Cursing is a touchy subject in magic-using traditions. Most people you’ll hear talking about it say that they believe people simply shouldn’t use harmful magic at all, just to be safe. After all, according to the Threefold Law, if you only do good things then only good things will happen to you, right?

Wrong.

Life isn’t a battlefield, but every now and then you are going to have to defend yourself. Intentionally or otherwise, human beings exchange energy with one another constantly, and that energy isn’t always of a positive nature. Maybe someone cut you off in traffic and you flipped them a particularly hostile magical gesture – negative energy. Maybe your boss caught you in between projects and assumed you were goofing off so he made the growley face – negative energy. The longer an angry person stews on something negative, the more negative energy gets directed at the object of their anger. This is especially true with magicians.

So, just from a self-defense standpoint, you’re going to have to deal with combat magic at one point or another. This either manifests as beefing up one’s own personal fortitude to resist harm, or as a counterattack against the attacker. Often both.

And make no mistake, “reflecting negative energy back on a person” is just as much an attack as if you’d originated the energy yourself.

Without getting to much into the “What A Man’s Gotta Do” mentality, the human animal is a violent, aggressive species and periodically you not only have to defend yourself, but attack a threat pre-emptively. We fight. It’s one of the top three things human beings DO. Maybe it’s not always physical violence, but passive-aggressive social harassment is just as much an attack as a punch in the face, often even more painful especially for young people.

So with the human species being naturally violent and combative, it only makes sense for our magic-using traditions to make allowances for that. Most traditions have some form of Defense Against the Dark Arts, usually including some form of counterattack. There’s no moral reason to not make use of this, and no such thing as the Threefold Law has ever manifested in my experience.

The closest thing I’ve ever seen to a Threefold Law is more of a ripple effect – we deal with the perfectly mundane consequences of our actions, rather than having them flung back at us by some invisible being recording our actions in some cosmic ledger and dishing out rewards and punishments.

“Therefore strike hard and low, and to Hell with them, Master!”