The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

Series Editor: William Irwin

South Park and Philosophy

Edited by Robert Arp

Metallica and Philosophy

Edited by William Irwin

Family Guy and Philosophy

Edited by J. Jeremy Wisnewski

The Daily Show and Philosophy

Edited by Jason Holt

Lost and Philosophy

Edited by Sharon Kaye

24 and Philosophy

Edited by Jennifer Hart Weed, Richard Davis, and Ronald Weed

Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy

Edited by Jason T. Eberl

The Office and Philosophy

Edited by J. Jeremy Wisnewski

Batman and Philosophy

Edited by Mark D. White and Robert Arp

House and Philosophy

Edited by Henry Jacoby

Watchmen and Philosophy

Edited by Mark D. White

X-Men and Philosophy

Edited by Rebecca Housel and J. Jeremy Wisnewski

Terminator and Philosophy

Edited by Richard Brown and Kevin Decker

Heroes and Philosophy

Edited by David Kyle Johnson

Twilight and Philosophy

Edited by Rebecca Housel and J. Jeremy Wisnewski

Final Fantasy and Philosophy

Edited by Jason P. Blahuta and Michel S. Beaulieu

Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy

Edited by Richard Brian Davis

Iron Man and Philosophy

Edited by Mark D. White

True Blood and Philosophy

Edited by George Dunn and Rebecca Housel

Mad Men and Philosophy

Edited by James South and Rod Carveth

30 Rock and Philosophy

Edited by J. Jeremy Wisnewski

The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy

Edited by Gregory Bassham

The Ultimate Lost and Philosophy

Edited by Sharon Kaye

Green Lantern and Philosophy

Edited by Jane Dryden and Mark D. White

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy

Edited by Eric Bronson

Arrested Development and Philosophy

Edited by Kristopher Phillips and J. Jeremy Wisnewski

Copyright © 2011 by John Wiley and Sons. All rights reserved

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ISBN 978-1-118-15347-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-15348-2 (ebk)

About the Book

This is a compilation of some of our best superhero essays in the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series with a preview of some of our forthcoming books and two essays that are exclusive to this sampler.

Part One: Superheroes Exclusives

1. Lord Odin Have Mercy: Justice and Punishment in Asgard

Mark D. White

2. Captain America and the Virtue of Modesty

Mark D. White

Part Two: DC Superheroes

3. Is Superman an American Icon?

Andrew Terjesen

From Superman and Philosophy, edited by Mark D. White

4. The Blackest Night for Aristotle’s Account of Emotions

Jason Southworth

From Green Lantern and Philosophy, edited by Jane Dryden and Mark D. White

5. Why Doesn’t Batman Kill the Joker?

Mark D. White

From Batman and Philosophy, edited by Mark D. White and Robert Arp

6. Can We Steer This Rudderless World?: Kant, Rorschach, Retributivism, and Honor

Jacob M. Held

From Watchmen and Philosophy, edited by Mark D. White

Part Three: Marvel Superheroes

7. Forgivers Assemble!

Daniel P. Malloy

From Avengers and Philosophy, edited by Mark D. White

8. Does Peter Parker Have a Good Life?

Neil Mussett

From Spider-Man and Philosophy, edited by Jonathan J. Sanford

9. The Stark Madness of Technology

George A. Dunn

From Iron Man and Philosophy, edited by Mark D. White

10. Amnesia, Personal Identity, and the Many Lives of Wolverine

Jason Southworth

From X-Men and Philosophy, edited by Rebecca Housel and J. Jeremy Wisnewski

Introduction

Taking Superheroes Seriously

William Irwin

Philosophy can change your life, but it may take a superhero for you to realize it. Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and company don’t just entertain us; they prompt us to think. I mean, why doesn’t Batman just kill the Joker and be done with it? Sure, that would be bad for future comic book sales, but, as we’ll see in this book, the Dark Knight has his philosophical reasons, too.

Philosophers specialize in theory, but people tend to learn better when something unfamiliar, such as philosophy, is explained in terms of something familiar, such as television, movies, comic books, music, or videogames. The philosophers of old understood this and came up with their own memorable examples to illustrate their theories, from Plato’s (428–348 BCE) allegory of the cave to Descartes’ (1596–1650) evil deceiver and beyond. In this book, we continue that long tradition by using examples from the realm of superheroes.

Why? Because superheroes are complex characters and have become the mythology of our time (literally, in the case of Thor!). Like the gods, superheroes tend to have basic origin stories and character traits, which set the stage for a limitless number and variety of tales. And like the gods of mythology, superheroes are not perfect; they are not like the all-loving, all-good, all-powerful God of Western religion. Still, our flawed heroes can act as moral exemplars. For those not inclined to ask W.W.J.D.?, it can make sense to ask W.W.C.A.D.? What would Captain America do?

Some people might worry that we can’t learn anything from superheroes since they’re just make-believe, but, like the ancient myths, tales of superheroes don’t need to be true or realistic to be inspiring. You don’t need to have been bitten by a radioactive spider to realize that with great power comes great responsibility. Heck, you don’t even need to have great power to learn and appreciate that lesson—kids and grown-ups alike have gotten that lesson from Spidey for decades.

Ultimately, this book aims to shed light on the hidden depth of superheroes, while at same time illustrate the importance of philosophy. Superman and Batman are not replacements for Plato and Aristotle, but they can inspire you to read Plato and Aristotle, who will challenge you to think deeply. This looks like a job for Superman, or at least Superheroes: The Best of Philosophy and Pop Culture. From there, the rest is up to you!

Part One

Superheroes Exclusive

Chapter 1

LORD ODIN HAVE MERCY: JUSTICE AND PUNISHMENT IN ASGARD

Mark D. White

What do we know about Odin? He’s the son of Bor, father to Thor and Balder, adoptive father of Loki, king of Asgard, wielder of the Odin-Force, “Old One-Eye,” and All-Father. And he’s also a supreme hard-ass. I don’t say that simply because he is a fierce warrior in life as well as death (well, Ragnarok, to be precise). I say that because his word is law, and that law must be obeyed, and woe be to him who challenges or violates that law—and by him, I mean Thor. After all, Thor’s life as a superhero on Midgard (Earth) began when he was sent there by Odin to learn humility as Dr. Donald Blake. After falling in love with Jane Foster, Thor soon insisted on marrying her, but Odin is not one to be insisted to, so he continued to punish Thor—a lot. No wonder Thor was hesitant to bring back his father after he revived the rest of the Asgardians after escaping from Ragnarok himself!1

In fact, there’s a lot of punishment in the Asgardian tales, and not only on the part of the All-Father—a lot of justice being sought, but not a lot of mercy given. Is this a good thing? Is mercy opposed to the point of justice, or is mercy an integral part of justice—and, if so, in what way?

Odin of Asgard, Meet Anselm of Canterbury

On the surface, justice and mercy seem like opposites. Justice is concerned with making sure people receive what they deserve—especially in the case of punishment, or retributive justice. Mercy, on the other hand, is usually understood as a reason to give people less than they deserve as punishment. So justice and mercy seem as mismatched as Thor and Loki, Odin and Surtur—or Volstagg and narrow passageways.

