A reader writes:
I wonder if you really meant this:
If there were witches, in the standard sense of people who could use black magic to harm the rest of us, then of course we ought to hunt them.
The reason I ask is that you’re suggesting hunting witches because they could harm us, not because they are or are planning to. This doesn’t seem to me to be a defensible position. Replace black magic with guns and I think you’ll see my point.
As I understand it, the conventional understanding of witches was that they got their powers through an alliance with satanic forces, and that they acquired those powers partly to use them against innocent people (or else why did they need the powers?). Punishing them is thus no different from punishing someone who got some very nasty weapons by dealing with the Mafia, or someone who has — but has not yet used, and as to whom there is no firm evidence that he is about to use — a radiological bomb that he got from a terrorist organization with which we are at war.
What to do about magicians, who have powers that they acquired without the help of demons, and who can use those powers for good as well as for ill, is a tough call. Likewise with people who have superpowers that they’ve always had, and that they can’t shed.
Imagine we discovered that there were telepaths living among us, people who could undetectably read our minds, in a way that we couldn’t block. Or imagine that there were people who could undetectably control into our minds, in a way that we couldn’t block. Would we be justified in locking them up, or even killing them? A hard question that I don’t think we can answer firmly using our current morality, which evolved based on certain assumptions about the physical world, and which might have to change if those assumptions proved false. Fortunately, we live (or appear to live!) in a world where we don’t have to make such tough decisions.
In any case, though, witches — as conventionally seen by those who went on witch hunts — are an easier case: They not only have dangerous tools, but they acquired them by conspiring with the Dark Side, and this acquisition shows evidence of malign intentions on their part, as well as a concrete act of dealing in dangerous munitions with the enemy. I have little trouble with punishing them for that.
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