warm to Harry and his magic than they were, because the main thing Dumbledore knows about Petunia is that she wanted to go to Hogwarts, and wrote him a nice letter begging to be allowed to forge her own connection with the magical world.

Fanon paints the Dursleys as hideously abusive, and then fanon breeds more fanon with the widespread assumption that Dumbledore showed great callousness in sending Harry back to be tortured by his monstrous relations. But in fact Harry wasn't starved (except for three days in CoS), or beaten, or raped or, so far as we know, made to do excessive chores on a regular basis - that's all 99%-pure fanficcery. It's unlikely that he confides in Mrs Figg, whom he mostly only sees once a year and doesn't like, that the Dursleys verbally hector him, make him sleep in a walk-in cupboard while Dudley has two full-sized rooms or give him a packet of paper hankies for his birthday while they heap Dudley with presents, so at this point all Dumbledore knows for sure against the Dursleys is that they indulge Dudley's desire not to take his cousin along on his birthday outing, or on what are evidently very rare holidays. Mrs Figg may have confided her (not necessarily correct) suspicion that the Dursleys had such a spite against Harry that they wouldn't send him to stay with her if they thought he enjoyed the visit; but she may equally have told Dumbledore that Harry did not enjoy his visits to her, showing that whatever the Dursleys' faults, he found being with them less unpleasant than looking at a lot of photographs of cats.

Dumbledore still sends Harry back after he finds out what the Dursleys are like - but what the Dursleys are like is not physically abusive or even very physically neglectful, except for the three days when they locked Harry in his room in CoS. Dumbledore isn't sending Harry back to be dreadfully ill-treated, but to safeguard his own life for another year by continuing to endure a socially stressful situation for a couple of weeks, before decamping to The Burrow or Grimmauld Place.

Dumbledore is such a tricky character that it's difficult to pin down instances where he does something good for disinterested reasons, rather than to serve the anti-Voldemort cause - although serving the anti-Voldemort cause is in itself a Good Thing. He is respectful to and thoughtful about house-elves and treats them as proper persons, and tried to protect the last British giants. He dislikes the use of Dementors to control prisoners, which is a virtue even if it springs from what happened to his own father, rather than from abstract ethical reasoning. Yet he seems to have done nothing to ease the harsh conditions in which his one-time lover Grindelwald is kept for decades - although it may just be that his influence does not extend that far.

His desire to save Draco from corruption and his offer to hide his family seem sincere and he is still teaching Draco as Draco threatens to kill him, just as Snape still teaches Harry as Harry pursues him across the grounds maybe fifteen minutes later.

Initially, his desire to have it be Snape who kills him, not Draco, is surely mainly because he doesn't know whether the mastery of the Elder Wand will die with him, if he dies willingly, or be passed to his killer, and he wants to make sure that if it's the latter it will go either to Snape or (if it should be the poison which kills him) to Harry. However, by the time we get to the conversation on top of the Tower, Dumbledore already knows that the mastery has been lost to Draco, so that's no longer a factor. We know he knows that the mastery can be passed by disarming, not just by killing, because Beedle quotes an article which Dumbledore wrote about the Hallows, in which he refers to "the way in which it has always passed allegiance between owners – the next master overcoming the first, usually by killing him".

Is his attempt to persuade Draco and his parents to go into hiding disinterested kindliness, or is he hoping to keep Draco away from Voldemort because if Voldemort kills Draco he will get the wand? It's impossible to tell. I don't personally see any reason to think that Dumbledore isn't genuinely concerned for Draco - but his plans are so layered that it's very hard to prove that any of his actions are disinterested. This is another case where Dumbledore is mistaken, incidentally - had the Malfoys accepted his offer and gone into hiding, Narcissa wouldn't have been there at the last to protect Harry, and Harry wouldn't have been able to disarm Draco and so gain the Mastery of the Elder Wand, and so it might just have killed him when Voldemort fired at him, instead of protecting its master by killing the Horcrux inside him.

When Dumbledore begs Snape to kill him, on the tower, the mastery of the wand is already lost. Is his concern for Draco, or to buy himself a clean death, or to save Snape from the consequences of breaking his Vow? If his main concern is to save Snape, is it for Snape's sake, or to preserve his agent? It's impossible to say. This is the big problem with Dumbledore: his schemes are so complex that many of his actions have multiple possible interpretations, all equally canon-compatible unless and until Rowling tells us which is which. All we can say is that canon does not actively support the idea that he never cared about Snape's life except for the use he could make of him, and cannot be used to support that interpretation, but it doesn't strongly support the idea that he did care, either. His comment on Snape's death - "Poor Severus" - is extremely tepid: but then, he is dead himself at this point, so for him dying young probably comes under the same sort of category as losing your job or having to move house. If this is really Dumbledore, and not just a figment of Harry's imagination, then he knows beyond doubt that death is not the end.

His relationship with Snape is peculiar. I don't blame him for worrying about Draco's soul and not Snape's because it's already been firmly established that a split soul can be healed by remorse, and fairly firmly established that it is murder, rather than killing per se, which splits the soul. Either way, he has every reason to think that Snape's soul will suffer no lasting damage - but he could have said that, instead of dismissing Snape's fears. On the other hand, Albus is in probably severe pain and has just learned he only has a year to live, and of course he cares more about protecting a student's soul than a colleague's, and so would Snape if he stopped to think about it. Snape is allowing his abandonment and father issues to get in the way of his job, so Albus can be forgiven for being a bit short here.