Medieval philosopher St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), famous for his ontological argument for the existence of God—the Christian God, of course, not our Asgardian friends—described the paradoxical relationship between justice and mercy in the context of God’s perfect justice and benevolence:

True, out of goodness you repay the good with good and the evil with evil, but the very nature of justice seems to demand this. When you give good things to the wicked, however, one knows that he is supremely good willed to do this, and yet one wonders why he who is supremely just could have willed such a thing.2

Wondering if perhaps mercy is an aspect of justice, Anselm asks God, “So, then, is your mercy born of justice? Do you spare the wicked because of your justice? If it is so . . . teach me how it is so.”3

Anselm has trouble resolving this paradox with respect to God. He assumes that God is both perfectly benevolent and perfectly just, but justice would seem to rule out benevolence to the wicked. Lucky for us, we need make no such assumptions about Odin and the rest of the Asgardians, for we know all too well that they are neither perfectly just nor perfectly good! In fact, they have much more in common with human beings than with God. So we can bring our discussion of justice and mercy down to Midgard, as it were, and ask about the relationship between justice and mercy as we practice them here.

Aristotle vs. Seidring the Merciless

One way to reconcile justice with mercy is to claim that in the real world, justice is imperfect, and mercy is one way of correcting its mistakes. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) argued along these lines, distinguishing between two senses of justice: justice as lawfulness and justice as fairness. Legal justice consists of the consistent application of the law to all who come before a court, while fairness (or equity) applies to the specific circumstances of a particular individual. While the law may demand that all persons found guilty of murder should receive life in prison, there may be mitigating circumstances in any particular case that suggest it would be more fair—or merciful—to reduce that sentence. For instance, the murderer may have already suffered in some way for what he or she did, or perhaps there is some reason he or she should not be held wholly responsible for the crime. The written law, however, cannot account for these particulars, and so mercy fills the gap. As Aristotle wrote, “Equity is just, but not what is legally just: it is a rectification of legal justice.”4

In his earliest adventures, Thor was constantly pulled between his duty to Odin and Asgard and his love for Jane Foster. Odin resented his son’s love for a mortal, so he forbade the relationship at every turn, and was particularly outraged when Thor revealed his dual identity as Donald Blake to Jane. “He hath broken my law!” Odin proclaims. “My choice is clear! There must be a reckoning!”5 Upon his son’s return to Asgard, Odin condemns him to “the ritual of steel,” pitting all of his guards against Thor, and further ordering that “should he survive—he shall nevermore set foot upon the planet Earth!”6 Thor fights his way through Odin’s guard and then Heimdall, mighty guardian of the Rainbow Bridge (the pathway to Asgard), and then returns to Earth, only to face Hercules—rough day!

Odin, of course, is none too pleased by his son’s continued defiance. Balder the Brave, Thor’s closest friend—and, unbeknownst to him at the time, Thor’s half-brother—pleads to Odin for mercy on Thor’s behalf, asking, “Thy son was motivated by love of a female—is he not more deserving of pity than retribution?” Odin simply replies, “My law is the law supreme—and none may break it! Mine ears shall hear no more entreaties! Nor shall the voice of Odin mouth words of forgiveness! Thor has dared to pit his will against mine! For that, he must pay!”7 In proclaiming his law the final word, Odin refuses to recognize that his law is general and may not serve the cause of justice in all cases. As contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes (and with which Balder would agree), law’s rules have their place but they are imprecise, “and when they have manifestly erred, it is justice itself, not a departure from justice, to use equity’s flexible standard.”8

Indeed, when Odin deliberates on Thor’s punishment, he is advised by no less than Seidring the Merciless, who reminds him that “justice is justice.” Odin decides to take half of Thor’s strength—while he’s battling Hercules—at which even Seidring (the Merciless, remember) balks, but the All-Father is firm: “No less punishment would be seemly!”9 But even Odin has his doubts—not to mention a wee bit of cowardice—and grants the Odin-Power to Seidring to carry out the punishment (and then ironically orders Jane to take care of Thor after his defeat at the hands of Hercules). He even confesses to Seidring later, “To think that Odin would thus betray the flesh of his flesh!” But Seidring holds the line, reassuring him, “Nay, sire! Punishment in the name of justice is never betrayal!”10 That is, of course, until Seidring himself betrays Odin and pleads for . . . you guessed it. “No! No! Mercy! Mercy!” he cries. “I dare not face the wrath of Odin!”11 (I think even Hogun the Grim wouldst chuckle at that.)

Well Met, Seneca

One of the earliest thinkers to address mercy directly was the Stoic philosopher Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE), who wrote On Mercy for the young emperor Nero (presumably to read in between fiddle lessons). Seneca helpfully provides us with a definition—nay, five definitions—of mercy:

1. “self-control by the mind when it has the power to take vengeance”

2. “leniency on the part of a superior towards an inferior in imposing punishment”

3. “a tendency of the mind to leniency in exacting a punishment”

4. “moderation that remits something of a deserved and due punishment”

5. “something which stops short of what could deservedly be imposed”12

Note that Seneca does not merely tell us—and Nero—what mercy is (in the last two definitions), but also the qualities of the merciful person (in the first three). When he gets more specific, he echoes Aristotle in proclaiming that mercy “judges not by legal formula, but by what is equitable and good” and that it does not do “something less than what is just but . . . what it decides should be the justest possible.”13 Indeed, the opposite of mercy, cruelty (or harshness), “is nothing other than grimness of mind in exacting punishment.”14

As Stoics often do, Seneca writes about “the wise man” or sage, the person who embodies admirable character traits, or virtues, of which mercy is one. As you might know, Odin is widely considered to be wise himself, but he has doubts after condemning his son Thor to a crushing defeat at the hands of that Olympian wannabe, Hercules. After Thor returns to Asgard and helps defeat Seidring, he collapses, and Odin rushes to help him. Odin is now filled with remorse, admitting that he “hath judged thee too harshly,” and “though I am said to be all-wise in all matter of things . . . my wisdom fled when I turned against Thor . . . my son!”15 Odin finally realizes that it is not weak or unwise to be merciful, but rather that it serves the greater cause of justice when circumstances demand it (as Aristotle pointed out). But of course, he wisely withholds mercy from Seidring, “the unspeakable villain who hath committed so foul an act of treason upon the golden realm”16 and who deserves full punishment, despite his last-minute epiphany regarding the virtue of mercy!

In supporting mercy, Seneca—a Roman—was refuting the position of Greek Stoics, who held that individual circumstances and human weakness should never be considered when meting out punishments. As Nussbaum writes about the Greek Stoics, “The soul of the good Stoic judge is a hard soul that protects itself from all impulses that might sway it from the strict path of virtue and duty. . . . An unyielding judge, the Stoic will do exactly what strict justice requires.”17 The Greek Stoics refused to recognize that human weaknesses could absolve even a small part of the responsibility for a crime, and demanded that wrongdoers be punished according to the written law in all cases. When Odin rejected Balder’s plea for “pity” in Thor’s case, he was playing the part of the wise man of the Greek Stoics, harsh and unyielding, applying “his law” with no regard for Thor’s motivations or unique circumstances (circumstances, ironically, he was in only because of Odin’s previous actions).

Mercy, Mercy Me

One reason that people in positions of authority should practice mercy and recognize the weaknesses of others is that they too are weak and imperfect. In his earlier work On Anger, Seneca wrote that a person such as a judge, or the king of Asgard—anybody, really—will be more sensitive to the faults of others if he submits his own actions to “judgment.”

At the day’s end, when he had retired for the night, he would interrogate his mind: “What ailment of yours have you cured today? What failing have you resisted? Where can you show improvement?” Your anger will cease or moderate itself, if it knows that each day it must come before a judge.18

Seneca’s advice leads us away from “an eye for an eye” and toward “judge not, lest ye be judged.” If a judge or ruler recognizes the fault within himself, he may be more likely to be lenient or merciful out of recognition of the faults of others.

