The Comics Professor

Why We Relate to Batman

Batman is celebrating his 80^th anniversary this year, and while he has served admirably as the protector of Gotham City, there is one mystery that the world’s greatest detective has never been able to solve: his own moral inconsistency. Many focus on his all-too-human motivation and lack of superpowers to explain why he’s more relatable than other superheroes, but most of us also share his struggle to reconcile the various elements of his moral code, which serves to make him a different sort of role model from most of his costumed colleagues as well.

Let’s start with Batman’s mission, the guiding principle of his life, sworn over his parents’ graves after their untimely deaths at the hands of a mugger: to save the lives of the people of Gotham, chiefly by fighting the scourge of crime. This is broadly consequentialist in its ethics, striving to do as much good as he can, both as the costumed crimefighter Batman and as wealthy philanthropist Bruce Wayne. At the same time, he breaks many common-sense moral rules in the process—he practices violence, often to the point of inflicting torture, and generally ignores the law when it is inconvenient—all of which would fly in the face of deontological ethics, which focuses on the right and wrong of actions rather than their consequences.

None of these actions, however, is the cause of his moral distress or inconsistency, because Batman justifies them all by how they help him further his mission. To him, the end does justify the means in such cases, which may be disagreeable to some (especially deontologists), but it is not morally inconsistent within Batman’s consequentialist mindset. If he believes that beating a reluctant informant senseless will help him save an innocent life, then he will do it (and he does it a lot).

For Batman, this reasoning justifies a lot of behavior that many others feel is wrong, but even the Caped Crusader draws the line at one wrongful act: killing. Countless times in the comics, Batman has refused to kill even his most homicidal foes, including the Joker, and even risks his own life to save theirs (yes, including the Joker). In other words, Batman will do almost anything to further his mission to save the lives of the citizens of Gotham, but to paraphrase the philosopher Meat Loaf, he won’t do that—he will not take a life, even to save many others.

This is the central moral conflict in Batman’s life: He refuses to perform the one wrongful act that would most significantly advance his mission and further his idea of the good. Here, his deontological convictions about means—perhaps his only one—run into his underlying consequentialist ends.

What accounts for his refusal to kill? Most of Batman’s explanations in the comics focus on the effects that killing would have on his moral character. For example, he worries that crossing that particular line will make him like the people he fights (as if their shared predilection for violence and lawbreaking weren’t enough). This concern is a key feature of virtue ethics, yet another school of moral philosophy, but Batman’s skewed version of it reflects an obsession with maintaining a virtuous self-image at the expense of the mission he has adopted as his version of the good life, and in the end, it furthers neither.

We could debate whether or not Batman should kill the Joker and his other murderous enemies until Bat-cow comes home. (Yes, there is a Bat-cow.) Certainly, comics fans have been doing this since before the first poisoned fish with a Joker grin popped up in Gotham Harbor. More important, however, Batman has long been debating this as well, both to himself and with his friends and fellow heroes, making much the same arguments I outlined above. He is keenly aware of this essential moral conflict, which is much harder to dismiss than using violence or breaking the law to further his mission. In this case, Batman has to explain what makes his concern with his virtue more important than his mission, or what makes the life he would take more important than the lives his foes would take.

Batman’s ongoing struggles with moral inconsistency provide us with a point of reference to consider our own. Most of us have a concept of the good we want to further, whether it’s saving lives as first responders, curing disease as medical researchers, or pursuing justice as policymakers or activists. At the same time, we all have moral lines we refuse to cross, such as those at the borders of lying, cheating, or stealing, and we also have ideas of who we want to be as people that includes but also supersedes all of these considerations.

