SPOILERS FOR THE CURRENT RUN OF DAREDEVIL BELOW!
For the last year, Daredevil has been in prison, where he was sentenced in Daredevil #24 for second-degree manslaughter, resulting from the eventual death of a burglar he beat up in the first issue of the current run. Since he's been incarcerated—as Daredevil, mind you, avec mask but sans costume—Elektra has been protecting Hell's Kitchen as the new Daredevil (as seen on the cover to the right), and his twin brother Mike has been posing as Matt Murdock to preserve his secret identity. (If you think Mike Murdock was simply a farcical disguise Matt used in the past to do this, you obviously haven't read 2020's Daredevil Annual #1.)
In Daredevil #36 (released December 1, 2021), by writer Chip Zdarsky, penciller Manuel Garcia, inkers Cam Smith, Scott Hanna, and Victor Nava, and colorists Marcio Menyz and Bryan Valenza, the Man without Fear is once again a free man, although he was preoccupied the last few weeks of his sentence with battling against both corruption inside the prison and clones of Bullseye outside of it. After wrapping up both matters in the previous issue, the authorities tried to arrest Daredevil for being a fugitive from justice; several of his fellow superheroes argued the necessity of his breakout and the good he did, and a video recording of their argument with the police soon went viral. In the end, Matt turned himself in, presumably to show, as he did when he submitted to his initial trial and accepted the prosecution's plea offer, that superheroes must be accountable to the same laws they help enforce—although, over Zdarsky's run of the book, he has become more and more skeptical of the criminal justice system that ultimately carries that responsibility.
After reconnecting with both his brother and Elektra, Matt—now very furry of face, which I hope is not a permanent state of affairs—returns to patrolling Hell's Kitchen, and comes across two young men who had just knocked over a bodega. More concerned with helping them turn their lives around then sending them to prison, especially given his recent experiences, Matt lets them go and gives the bag of stolen loot back to the store owner... which comes as a surprise to Reed Richards, who by then had also arrived on the scene.
Reed shares Matt's concerns about reassuring a worried public that they can trust superheroes, but they differ on how much deference they should show "the system" in order to do this. As he did during the fight over superhuman registration that he references—and despite the fact that his support of registration almost ended his marriage—Reed stands by the legal system, despite its flaws, and wants to devise an optimal strategy in accordance with it, as well as optics of the current situation.
In contrast, Matt asks a simple question—"What's right?"—and then draws out the difference between what philosopher W.D. Ross characterized as "the right and the good" (in his book of the same title). Effectively, Matt is contrasting Reed's utilitarianism, in which he calculates the myriad contributing factors to an issue to arrive at a conclusion regarding the best course of action to take, with Matt's own deontological approach, which dismisses empirical contingencies in favor of using principle to determine the right thing to do.
Matt drives the point home when he acknowledges Reed's brilliance, but suggests that it's distracting him from the simple moral truth.
To be fair, determining what's right is not necessarily simpler than determining what's good or best; both require the use of judgment to weigh the various moral factors that are relevant to a problematic situation. (I discuss this reference to Captain America and Iron Man's conflicting moral perspectives, very similar to Matt's and Reed's, and the different use of judgment they each require, in my book A Philosopher Reads Marvel Comics' Civil War.) But Matt obviously feels, at least in this case, that he has identified the right thing to do—showing mercy to the two young men and sparing them the "justice" of the system that Matt feels is broken—and he has decided that no other factors, including the effect of his actions on public opinion, are relevant to that decision, amounting to mere "noise" that's "drowning out what's right."
This is not to say Reed doesn't have a point as well. As we saw above, Reed recognizes the flaws in the system, which we can safely assume he has included in his determination of what is the best thing to do overall; it simply wasn't the conclusive factor in the end. For his part, Matt also showed he realizes the importance of optics when he turned himself in again after putting down the prison riot and helping to defeat the Bullseyes; nonetheless, he didn't find it relevant to his conclusion (which is a different moral logic than Reed's considering the flaws of the system but finding other factors more significant). Both heroes weighed the same options, but in different ways and with different conclusions, which shows how equally moral persons can nonetheless disagree, in good faith, on ethical problems based on their unique ethical perspectives.
Don't believe for a minute that this issue is settled, especially for Matt Murdock. After all, he has seen the criminal justice system from many sides—defense attorney, prosecutor, defendant, and incarcerated felon—and he has long had to deal with the conflict between the law he is dedicated to upholding and the ideal of justice to which the law is only an approximation, as well the conflict between the law, ideally based on justice, and the imperfections of the criminal justice system, designed and implemented by human beings to enforce that law in the real world. (And we didn't even mention the conflict presented by the dual roles he has chosen to play in this drama!)
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