Perhaps this is what Balder the Brave—in his second career as Balder the Balladeer—is thinking when Odin expresses doubt about refusing to allow Thor and Jane to marry. Balder offers him a song, and croons of the “love of a warrior for a maiden fair,” which leads Odin to remember his own youth and experiences with forbidden love. Odin seems to be coming around to Seneca’s point of view, acknowledging that love does not always leave gods or mortals in their right minds, when Loki breaks into Balder’s “Asgardian Idol” audition and proclaims, “Balder! You dare try to trick the noble Odin?!!”19 Setting aside the Volstagginous degree of irony involved when Loki calls anyone a trickster, we can see how Balder appeals to Odin’s own weakness in his past to make him more sympathetic (and merciful) toward his son Thor’s own struggles and defiance of his father’s wishes.

Contemporary philosopher Jeffrie G. Murphy strikes a similar tone when criticizing modern-day enthusiasm among Midgardians for harsh and unrelenting punishment. While Murphy is one of the foremost advocates of retributive justice (which demands that deserved punishment be given for the sake of justice and right), he nonetheless urges humility in handing out punishment, because one can never be sure how responsible a wrongdoer truly is for his or her crime.20 For instance, it is easy to look down on Loki for his years of trickery, deceit, and obnoxiously long and pointy horns. But unless we’ve shared his traumatic early childhood, how can we be so sure Loki is truly to blame for his evil deeds—and that we wouldn’t do the same in his position, if we had his history and background?21 Looking at it the other way, how much of Thor’s virtuous behavior is due to the fact that he was the favored son since birth, blessed with all of Odin’s gifts? Is he truly good, or merely lucky?

Even Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), widely considered a particularly harsh retributivist, questions whether we can ever be sure of our own moral character, much less that of others, claiming that people delude themselves into thinking that

they deserve not to feel guilty of such transgressions as they see others burdened with, without however inquiring whether the credit goes perhaps to good luck, or whether, on the attitude of mind they could well discover within themselves if they just wanted, they would not have practiced similar vices themselves, had they not been kept away from them by impotence, temperament, upbringing, and tempting circumstances of time and place.22

This does not mean that a judge or ruler should forgive all wrongs, of course—even Seneca was very clear on the distinction between mercy and absolution23—but just that the zeal for retribution should be tempered out of the recognition that had the world been different, it could very well have been the judge coming under judgment. In other words, “There, but for the grace of God, go I,” which applies equally in Asgard and Midgard.

Oh, Balder, We Hardly Knew Ye . . .

The lessons of mercy are hard-learned in the halls of Asgard, even to those kind of heart like Balder the Brave. After Loki tells Balder the truth about his royal heritage (which is confirmed by Thor),24 the trickster then turns his attentions to resurrecting Bor, father of Odin and former king of Asgard, who immediately launches into a delusional rampage through New York City. After a vicious battle, Thor kills Bor, unaware of the identity of his foe, which is soon “discovered” by Balder and Loki (who is shocked, simply shocked). Naturally, given his unyielding devotion to justice, Loki is all too happy to remind Balder of his duty as a prince of Asgard: “Oh . . . oh, this is most distressing. For is not the punishment for slaying any member of the family royal—the loss of all titles and honors? And banishment from Asgard? Is that not right, my lord Balder?”25

Maybe it’s the weight of Asgardian nobility, but our traditionally tender and merciful Balder is now stern and harsh (Odin wouldst be so proud). “Yes, Loki . . . yes, it is,” he says solemnly. “And the law must be respected before all things.” Loki, of course, recommends precise adherence to the law, asking, “Is the law to be administered equally to all—or shall the law fail, and the very heart of Asgard be made false?” Balder concedes, and banishes Thor, though he surely suspects the hand of Loki behind it all (if only because Thor all but says so during his “trial”). To be fair to good Balder, he did offer Thor a chance to defend his actions, which he refused to do. Balder, nonetheless, refused to consider any mitigating factors, including Thor’s obvious ignorance of whom he was fighting, and chose instead to follow the harsh Stoics of Greece rather than the merciful Seneca of Rome. Like father, like son, I suppose, on Asgard as on Midgard.

Verily, the Vizier Gets the Vinal Final Word

For an all-knowing and wise All-Father, Odin sure takes a lot of bad advice from the likes of Seidring and Loki. But still there is the Grand Vizier, who urges Odin that “justice hath no meaning lest it be tempered with mercy.”26 The Vizier reminds him—and the rest of us, though Loki’s pretty much a lost cause, I fear—that justice is a very particular virtue, and must be tailored to the case of each man and woman who falls under its judgment. Laws and rules only go so far in achieving true justice, and mercy, practiced with sensitivity to individual circumstances, is needed to ensure that each person gets what he or she deserves (or as close to it as human justice can get).27 Strict adherence to the law can seem noble, but it did not make Odin seem any nobler to exact harsh and cruel punishment on his son Thor, and it definitely took a bit of the shine off of Balder. Ironically, it is the humanity within Thor, whether due to his mortal identity as Donald Blake or his mother, Jord, goddess of the Earth, that allows the Asgardians the opportunity to practice mercy—and reminds us to practice it also.

NOTES

1 Thor, vol. 3, #7–8 (May–June 2008), reprinted in Thor J. Michael Straczynski Vol. 2 (2009).

2 Anselm, Proslogion: With the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 2001), p. 12.

3 Ibid., p. 13.

4 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 1137b12–13.

5 Journey into Mystery #124 (January 1966), reprinted in Essential Thor Vol. 2 (2008).

6 Journey into Mystery #125 (February 1966), reprinted in Essential Thor Vol. 2.

7 Thor, vol. 1, #126 (March 1966), reprinted in Essential Thor Vol. 2. (Journey into Mystery was retitled Thor with this issue.)

8 Martha C. Nussbaum, “Equity and Mercy,” in Punishment: A Philosophy & Public Affairs Reader, ed. A. John Simmons et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 158.

9 Thor, vol. 1, #126.

10 Thor, vol. 1, #127 (April 1966), reprinted in Essential Thor Vol. 2.

11 Thor, vol. 1, #128 (May 1966), reprinted in Essential Thor Vol. 2.

12 Seneca, On Mercy, II.3, in Moral and Political Essays, eds. John M. Cooper and J. F. Procope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 160.

13 On Mercy, II.7, in Moral and Political Essays, p. 164. That’s right, “justest”—and you thought Asgardians talk funny!

14 On Mercy, II.4, in Moral and Political Essays, p. 160. Note that the words “cruel” and “grim” show up repeatedly during another vengeful tirade of Odin’s in Thor, vol. 1, 246–250 (April–August 1976), reprinted in Thor: If Asgard Should Perish (2010). (To be fair, it was not Odin in this case but the villainous Mangog. Seeing, however, how no one suspected anything for so long, it obviously wasn’t completely out of character for Old One-Eye!)

15 Thor, vol. 1, #127.

16 Thor, vol. 1, #128

17 Nussbaum, “Equity and Mercy,” p. 160.

18 Seneca, On Anger, III.36.1–2, in Moral and Political Essays, p. 116.

19 Journey into Mystery #111 (December 1964), reprinted in Essential Thor Vol. 1 (2005).

20 Jeffrie G. Murphy, “Legal Moralism and Retribution Revisited,” Criminal Law and Philosophy 1 (2007): 5–20; see also his chapter “Mercy and Legal Justice” in Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 162–186. For more on retributivism, see my chapter “Crying for Justice: Retributivism for Those Who Worship Evil’s Might,” in Green Lantern and Philosophy: No Evil Shall Escape This Book, eds. Jane Dryden and Mark D. White (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), pp. 162–174.

21 This may not be the best example, because Loki contributed to much of his early misfortune and character through traveling in time to visit his younger self and nudge him toward the evil god he will one day become (Thor, vol. 3, #12, January 2009, reprinted in Thor by J. Michael Straczynski Vol. 2).