On the other hand, his behaviour to Snape when they argue in the Forest really is peculiar, even harsh, calling him out on his promise of obedience in order to make him do something he really doesn't want to do - yet, by doing so he saves Snape's life, since Snape will die if he breaks his Vow to help Draco kill Dumbledore, so here Dumbledore is in some sense acting like Snape himself, or like James for that matter, i.e. protecting Snape from danger of death while still not being particularly kind to him. [And yes, Snape dies in the end anyway, but that was bad luck - he easily could have survived if things had gone even slightly differently.] At times he speaks to Snape as if he was still a schoolboy, or as if he were an interesting psychological specimen; at others he is on the back foot and defensive because Snape seems to be one of the few people willing to shout at Dumbledore and tell him when he's being an idiot.

The fact that his behaviour towards Snape is erratic and that he mishandles him as badly as Snape himself mishandles Neville (and you can kind of see where he gets it from) doesn't necessarily mean that he isn't fond of him. Rowling has suggested at interview that Dumbledore is emotionally damaged by the Grindelwald affair and has been unable to form really close relationships, so he is emotionally incompetent. But he speaks of Snape with more sympathy than he does most people (even if he doesn't show it to his face) and seems genuinely overcome by his life-long devotion to Lily. Here, again, he may be comparing himself with Snape - the fact that he has taken a fatal curse out of his desire to see Ariana one more time and apologise to her, or the fact that his love for Grindelwald turned much more sour even than Snape's love for Lily, so he doesn't even have undying devotion to a memory to keep him warm.

He probably could have done more than he did to reconcile Harry with Snape, but we see in DH that once he realizes that Voldemort can see into Harry's head, he doesn't actually want them to be close because if Harry is fully convinced that Snape is on the Order side, that may put Snape in danger. Hence portrait!Dumbledore warns Snape to make sure Harry doesn't realise whose the doe Patronus is. Snape's survival is one of his primary goals, and while there's no way to tell how much of this is down to genuine care and how much just because Snape is vital to his plans, there's no reason why it can't be both.

I don't see any reason to doubt that Dumbledore is genuinely fond of Snape, of Harry, of Hagrid and Slughorn, within the limits of his own emotional constipation and his tendency to project his own faults onto others and then blame them for them. That he is nevertheless willing to endanger Harry and Snape, and sacrifice them if he has to in order to bring Voldemort down, is not an indication that he does not love them but that, like Captain Carrot in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, he believes that "personal is not the same as important". After what happened with Grindelwald it would be hard for him to believe anything else - otherwise he would, like Bellatrix, have let the world burn to save his deranged lover.

When Dumbledore says to Snape that "we Sort too soon" he appears to be saying that Snape was so brave he should have been in Gryffindor - but perhaps also that he himself should have been a Slytherin. His dominant characteristic is an ambition - his desire to beat Tom - and willingness to do almost anything to further that end. He himself says he allowed Grindelwald to murder unchecked for longer than necessary out of emotional cowardice. There's nothing brave about his willingness to die on the Tower, since he expects to have only a few weeks to live anyway, and by his own account part of his reason for wanting Snape to kill him is to make sure his death will be easy. None of the challenges he faces require much courage on his part, since he so far outclasses the opposition. But he does show great courage when he orders Harry to keep on giving him the poisonous potion in the cave, evidently expecting in advance that it will be so unpleasant that he will plead with Harry to stop.

His belief in "the greater good" is widely mocked, and it's true that it's the sort of idea which can easily be hijacked and misused by somebody like Umbridge. But personal is not the same as important, and any commander has to make difficult and sometimes ruthless decisions to achieve their military goals, even when those goals are clearly virtuous. If you say that the end never justifies the means, you end up with the ridiculous situation of the three Ten Boom sisters in wartime Holland, who bravely hid several refugee Jews from the Nazis, but when a Nazi officer asked one of them directly if they were hiding Jews she said "Yes" and betrayed them all, because she did not feel that the end of saving lives justified the means of telling a lie.

Many people will feel that Dumbledore goes too far the other way, but in the end it's a matter of personal taste just how far you think that the end of saving the world from a murderous dictatorship justifies the means. Barty Crouch Snr thought it justified torture and murder. Snape (if he is telling the truth about his involvement in the capture of Emmeline Vance) evidently thought it justified the sacrifice of fellow Order members. Harry thought it justified lying and cheating and using Imperius. You may think that training an eleven-year-old schoolboy up to be a nearly-kamikaze warrior is a step too far, or you may think that Voldemort would always have tracked Harry down, however far he fled, and that Dumbledore's dodgy schemes represented the best hope for Harry himself, as well as for the world (or at least that Dumbledore genuinely believed that they did). It's a grey area.

Then one can ask why it fell to Dumbledore to make those decisions. People who set up freelance vigilante groups are usually pretty cracked, and we can see that as a teenager he had toyed with the idea of becoming a dictator himself, although his attitude to Muggles was patronising rather than murderous. Yet, the corruption and incompetance of the Ministry is such that there was a clear need for an independent group, and given Dumbledore's power and his personal knowledge of Riddle, it would have been a dereliction of duty if he had not acted. And his motivation seems to be disinterested and impersonal - he fights Voldemort because he thinks it's a thing which needs to be done, which he himself may be able to do and which it is therefore his duty to attempt - and that disinterested choice is arguably more ethical and admirable than when Severus and Regulus chose to fight Voldemort because he had threatened someone they loved, having been willing to support him up to that point.

Dumbledore would perhaps have done better to learn to control his own lust for power and to have accepted the post of Minister, so he could guard the wizarding world in an official capacity. But we don't know enough about how the Ministry is organised to be able to say for certain that that would have worked better than, or as well as, setting up the Order as an independent group.