All of this moral “material” is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile and make consistent, especially when we have to marshal it in the face of hard choices. As many philosophers acknowledge, a faculty of judgment is necessary to combine, prioritize, and balance all of these moral criteria to make an actual decision. Philosophy professors teach the basic elements of ethics to our students, but as Immanuel Kant wrote in the Critique of Pure Reason, “judgment is a peculiar talent which can be practiced only, and cannot be taught.” Judgment is developed through experience over time (and many mistakes), and it is also be learned through example—and not necessarily by those who exercise it well. It is more important to see the process of judgment than its results, and fiction can be just as valuable to this end as the stories of real people, if the characters portrayed in it are sufficient complex.

Batman is indeed complex. Over his eighty years, he has developed into a fascinating character with a multifaceted ethics, and because of this he can not only entertain us but also inspire us. His struggle to reconcile his conflicted moral code, likely as impossible a task as eradicating crime in Gotham City, is yet one more reason he is considered so relatable to millions of fans around the world. His moral and psychological extremes may not qualify him as a role model similar to Superman or Wonder Woman, but his awareness of his own conflicts, especially regarding trying to be moral in several different ways at the same time, is certainly worthy of admiration and emulation. Among superheroes, no one lives a more thoroughly examined life than Batman.

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See here for more on my book Batman and Ethics, which you can buy at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or IndieBound.

Another perspective on why Batman doesn't kill--and the problems with it

This week's Batman and Robin #8 (written by Peter Tomasi and illustrated by Patrick Gleason and Mick Gray) was a welcome denouement to the Morgan Ducard/Nobody storyline that culminated at the end of #7 when, as Bruce explains to Alfred, "Nobody's dead. Damian killed him." (Imagine parsing that statement if you hadn't been keeping up with the storyline!) As Bruce and Damian recover from their injuries (gee, good thing Bruce hasn't gotten thrashed lately in any other title), father and son talk about what happened. Bruce shares his oral diary, revealing his own desire to kill Ducard, to show Damian that the urge is natural but that he must never give into it.

Bruce argues that he adheres to a principle of not killing that doesn't "allow for exceptions." This sounds very much like a Kantian perfect duty, which is fantastic--to a degree. In an ideal world, it is easy to say "I will not kill" or "I will not lie," regardless of the circumstances, and it is an admirable person that tries his or her best to stick to them. But such a person must also recognize that there can be circumstances that will force him or her to question whether these duties or principles are truly absolute.

Take Kant's infamous "murderer at the door" example: Your good friend shows up at your door one day, frantically trying to escape someone who's trying to kill him. You agree to hide your friend, and minutes later the would-be murderer shows up, asking if your friend is about. What do you do: lie to the murderer to save your friend, or tell the truth and help the murderer?

Kant said you must not lie. According to  him, you have one concern and one concern alone: following your strict duty not to lie. If you tell the truth (or simply say nothing, which will save the same effect), your hands will be clean. If you do right, you're not responsible for anything that happens as a consequence, whereas if you were to lie, and the murderer went on to kill someone else (in mistake, perhaps), you would be responsible for that.

But Kant was wrong, and he was wrong by his own standards. The murderer-at-the-door example appeared in the Berlin Press as a retort to Benjamin Constant, a French statesman, but in his more considered work, he wrote that no one can apply simple rules, including the duties one derives from the categorical imperative, to real-life situations without using judgment. For instance, even if you decided not to lie to the murderer at the door, you would need to use judgment to decide what to do instead: tell the truth, stay silent, or say "look--a squirrel!"

More relevant is the need for judgment to settle conflicts between obligations, and this provides a more reasonable answer to the murderer-at-the-door example (and much-needed perspective on Bruce and Damian's discussion). Clearly there is more than one principle, duty, or obligation at play when the murderer comes to your door--specifically, you should also help save your friend's life, based on a moral principle to prevent wrongful harm to others. I think most morally reflective people would consider that to be a more important principle in this case than the principle that you shouldn't lie. Of course, this judgment is contingent on the context of the situation: the harm threatened is severe and the lie would be to a person intent on doing wrong. In a different situation, the judgment may be different, though the two principles are the same, because the context gives the principles different relative weight.