22 Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (and Other Writings), trans. and eds. A. Wood & G. di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 38.

23 See Seneca, On Mercy, II.7, in Moral and PoliticalEssays, pp. 163–164.

24 Thor, vol. 3, #9–10 (July and September 2008), reprinted in Thor by J. Michael Straczynski Vol. 2.

25 Thor #600 (April 2009), which followed Thor, vol. 3, #12 (January 2009)—Volstagg apparently ate all the numbers in between—and was reprinted in Thor by J. Michael Straczynski Vol. 2.

26 Thor, vol. 1, #250 (August 1976).

27 For a more contemporary take on the relationship between justice and mercy, I recommend Claudia Card, “On Mercy,” Philosophical Review 81 (1972): pp. 182–207, as well as the works by Nussbaum and Murphy cited earlier.

Chapter 2

CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE VIRTUE OF MODESTY

Mark D. White

When we think about Captain America, many things come to mind, such as courage, honor, and honesty. These qualities are examples of virtues, character traits that we associate with admirable people, traits we try to instill in our children, traits that we aspire to have ourselves. Through these virtues, Captain America inspires fellow heroes and ordinary people alike, and serves as an example of a virtuous person (a moral exemplar). Although he is an inspirational figure to many, Cap doesn’t seem to dwell on it. He just continues to do his job, protecting the innocent and serving justice, never taking credit, and always preferring to acknowledge the good deeds of others rather than his own.

More so than his other character traits, it is Captain America’s incredible modesty that stands out to me when I read his adventures. How does someone who is so strong, so noble—so good—keep from getting a swelled head around . . . well, people who are not quite as strong, or noble, or good? Modesty is definitely a virtue, but how does Cap achieve it? Is he unaware of his good qualities, or does he just downplay them around others? Does Cap’s modesty require Super-Soldier Serum, or can we all achieve it?

I’m Modest—Isn’t That Great?

Think about the statement “I am modest.” It seems contradictory, like saying “I am asleep” or “I’m the Red Skull and I need a hug.” Saying you’re modest would make you immodest. In fact, just thinking you’re modest would make you immodest. For this reason, some philosophers argue that the modest person must be unaware of the qualities that make him or her stand out compared to other people.1 If, for instance, Captain America didn’t realize that he was stronger, faster, and smarter than most other people, his modesty about those things would be sincere. Not only would he deny these superior qualities, but he would deny being modest as well, since he would see nothing to be modest about! This solves the problem with saying (or thinking) “I am modest,” since the truly modest person is unaware of what to be modest about and therefore would never say or think that he or she was modest.

There’s a problem with this, however. Virtues are character traits that people should be able to cultivate. For example, honesty is a virtue, and if you’re not an inherently honest person (like you-know-who), you can certainly try to be more honest and develop that disposition within yourself. But can you try to become unaware of something? Can you cultivate ignorance? It’s very hard to imagine how, since unawareness and ignorance are involuntary and unintentional—it’s like trying not to think of a blue elephant (or the Red Skull). If modesty involves unawareness, then it isn’t a trait that you can try to develop, and therefore it can’t be a virtue.

So if we want to maintain that modesty is a virtue, we have to explain how it can be developed without demanding that people forget about their good qualities. If a person is aware of his or her superior qualities, though, what does it mean for him or her to be modest? Look at Tony Stark, one of the most brilliant people in the world, with incredible wealth (most of the time) and movie-star looks. He’s definitely aware of all this, and certainly no one would call him modest. Then again, how could we reasonably expect him to be? If he were modest, wouldn’t it be the kind of false modesty that is obnoxious and fools no one?

Modesty Isn’t Just About You, You Know

Some philosophers argue that we shouldn’t focus our attention just on how modest people see themselves—whether they are aware of their successes and abilities—but also on how they treat other people. After all, modesty is best shown when interacting with other people, especially people who don’t “measure up” to someone who’s more successful or talented. Think about Cap’s modesty, which is less a matter of how he sees himself and more a matter of how he downplays his enhanced abilities and admirable virtues to others. The fact that he does this, especially if we assume (reasonably) that he knows exactly how much stronger, faster, and smarter he is compared to most people, suggests that he behaves this way out of concern for others.

The contemporary philosopher Irene McMullin writes that modesty “is a particular form of self-awareness coupled with the desire to foster the welfare of other people and a tendency to behave in ways that do this.”2 She argues that modesty is motivated by concern for others, and actually requires that the modest person know exactly how much he or she excels—otherwise, the modest person would have no way to know that he or she should be modest! If Cap thought everyone was as strong as he is, he wouldn’t realize that he shouldn’t talk about all his feats of strength. Since he is aware of his enhanced abilities, though, he downplays them when talking with normal people. He even goes out of his way to recognize their skills and achievements, such as when he meets war veterans and praises their heroism instead of his own. For example, when Cap met Peter Parker’s aunt May and she told him how much it meant to her late husband Ben to meet him during World War II, Cap told her what a great job she did raising Peter and asked if he could see some pictures of Ben sometime—taking the attention off of himself and refocusing it on others whom he felt were just as deserving if not more.3

Even if we agree that modesty has an important social aspect in addition to its self-regarding one, there is another issue: How can we expect a person who knows how great he or she is to hold back this knowledge when dealing with other people? Of course, no one ever said that cultivating a virtue was easy, but maybe this is too much to ask. Tony Stark obviously can’t do it—or, if he can, he chooses not to. Clint Barton, the world’s foremost marksman and the Avenger known as Hawkeye, is also fond of bragging about his skills (especially to women). Even Cap has trouble with it at times, especially during the “Capmania” engineered by the Skrulls, when he said, “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t flattering . . . it’s actually becoming a strain not letting it go to my head.”4 Somehow, though, even when he becomes the ultimate American Idol, Cap manages to keep his ego in check, balancing his concern for other people with clear awareness that he was created to be the ultimate soldier. But how does he do this—and how can we do it?

The Egalitarians Have Landed

One possible answer is that modest people believe in the inherent equality of all persons; they are egalitarians.5 Of course, this doesn’t mean they think everyone is equally smart, strong, fast, and rich—obviously that isn’t so. What equality means in this context is that people are morally equal; they are of equal worth. Every person counts, no matter how old or young, tall or short, and so forth. This is the ideal that motivates heroes—in the real world as well as the comics—to try to save everyone they can, regardless of age, race, sex, or wealth. It even explains why superheroes often save their worst enemies—for instance, Cap has saved his greatest foe, the Red Skull, on many an occasion.6

Several contemporary philosophers have proposed such an egalitarian version of modesty. For instance, Daniel Statman writes that “the modest person indeed keeps his qualities ‘in perspective’. . . keeping a clear distinction between his superior qualities and achievements, on the one hand, and his moral status with regard to other human beings, on the other.”7 Another philosopher, Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, writes that modesty “requires a realization of the fundamentally similar worth of all human beings, and the evaluation of this similarity as more significant than the differences resulting from the accomplishments of different human beings.”8 Statman and Ben-Ze’ev are saying that even though some people have talents and abilities (or simply good luck) that make them better in certain superficial ways than other people, when you get down to it, we are the same—and realizing this is what enables people (like Cap) to behave modestly.

In a recent story set in Iraq, Cap makes a decision that inadvertently results in a young Army sergeant losing three of his limbs.9 Years later, while at a welcoming party for the return of the sergeant’s comrades from another tour of duty, Cap approaches him and apologizes, saying he’s doubted that decision every day since making it. After the sergeant forgives him, Cap explains that because of his enhanced abilities—not just physical but also mental—he can’t forget a single name of a soldier he’s lost in battle. Whereas some might consider those memories to be a curse, Cap considers them a privilege, an honor like that which he feels greeting returning soldiers. Even the salute that Cap gives the sergeant at the end of the story is an expression of egalitarian sentiment, displaying mutual respect between military personnel that transcends any personal differences when out of uniform.10 These are just a few examples of Captain America treating others—especially fellow military men and women—as equals, because he recognizes their equal moral status regardless of their differences in strength, speed, and so forth.11

If Batroc Knows One Philosophe, It Would Be . . .

