(Continued from here)
Batman is supposed to be a symbol of ethical excellence, representing a standard regular humans can only strive for, but never achieve. Joker and his moral nihilism, of course, are fundamentally antithetical to what he stands for. However, near the end of the last post I said there's one gaping hole in Batman's moral fabric, and that is his refusal to kill the Joker. In this and the subsequent posts I plan to defend this idea.
Why should Batman kill the Joker?
It's not hard to see why Batman could be said to have a moral responsibility to kill the Joker. Batman's project, very simply put, is to save Gotham city. The single greatest threat to the Gothamites ever to have emerged is the Joker. With so many (particularly gruesome) murders to his name, he has deserved the right to be executed many times over. But keeping retribution aside, even from a deterrent point of view- the Joker has simply no intention of stopping. Ever. The Gotham justice system is unable to control him to any effective extent. Given this fact, just on grounds of utilitarian considerations alone, Batman should by all means kill the Joker.
But of course, it would be incredibly naive to end the discussion there. While superficially Batman may seem to have every reason to kill the Joker, there are more complex issues at play which at the end of the day justifies Batman's one rule. Or so we are told. In the remainder of the post, I'll be looking at (and rebutting) some key justifications provided for this.
Reason 1 for not killing- The Joker doesn't deserve death
Some people have argued that Batman has a moral vision few other human beings share. He's able to relate to criminals in a deep way, and knows that it's only their circumstances (one bad day, perhaps?) that has led them down their path. Criminals, especially those emerging from Gotham, are especially susceptible to this because of the raw deal the city has given them. This view is also informed by Batman's unbounded optimism about human nature, the idea that we're all fundamentally good. All of this contributes to his view that no criminal, even the Joker, really deserves death, since their choices are a product of their circumstances as much as it is their own.
Note first that this is a fan theory, and not so much an idea explicitly expressed in the comics. Second, this theory misrepresents the situation somewhat by saying that the only consideration relevant to whether the Joker should be killed is whether he deserves to be killed. I argued above that the grounds for killing the Joker isn't only retributive (i.e. he did bad things so bad things must happen to him), but also utilitarian (i.e. he should be killed to save the lives of so many other people). Third, a key problem in this view is a categorical denial of human agency. Killing the Joker to save the lives of many others (i.e. the aforementioned utilitarian ground) may strike some as being similar to the trolley problem (The Last of Us players would be very familiar with this concept). A crucial disanalogy, however, between the paradox and the case of the Joker is that the Joker really can't be said to be innocent. By saying that, I'm denying the premise that Gotham's criminals aren't culpable, as the theory states. That view entails a fundamental denial of human agency in a rather implausible way. Sure, we all make mistakes, and many of our mistakes aren't predominantly our doing. But can that rationale really be stretched thin to include the case of a mass-murderer like the Joker? I don't think so.
As it happens, there's a variant of the trolley paradox which is somewhat more similar to the case at hand- the so-called fat villain variant. Here are the relevant passages from Wiki:
The Joker is the fat villain in this example, only infinitely more evil and culpable many times over (and not particularly fat).
[To be continued]
Batman is supposed to be a symbol of ethical excellence, representing a standard regular humans can only strive for, but never achieve. Joker and his moral nihilism, of course, are fundamentally antithetical to what he stands for. However, near the end of the last post I said there's one gaping hole in Batman's moral fabric, and that is his refusal to kill the Joker. In this and the subsequent posts I plan to defend this idea.
Why should Batman kill the Joker?
It's not hard to see why Batman could be said to have a moral responsibility to kill the Joker. Batman's project, very simply put, is to save Gotham city. The single greatest threat to the Gothamites ever to have emerged is the Joker. With so many (particularly gruesome) murders to his name, he has deserved the right to be executed many times over. But keeping retribution aside, even from a deterrent point of view- the Joker has simply no intention of stopping. Ever. The Gotham justice system is unable to control him to any effective extent. Given this fact, just on grounds of utilitarian considerations alone, Batman should by all means kill the Joker.
But of course, it would be incredibly naive to end the discussion there. While superficially Batman may seem to have every reason to kill the Joker, there are more complex issues at play which at the end of the day justifies Batman's one rule. Or so we are told. In the remainder of the post, I'll be looking at (and rebutting) some key justifications provided for this.
Reason 1 for not killing- The Joker doesn't deserve death
Some people have argued that Batman has a moral vision few other human beings share. He's able to relate to criminals in a deep way, and knows that it's only their circumstances (one bad day, perhaps?) that has led them down their path. Criminals, especially those emerging from Gotham, are especially susceptible to this because of the raw deal the city has given them. This view is also informed by Batman's unbounded optimism about human nature, the idea that we're all fundamentally good. All of this contributes to his view that no criminal, even the Joker, really deserves death, since their choices are a product of their circumstances as much as it is their own.
Note first that this is a fan theory, and not so much an idea explicitly expressed in the comics. Second, this theory misrepresents the situation somewhat by saying that the only consideration relevant to whether the Joker should be killed is whether he deserves to be killed. I argued above that the grounds for killing the Joker isn't only retributive (i.e. he did bad things so bad things must happen to him), but also utilitarian (i.e. he should be killed to save the lives of so many other people). Third, a key problem in this view is a categorical denial of human agency. Killing the Joker to save the lives of many others (i.e. the aforementioned utilitarian ground) may strike some as being similar to the trolley problem (The Last of Us players would be very familiar with this concept). A crucial disanalogy, however, between the paradox and the case of the Joker is that the Joker really can't be said to be innocent. By saying that, I'm denying the premise that Gotham's criminals aren't culpable, as the theory states. That view entails a fundamental denial of human agency in a rather implausible way. Sure, we all make mistakes, and many of our mistakes aren't predominantly our doing. But can that rationale really be stretched thin to include the case of a mass-murderer like the Joker? I don't think so.
As it happens, there's a variant of the trolley paradox which is somewhat more similar to the case at hand- the so-called fat villain variant. Here are the relevant passages from Wiki:
The Joker is the fat villain in this example, only infinitely more evil and culpable many times over (and not particularly fat).
[To be continued]