Short and sweet, folks... amidst the wonderfully poignant, mostly silent elegy for the recently departed (I won't spoil things if it you didn't read #654), Dan Slott and Marcos Martin's Amazing Spider-Man #655 portrays Peter in his dreamworld confronting those lost in his battle against evil, and being taunted by the evildors themselves for not "doing what has to be done" to save the innocent: namely, kill.
As you may know (especially if you've read Chapter 1 in Batman and Philosophy
), this is a classic trolley problem situation. The story goes like this: a runaway trolley carrying five passengers is about to crash, and the only way to prevent these deaths is to divert the trolley to another track. You have the power to do this, but there is one innocent person on the other track who will be killed if the trolley is diverted. The dilemma is: do you act to save the five and kill the one, or do you not act, letting the five die while not killing the one. Someone (at least one) is going to die, and you can minimize the death, but only by acting to kill the one rather than doing nothing and letting the five die. Since most superheroes refuse to kill even their most heinous foes, they allow many innocent people to die, which is a perpetual topic of discussion among comics fans, and a person's answer is a sort of Rorschach test for his or her moral values and positions.
At the end of the issue, Spidey promises that the deaths will end. In the classic trolley problem story, that's not an option. And as much as we'd like to believe it's different in the Marvel Universe, we all know it's not.
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