Another way that the modest person can balance awareness of his or her superior qualities with the well-being of others is suggested by McMullin, and was inspired by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). While it’s not our main focus here, suffice it to say that existentialism is an attempt to probe the nature of human existence, with all of its absurdities and futilities, while at the same time recognizing the infinite capacity of human beings to define themselves and “own” their lives.12

According to McMullin, modest people balance two perspectives of themselves: the first-person perspective, or how they see themselves, and the third-person perspective, or how others see them. The first-person perspective corresponds to the self-awareness we’ve been talking about all along: a person should be aware of who he or she is, including his or her good and bad qualities. Also, in existentialist terms, self-awareness implies that each person is responsible for creating the person he or she wants to be. This means setting the standards that a person chooses to live by and measure success against. Like Captain America and many other heroes do, most successful people set very high standards for themselves. Even if they don’t always meet the standards, they have something to aim for. In a way, the standards themselves help define the person they wish to become.

For the third-person perspective, McMullin borrows the concept of facticity from Sartre. Facticity refers to the extent to which we are defined and measured by external standards as opposed to our own. In Sartre’s terms, facticity refers to the “situation” of “being in the world.” Facticity includes all the aspects of our reality that we cannot (easily) change, such as our height, race, where we were born, and so on—all things that we must act within, knowing that other people will judge us on those things, which we know by “the look” of the “other.”13 As much as we may try to avoid these third-person assessments, we cannot completely escape them without being ascetics or hermits. Insofar as we interact with other people, they will always come into play in some way.

One of the central tenets of existentialism, however, is that we can transcend our facticity and define ourselves by our own standards, not those of other people. We see this in civil rights movements, in which women and African Africans refused to accept how society defined them and asserted their independence and their own identities. On a smaller scale, though, each of us does this—or should do this—when we refuse to accept the labels, expectations, and standards of others, and instead craft our identities as we wish.14 The standards and judgments of others can’t be eliminated, but we can disvalue them or ignore them, especially when it comes to defining and judging ourselves.

This, in fact, is exactly what the modest person does, according to McMullin: he or she recognizes both the first-person and third-person perspectives and balances them properly. Let’s think this through in terms of Captain America. From the third-person perspective, based on the standards of others, he is judged as a living legend, a symbol of freedom, a hero among heroes, with “a voice that could command a god.”15 From the first-person perspective, however, he knows that these judgments do not define him. Only he can define himself, by determining the standards against which he measures himself, as we see in how hard he pushes himself on missions with the Avengers and the military. (At times he has even resisted the “title” thrust upon him: “I never wanted to be Captain America. I was just supposed to be a soldier. . . I just wanted to serve.”16) Ultimately, Cap succeeds in being modest because he keeps his own standards in mind while dealing with others, rather than other people’s praise of his superior qualities. As McMullin writes, “To be modest, I must recognize both that I am as others experience me and that the social roles and accomplishments by which other people understand and rank me are never entirely definitive of who I am.”17

Kant We Do Better, Though?

Each of these ways of looking at modesty—the egalitarian and the existentialist—has its unique advantages. The existentialist approach focuses on measuring yourself by your own standards, while the egalitarian approach shows us why we should take other people’s well-being into account. What if we put them together, in our own version of a Marvel Team-Up, combining the best of both accounts of modesty to defeat the evil Axis of Arrogance?

Lucky for us, the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) did just that, providing us with a moral philosophy that promotes both individuality and egalitarianism. Let’s start with Kant’s understanding of autonomy, the capacity of every person to follow laws of her own determination, to create her own identity, without bowing to external authority or social pressure (or even internal preferences and desires that may sway her from her chosen path). This concept was a direct influence on existentialists like Sartre, so it is no surprise that Kant can cover this aspect of modesty as well. The autonomous person, like the existentialist, measures herself by standards she chooses herself; the opinions and judgments of others do not affect her self-assessment.

Where does egalitarianism enter a Kantian account of modesty? Because of autonomy, each person’s ability (and responsibility) to make his or her own choices and character, persons have dignity, an incomparable worth that implies a strict moral equality between them. This enables a modest person like Captain America to acknowledge his own superior abilities, yet still treat other people as equals, because deep down, he recognizes that everyone is the same. As contemporary philosopher Thomas E. Hill Jr. writes, “The root idea of dignity is simply that virtually everyone, regardless of social station, talents, accomplishments, or moral record, should be regarded with respect as a human being.”18 So no matter how Cap (or any modest person) compares with others in terms of brains, beauty, or strength, he always keeps in mind that everyone is deserving of respect by virtue of his or her dignity, and is worthy of consideration.

In fact, Cap exemplifies the Kantian approach to modesty when he compares himself to his fellow soldiers, recognizing that while they don’t share his augmented abilities, they are no less courageous in battle—and more heroic for it. For example, a story set in World War II introduces Bobby Shaw, whom Steve Rogers met in basic training at Fort Lehigh. Private Shaw reminds Steve of himself before he was transformed into Captain America: a scrawny, timid young man who nonetheless felt the call of duty. At the end of the story, Private Shaw makes the ultimate sacrifice, and at his funeral sixty years later, in front of superheroes and military personnel alike, Cap says, “I have been to the end of the skies and back. I have been in the company of heroes. Of all those heroes, he was the bravest I have ever known.”19 In another story, when recounting his early days in the war, Cap tells of his desire to serve with the troops rather than merely be a USO attraction for them: “I convinced the War Department that the only way I intended to cooperate was by taking the risks the others did. Those men didn’t have super-powers. They were the true heroes.”20 Cap’s Kantian modesty is clear in his recognition that his enhanced abilities don’t make him better than anyone else where it counts, in terms of dignity.

Tales of Modesty

Of course, Captain America regards everybody, not just soldiers, as equals. In the alternative future of The Chosen, a dying Steve Rogers passes his spirit to many who share the virtue of heroism, such as firefighters, doctors, teachers, and others: “Decent, caring people willing to sacrifice. Some of them are already heroes, although they don’t think of themselves that way. They insist they’re just doing their job.”21 In that respect, these people also share the virtue of modesty.

Clearly, it doesn’t take Super-Soldier Serum to share Captain America’s modesty. Instead, all it takes is a recognition that despite our differences in terms of strength, speed, intelligence, or good looks, when it gets down to it we are all the same, dealing with life’s ups and downs the best we can.22 It’s this sense of modesty that allows the CEO to wish Phil, the janitor in his building, a sincere “happy birthday” on his way home for the day, and the successful doctor to show compassion to her patients in the free clinic. As Kant wrote of the man of little acclaim, because of his dignity “he can measure himself with every other being of this kind and value himself on a footing of equality with them.”23 This goes for the successful person, too, as Captain America has shown us for over seventy years.24

NOTES

1 See, for instance, Julia Driver, “The Virtues of Ignorance,” Journal of Philosophy, 86 (1989), pp. 373–384.

2 Irene McMullin, “A Modest Proposal: Accounting for the Virtuousness of Modesty,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 60 (2010), pp. 783–784.

3 Amazing Spider-Man #519 (June 2005), reprinted in Amazing Spider-Man: New Avengers (2005). This behavior also applies to fellow heroes: When Hawkeye marveled at Cap’s skill with his shield and asks how he does it, Cap simply said, “Practice and passion, Clint. Just like you” (The Avengers, vol. 3, #75, February 2004, reprinted in Avengers: The Search for She-Hulk, 2010).