In the second panel above, Damian essentially states the opposing principle to his father's: "But if killing them is the only way to stop them..." Bruce knows this principle well: while he says in this issue that he made a promise to himself ("and on the souls of my parents") not to kill criminals, he also made a promise that night (as seen in countless retellings of his origin) to make sure what happened to him doesn't happen to anyone else. Bruce and Damian recognize both a principle of preventing wrongful harm and a principle of not killing--but for Bruce, the latter principle always takes precedence, where I think Damian is more open to weighing the principles against each other in any given situation. (I realize this may be due to his early training by the League of Assassins, which leads him to minimize the importance of the no-killing principle. If nothing else, Bruce is helping him see the importance of this principle by adhering to it with no exceptions--the opposite extreme to Damian's dear mother and grandfather.)

Bruce does give other rationales, familiar from previous Batman stories in which killing has been discussed. He gives the virtue argument, that killing makes you a lesser person ("bankrupts your soul") and makes you no better than those you're sworn to fight. (His caution against indulging vengeance can be considered part of this, and is the clearest argument he makes; few would defend a principle based on vengeance.) He also presents the consequentialist argument ("reinforcing the same cycle of violence") that killing only leads to more killing. But note that neither of these escape the need for judgment: is your purity of character more important than saving lives, and does killing necessarily lead to more killing--or may judicious use of it lead to less deaths instead?

Bruce's continued idealism on this issue is particularly welcome following Geoff Johns' flip comments about killing earlier this week. If we give him the benefit of the doubt, Johns may have been thinking much the same as I wrote here when he said, "there are heroes that, when they need to cross that line, they do it," citing Green Lantern, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman as examples. I would just like to see more discussions like the one in Batman and Robin #8, in which these heroes defend their decisions and explain why they "need to cross that line." I'm less interested in whether or not they kill than I am in how they justify it.

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Kant presented his murderer-at-the-door example in an essay titled "On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns," available in the Hackett edition of his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Philosophers have spilled much ink and killed many trees trying to reconcile the absolutist position given there with the rest of his philosophy; my favorite is Christine Korsgaard's "The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil," available in her book Creating the Kingdom of Ends, which focuses on the difference between ideal and nonideal moral theory. Finally, I wrote about Batman and killing, relying chiefly on the Joker and the trolley problem (which can easily be framed as a conflict of principles as above), in my chapter "Why Doesn't Batman Kill the Joker?" in Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul.

Duties toward fictional characters, or: Does Barbara Gordon "deserve" to walk again?

The issue of Barbara Gordon regaining mobility and once again adopting the mantle of Batgirl has been the cause of much discussion on the interwebs since it was announced by DC recently. Earlier I highlighted longtime Gordon scribe Gail Simone's conversation with Oracle-advocate Jill Pantozzi, during which Simone said (in the context of explaining why the relaunch finally made her comfortable with "curing" Barbara):

The most persuasive argument to put Babs back in the boots has always been one that I would argue against vehemently for story reasons, but that was impossible to argue with ethically. And I have heard this question a million times...why is it that virtually every single hero with a grievous injury, or even a death, gets to come back whole, except Barbara Gordon? Why? Why was Batman's back broken, and he was barely in the chair long enough to keep the seat warm, and now it's never even mentioned?

Arms and legs get ripped off, and they grow back, somehow. Graves don't stay filled. But the one constant is that Barbara stays in that chair.

Role model or not, that is problematic and uncomfortable, and the excuses to not cure her, in a world of purple rays and magic and super-science, are often unconvincing or wholly meta-textual. And the longer it goes on, the more it has stretched credibility.

Simone's logic is compelling--why does everyone else in comics come back to life or have life-threatening injuries miraculously resolved, but Barbara Gordon doesn't. But it's her unspoken premise that I want to look into, because I think it's a fascinating area for discussion: in what sense can Barbara Gordon--a fictional character--be understood to "deserve" anything? And if there is such an understanding of having duties toward a fictional character, how do those duties compare with duties to fans (like Pantozzi) who derived tremendous satisfaction from having a character like Oracle in comics (not to mention the other fans, disabled or not, that will enjoy seeing Babs walk again)?