4 Captain America, vol. 3, #5 (May 1998), reprinted in Captain America: To Serve & Protect (2011).

5 There are also versions of egalitarianism that are politically oriented, arguing that people should be equal in certain ways, such as well-being or opportunity; for more on this, see Richard Arneson, “Egalitarianism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/egalitarianism/.

6 See, for instance, Captain America, vol. 1, #447 (January 1996), reprinted in Captain America: Operation Rebirth (2011).

7 Daniel Statman, “Modesty, Pride and Realistic Self-Assessment,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 42 (1992), p. 434

8 Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, “The Virtue of Modesty,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 30 (1990), p. 238.

9 Captain America Theater of War: To Soldier On (October 2009), reprinted in Captain America Theater of War (2010).

10 See Nancy Sherman, Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 48.

11 This egalitarianism also encompasses race and sex, of course. In the Captain America: Man Out of Time miniseries (2011), which recounts the days after the Avengers thawed Cap from the block of ice in which he’d been frozen since the 1940s, he is happy to see that women and African Americans are treated more equally than they were in “his day”—and is disappointed when he returns to the 1940s and confronts the racism and sexism that was much more prevalent then.

12 For more, see Steven Crowell, “Existentialism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/.

13 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), pp. 340–400.

14 It’s not a comic book (yet), but think of the final letter to the principal that is read at the end of the movie The Breakfast Club (1985), which lists all the roles (“a brain . . . athlete . . . basket case . . . princess . . . criminal”) that the five kids in detention were labeled with, and which they refused to accept.

15 These are the words of reporter Ben Urich upon seeing Cap give an order to Thor during an Avengers battle in Daredevil, vol. 1, #233 (August 1986).

16 “Must There Be a Captain America?” in Captain America #616 (May 2011).

17 McMullin, “A Modest Proposal,” p. 797.

18 Thomas E. Hill Jr., “Social Snobbery and Moral Dignity,” in Autonomy and Self-Respect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 170.

19 Captain America Theater of War: America the Beautiful (March 2009), reprinted in Captain America Theater of War.

20 Captain America: The Chosen #5 (February 2008), reprinted in Captain America: The Chosen (2008).

21 Captain America: The Chosen #6 (March 2008), reprinted in Captain America: The Chosen.

22 “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” as the good doctor wrote. (No, not you, Pym.)

23 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 435.

24 This essay is dedicated to the young soldier I met in an airport in April 2011, who after six months of service in Iraq was heading home to see his baby son for the first time.

Part Two

DC Superheroes

Chapter 3

IS SUPERMAN AN AMERICAN ICON?

Andrew Terjesen

Superman caused a bit of a stir in the real world when he announced, in the landmark 900th issue of Action Comics, that he was going to renounce his U.S. citizenship in the fictional DC Universe. One conservative activist told Fox News that Superman’s actions displayed a “blatant lack of patriotism” and that Superman was “belittling the United States as a whole.”1 Though this seems to be mostly an example of media overreaction during a slow news cycle, it does raise some important questions about Superman’s relationship to the United States, the “American way,” patriotism, and cosmopolitanism.

Before we address those questions, however, let’s get a simpler matter out of the way: even if this humble backup story in an oversized anniversary issue is taken to be canon or “in continuity,” it will have very little effect on anything. As almost everyone knows, the man we call Superman began life on the planet Krypton as Kal-El, the child of Jor-El and Lara, but was raised on Earth by Jonathan and Martha Kent as their son, Clark. As he grew, Kal-El developed amazing abilities under our yellow sun, but as Clark Kent he pretended to be an average human being (even wearing—gasp—glasses). Even though he now serves the people of Earth as Superman, Clark Kent is still the one who pays income taxes to the U.S. government, who renews his driver’s license in Metropolis, and who is married to Lois Lane.

Most important for our purposes, Clark Kent is the one who holds U.S. citizenship. Superman has no legal documentation with which to procure such legal status; his “long-form birth certificate” was destroyed with the rest of Krypton. Superman has no legal citizenship to give up, and unless Clark Kent renounces his citizenship, what Superman does is purely symbolic. So why has it caused such a stir?

Is Superman Giving Up on the American Way?

For decades, Superman has been seen as a distinctly American superhero; after all, he fights for “truth, justice, and the American way.” Although Superman has been famously associated with that phrase through his radio and television incarnations, it wasn’t always that way. The early radio programs stopped with “truth and justice.” The “American way” part was added in 1942 when the United States was in the thick of World War II.2 And it didn’t really become a popular phrase until the 1950s television show starring George Reeves.

Nonetheless, the idea that Superman is a distinctly American superhero deserves close scrutiny. What exactly is the “American way” that he is fighting for? It can’t be the same as “truth” or “justice,” because those are both listed as distinct concepts. Is it democracy, equality, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness? While one could argue that all of these concepts can be found throughout American history and literature, the particular notion of the “American way” as something that we need to fight for seems to have gained a lot of momentum in the mid-twentieth century, especially during the Cold War.

Since it was contrasted with the totalitarian communist government of the USSR, it should not be surprising that the “American way” was very strongly associated with capitalism and individual freedom. In 1955, the conservative thinker Will Herberg summed it up as follows:

The American Way of life is individualistic, dynamic, pragmatic. It affirms the supreme value and dignity of the individual; it stresses incessant activity on his part, for he is never to rest but is always to be striving to “get ahead”; it defines an ethic of self-reliance, merit, and character, and judges by achievement: “deeds, not creeds” are what count. . . . The American believes in progress, in self-improvement, and quite fanatically in education. But above all, the American is idealistic.3

This definition of the “American way” seems as good as any because it hits the same high points as most other discussions of “what makes America great.” Yet it does not identify anything that seems unique to America; certainly, we can find other countries that seek to protect individual dignity and promote self-reliance.

In a story that appeared just weeks after Action Comics #900 (albeit by a different writer), Superman explains what the American way means to him. After keeping the villain Livewire from destroying the Vegas Strip, Superman favors giving her a light sentence. Jimmy Olsen is outraged that Superman would turn a blind eye to the danger she had posed, but Superman answers him with a speech in defense of second chances:

That’s what America is about, really. That’s the American way. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—and second chances. None of us are forced to be anything we don’t want to be. . . . People from all over America—from all over the world—who went to the city to live the lives they wanted, to be the people they wanted to be. That’s the idea that America was founded on, but it’s not just for people born here. It’s for everyone.4

This statement dovetails very nicely with what Superman said when he threatened to renounce his citizenship: “I can’t help but see the bigger picture. I’ve been thinking too small. I realize that now.”5 Superman may have meant that the values of America are not limited to America, in which case it’s not clear why renouncing his citizenship is so controversial. Superman is just trying to show how universal those values are, and that there is no reason why one has to be an American in order to stand for them. If anything, renouncing his citizenship would serve as a message to the world that those values are for everyone.

My Country, Right or Wrong—But Mostly Right

In giving up his American citizenship, Superman appears to be denying exceptionalism, the belief that one nation—in this case, the United States—is qualitatively superior in some way to other nations. Perhaps Superman’s critics could take solace in the fact that he is not defecting, nor is he choosing to ally with another nation; he’s simply saying that America is no more important to him than any other nation. It shouldn’t be so offensive to say that all nations are equal, but some critics are worried about how Superman’s actions could undermine young children’s belief in American exceptionalism—in other words, their patriotism.

Contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre explores the ethics of patriotism in a short book entitled Is Patriotism a Virtue?6 MacIntyre points out that true patriotism has to involve a nonrational commitment to one’s country, since there can’t be a legitimate reason why one’s country is superior to all others. If America actually were the only place where equality could be achieved, then one would have a good reason to defend it—but it’s not. Someone who only supports their country when it is in the right is considered a fair-weather citizen to the “true patriot,” who believes in “my country—right or wrong.” Patriots are committed to their country because it is their country and for no other reason. Since patriotism requires people to support their country even when it does the wrong thing, it seems as if patriotism is morally wrong. The fact that one was born or lives in a particular geographic location is not morally relevant when judging its actions. It would be wrong to excuse somebody’s behavior just because he or she is our neighbor, so why should excusing one’s country in the name of patriotism be any different?

MacIntyre suggests there is a reason why patriotism is different. We need a community to embody and pass on our values, and real communities are preserved only if people are dedicated to the community as a community, rather than as an ideal or based on the benefits of being a member of that community. If people love something other than their community (or country), then someday they may choose that thing over their community. People who fight for a country just because they are paid to do so are mercenaries, and they have no problem switching sides if it serves their interests (Lex Luthor is a classic example). A similar problem exists with communities dedicated to achieving certain ideals, like spreading democracy: Groups that are dedicated to a cause will cease to be once that cause is achieved. For a community to be stable enough to produce generations and generations of mature adults, it needs to be dedicated to self-preservation, valuing its particular social structure (warts and all) and striving to protect it.

The “irrationality” of patriotism is precisely what concerns many modern thinkers and causes them to question its value. We can certainly see some of the excesses of patriotism. For instance, not everyone who fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War was trying to preserve the institution of slavery. Some were patriots trying to preserve the way of life in their states, and preserving that way of life meant preserving both the good and the bad parts of it. This may be what Superman meant when he talked about thinking small: Patriots tend to focus on preserving their country even if it is not a good thing for the rest of the world. From the perspective of an alien, the conflicts between America and Europe, or America and China, can seem like petty squabbles.

Can Superman Be a Citizen of the World?

The idea that we should think in global terms is known as cosmopolitanism, a word that combines the Greek words for the world (cosmos) and city-state (polis). Cosmopolitans are people who see themselves as part of a worldwide community and who try to experience and understand the larger world. As a philosophical view, cosmopolitanism is the idea that we should organize society in order to create such a worldwide community. Nations should be united under a single governing body that resolves disputes peacefully through dialogue and a commitment to a shared set of values. The United Nations and its predecessor, the League of Nations, are both products of cosmopolitan philosophy. Cosmopolitanism represents a range of views: some cosmopolitans think we simply need a set of rules that govern international politics, while others believe we should work toward a society in which national affiliations are incidental and we’re all global citizens following the same laws and answering to the same institutions. Despite their differences, however, cosmopolitans all embrace global unity among the nations of the world as a means toward peace.

Superman’s decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship seems to reflect a very moderate form of cosmopolitanism. When explaining his decision to the American President’s national security adviser, he says, “Truth, justice and the American way—it’s not enough anymore. The world’s too small. Too connected.”7 It seems that Superman is acknowledging that modern technology has made it almost impossible to be isolated from one another. Our actions affect people all over the world, and as a result we need to stop focusing only on our national self-interest. Superman knows that we can’t become cosmopolitans overnight, but his symbolic renunciation of American citizenship can inspire people around the world to come together as fellow human beings and stop treating each other merely as Americans, Russians, Chinese, and so forth.

One example of the subtle ways in which the world is becoming more cosmopolitan is that cultural influences are easily spread through the internet and other media. Superman has fans all around the world who like to read his comics and watch his movies. In terms of the real world, Superman’s cosmopolitan decision could be interpreted simply as DC Comics attempting to appeal to the global market for Superman stuff. Less cynically, though, one blogger said, “It’s refreshing to see an alien refugee tell the United States that it’s as important to him as any other country on Earth—which, in turn, is as important to Superman as any other planet in the multiverse.”8 Whether intended or not, American exceptionalism implies international inferiority. Patriotism will always be a barrier to international cooperation. If people around the world can find shared interests and shared values—even in the form of Superman—then maybe they can progress to a point where cooperation is common and patriotism recedes into the background.

Cosmopolitanism Then and Now

Many of the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics endorsed a cosmopolitan worldview according to which the entire universe was a sentient and rational being that made sure everything happened in a rational manner.9 From the Stoic point of view, patriotism was exactly what Superman described—a narrow perspective that neglected the larger God’s-eye picture of the universe. Endorsing a strong form of cosmopolitanism, the Stoics sought to supplant particular cultures with a universal rational culture.

In his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, contemporary philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues for a modern form of cosmopolitanism.10 Instead of claiming that we are all part of one rational being or creature, like the Stoics did, Appiah appeals to the fact that we need to be responsible for the effects our actions have on people around the world. Appiah emphasizes connectedness, like the Stoics did, but he does not appeal to a single standard of the good. Instead, Appiah embraces the idea that there is more than one way to live a good life, and explains that cosmopolitanism has to find a way to balance the interconnectedness of peoples, and the obligations between them, with mutual respect for their differences.

Critics of cosmopolitanism fear that respecting everyone else’s life choices would create a community based entirely on twentysomething hipster irony. Instead of patriotically defending their community from threats, people would “patriotically” defend their community, going through the motions but not really believing that it was truly worth saving. Since the members of the community can’t fully commit emotionally to its defense, it is likely that they would not fight as vigorously as they otherwise would. Moreover, they would not be able to transmit any standards to new members of the community. In the end, a lack of patriotism means a lack of cultural preservation, and since MacIntyre claims that every moral system is embedded in a culture, a lack of culture would mean a lack of morality. MacIntyre does not say, however, that this is proof that we need to be patriots. Rather, he raises the issue of how we balance the problems of overzealous patriotism (or jingoism) with the dangers of having no commitments that are beyond question.

Despite what some commentators in the media may say, Superman has not rejected America. His renunciation of citizenship is a symbolic denial of American exceptionalism, but it is not an abandonment of America or the values that it—but not it alone—represents and promotes. If he truly wanted to make a break from the American way of life Superman would need to renounce his citizenship and reveal his secret identity. He would need to renounce being Clark Kent. As long as Clark Kent still lives in Metropolis, Superman will favor Metropolis and the country in which it is located. He can claim to be a citizen of the world, but it’s not really true. He still has commitments to a particular part of the world that make him more involved in its way of life. But if Superman’s actions are not meant as a repudiation of America or an endorsement of strong cosmopolitanism, then what is he trying to accomplish?

The Appearance of Impropriety

In all of the brouhaha (as opposed to “bwa-ha-ha”) surrounding Superman’s decision, very little attention has been paid to the context in which he says he is surrendering his citizenship. In Action Comics #900, we see Superman talking to the U.S. national security adviser, who is very upset because Superman created a national incident when he traveled to Tehran to support antigovernment protesters. Rather than throw his weight around, he took no actions against the government forces, even when it seemed that they would hurt the protesters. Instead he merely stood in the public square for twenty-four hours in tacit support of the protesters. The Iranian government nonetheless interpreted this as the American government, acting through Superman, supporting the protesters, and voilà—we have an international incident and further erosion in U.S.-Iranian relations.

Superman feels compelled to renounce his citizenship because as long as the most powerful being on the planet appears to be affiliated with a particular government or nation, he is always seen as acting in its best interests rather than those of the world in general. As he says, “I’m tired of having my actions construed as instruments of U.S. policy.” Superman sought to be a moral force in Iran, putting pressure on both the government and the protesters to resolve their issues peacefully. But in order to exert moral authority he needs to demonstrate the essential traits of a moral person, especially impartiality.