Bill Willingham: Turn me evil once, shame on you--turn me evil twice, shame on me!

In a new interview on Newsarama, comics writer (and sometimes artist) Bill Willingham discusses many things, including Fables of course, but also why he left JSA after twelve issues (contained in the trades shown to the left, The Bad Seed and Axis of Evil). In particular, he cites issues with accommodating crossovers and editorial interference, which have bedeviled many a creative writer in the event-crazed status quo of modern comics. (See also: Dwayne McDuffie and JLA.)

I found this passage particularly interesting:

And then comes along this crossover in which the whole plot revolves around just about every member of the JSA turning evil for a couple of issues.

I couldn’t bring myself to do that because, you know, one time something takes control of you and you accidentally turn evil but it’s not your fault? That can be understood. Maybe the second time something takes possession of you and you turn evil, maybe that can be forgiven as well. But by about the third or fourth time that something takes over this person and he becomes evil, you have to ask yourself, like, well, maybe there’s just something wrong with this fellow from the beginning. Maybe he is just evil. Maybe that’s what evil is, is people that are just accessible to being taken over by whatever cosmic hobo happens to be passing through today.

This is very similar to the Kantian description of weakness of judgment and the will that I first laid out in my chapter in The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination, and again in my book Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character, coming out in May. 

In a nutshell, a person's autonomous decision-making--in which she makes choices according to moral principle, with no influence from internal or external pressures--can be corrupted, or made heteronomous, in two different ways. In the first, she makes the right decision, but has trouble carrying through with it because her will is weak; I call this "simple weakness." For example, a person may be dedicated to healthy eating, and for the most part he sticks to his diet, but nonetheless he slips once in a while. In other words, his judgment is sound, but his will is weak; this does not make him a bad or "vicious" person, but simply lacking a bit in "virtue" or strength.

A person can stay "simply weak" his entire life--and indeed, all of us are a little weak (which is to say, none of us is perfectly strong or resolute, at least not in all areas of our lives). But the worse type of weakness, what Kant calls the "impure will," occurs when judgment itself is corrupted, or when the person lets improper incentives and considerations into her decision-making itself. So the dieter who rationalizes cheating for reason based on the pleasure of tasty but unhealthy food is making the wrong decision, not just failing to carry through with the right one.

And as Kant wrote, it is the impure will that signals viciousness, since it "involves a conscious choice to be heteronomous, a surrender in the endless fight against inclination, as opposed to simple weakness, which represents merely a temporary loss of control" (Kantian Ethics and Economics, p. 59). It's also more susceptible to corruption, because once a person lets nonmoral considerations into her moral decision-making once, it becomes easier and easier to let it happen again:

The impure will involves a deliberate submission, a choice to admit the influence of inclination—as evidenced by the fact that "the calm with which one gives oneself up to it permits reflection and allows the mind to form principles upon it"—and is therefore more blameworthy than simple weakness... (ibid., quoting from Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, p. 408)

Willingham could have been talking about Kant's version of the impure will when he said that when someone becomes evil once, it might not mean anything, but if he becomes evil again and again, then there's something wrong with him--"maybe he is just evil."

Superman discovers the need for moral judgment

I haven't had much time to read comics the last couple weeks, so I caught up on a few today, including Superman #707, which continues the "Grounded"... well, "storyline" doesn't seem like the right term... "theme," maybe. Whatever. He's walking. (If he wanted to connect with the common man and woman, he'd realize that most of us really want to fly, and he's just rubbing it in our faces by walking instead. Hmph.)

At least Hal and Ollie drove a pick-up truck... and didn't wear their costumes while they were driving across the country... just sayin'...

Oh, yeah, my point... the issue contains an excellent illustration of moral conflict, and the importance of moral judgment in making all but the simplest of ethical decision.

SPOILERS to follow the jump...