In today’s world we tend to think of an impartial person as having an abstract point of view that transcends any particular feelings, like someone who does not get upset when he sees a couple send their only child into space before their planet explodes (just an example, of course). There is, however, another way to think about impartiality. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, philosopher Adam Smith (1723–1790) proposed a theory of moral judgment that hinged upon what he called the “impartial spectator,” but this meaning of “impartial” is not unemotional.11 Instead, Smith’s sense of “impartial” simply refers to someone who does not have a particular interest in the outcome nor any connections to anyone who is affected by the outcome. Notice that Smith did not call for us to imagine an “unemotional spectator.” In fact, Smith thought that our emotions conveyed important information, although our emotions need to be pure in order to give us the right picture of the situation. If we are personally interested in the outcome, we might not feel the right way about it.

Whenever we think that someone has a particular interest in something, we begin to question their judgments on that topic. As one blogger pointed out, as long as Superman is viewed as a U.S. citizen “it would indeed be impossible for a nigh-omnipotent being ideologically aligned with America to intercede against injustice beyond American borders without creating enormous political fallout for the U.S. government.”12 Anything that Superman did that had indirect benefits for the U.S. government would be called into question. Superman’s presence in Tehran could be viewed as support for a democratic movement, or it could be viewed as an American attempt to destabilize an unfriendly government.13 So the question we need to consider is whether Superman should feel morally obligated to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

To answer this question we need to recognize that impropriety is an unavoidable fact of life if one is to maintain any commitments or close ties at all. Rival newspapers undoubtedly think that Superman is “in bed with” the Daily Planet, but the fact that he often grants them interviews and that they tend to portray him in a favorable light is more a function of his close contact with the members of the staff (one in particular). If we want to avoid the appearance of impropriety altogether, we would need to shun any commitments that would produce normal associations. That, of course, is impossible, since our connections and associations are part of who we are.

Even so, Superman does have a moral responsibility to make sure that he is not too closely involved with the American government. In many professions, conflicts of interest are dealt with by creating a so-called “Chinese wall” that blocks the flow of information between different parts of an organization. Superman needs to maintain a wall between himself and the U.S. government so that he does not appear to be receiving national secrets or taking marching orders from the President. He doesn’t want to appear to be a secret tool of American policy like he did in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. (That didn’t turn out so well, did it?)

Act Locally, Think Globally

Superman is inescapably an American icon in that he is deeply embedded in American society. More accurately, he’s an icon who happens to be American. To some extent he will always favor America, but not because there is any clear set of distinctly American values that only America promotes or embodies. Still, Superman has to avoid creating the impression that his commitment to America is also a commitment to U.S. foreign policy and its national interests. So the symbolic gesture of renouncing his citizenship might help in distancing himself from the American government in people’s minds.

The renunciation is not enough on its own, however. Superman needs to show that he does not take national interest into consideration when he acts, and the best way to do that would be to spend more time helping on a global scale.14 Appiah’s modern cosmopolitanism encourages us to broaden our perspective without giving up the culture that makes us who we are. Superman can affect the world in ways that far exceed Appiah’s examples of interconnectedness, so the argument for cosmopolitanism is much more compelling for Superman. If nothing else, the symbolic act of renouncing his citizenship would help Superman to think like a modern cosmopolitan when he looks at the world’s problems—or, as the bumper sticker says, he should act locally while thinking globally.

NOTES

1 Hollie McKay, “Superman Renounced his U.S. Citizenship in the 900th issue of Action Comics.” FoxNews.com, April 28, 2011. http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2011/04/28/superman-renounces-citizenship-00th-issue/.

2 Brian Cronin, “Comic Book Legends Revealed #276,” September 3, 2010. http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2010/09/03/comic-book-legends-revealed-276/.

3 Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 79.

4 Superman #711 (July 2011).

5 Action Comics #900 (June 2011).

6 Alasdair MacIntyre, Is Patriotism a Virtue? (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1984).

7 Action Comics #900.

8 Scott Thill, “Superman Defies God, USA in Action Comics’ Landmark 900th Issue,” Wired.com, April 27, 2011. http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/04/action-comics-900/.

9 See Pauline Kleingeld and Eric Brown, “Cosmopolitanism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmopolitanism/, especially section 1.1 (“Greek and Roman Cosmopolitanism”).

10 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).

11 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A. Miller, 1759). Available at http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS.html.

12 Laura Hudson, “Superman Renounces U.S. Citizenship in Action Comics #900,” April 27, 2011. http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/04/27/superman-renounces-us-citizenship/.

13 As Mark D. White has pointed out (http://www.comicsprofessor.com/2011/04/on-supermans-renouncing-his-us-citizenship-in-action-comics-900.html), Superman’s efforts to detach himself from the United States might also be intended to protect American citizens from retaliation for his actions.

14 If the renunciation was for our benefit, it wouldn’t be the first time Superman did something that was largely symbolic for our benefit. In Superman: Peace on Earth (1999), Superman spends a day trying to feed the hungry around the world. He knows that his efforts alone can’t eliminate hunger, but he hopes that his attempt to do will inspire others to pay attention to the problem.

Chapter 4

THE BLACKEST NIGHT FOR ARISTOTLE’S ACCOUNT OF EMOTIONS

Jason Southworth

Since 2005’s Green Lantern: Rebirth, writer Geoff Johns has told a series of stories leading up to Blackest Night, introducing to the DC Universe a series of six previously unknown color corps in addition to the classic green: red (rage), orange (avarice), yellow (fear), blue (hope), indigo (compassion), and violet (love).1 The members of each corps see the emotion they represent as the most important one and believe that acting out of that emotion is the only appropriate way to behave. The Green Lanterns, on the other hand, represent the triumph of willpower or reason over emotion and seek to overcome and stifle these emotional states.2

The conflict between the various lantern corps, while providing an interesting series of stories, also sets the stage for thinking about one of the most long-standing questions in ethics: What role should emotion play in moral reasoning?

Color-Coded Morality

With the exception of the Indigo Lanterns (who don’t speak a language that can be translated by a Green Lantern power ring, much less your average comics reader), the representatives of the new color corps all make the case that acting out their sections of the emotional spectrum is the only way to achieve justice. Let’s consider the ways these Lanterns make their cases for a morality driven by a single emotion.

The first of the new color corps to make itself known to the DC Universe was the Sinestro Corps. Led by the renegade Green Lantern after whom it takes its name, this corps embodies the yellow light of fear. Since the days when he was a Green Lantern, Sinestro has argued that people do the right thing only when they fear the consequences if they don’t. It was this principle that led Sinestro to force the residents of his home world, Korugar, to live in fear of his wrath.3 While this might seem extreme, Sinestro has shown us time and time again that fear is a strong motivator. For instance, when he decided that the Green Lanterns needed to change the Laws of Oa to allow Lanterns to kill, he was able to make the Guardians so afraid that they did as he wished.4 When discussing Sinestro’s motivations, some may say that while he wants others to act out of fear, he holds himself exempt from this standard. But a closer look shows that Sinestro’s turn to fear came from his own fears of a prophecy relayed to him by Atrocitus, which said that Korugar would fall into a state of chaos from riots and a violent coup if nothing was done to prevent it.5

Like the Sinestro Corps, the Violet Lantern Corps was started by a long-time Green Lantern villain, Star Sapphire. Actually, Star Sapphire is not a person, but an alien gem that possesses the person desired most by Hal Jordan; more often than not, that person is Carol Ferris (his sometimes employer and love interest).6 Let’s set aside the fact that violet light is powering a person whose name refers to a blue gem—and whose costume is pink—and move on to a discussion of the Violet Lanterns’ emotional focus. Violet Lanterns, just like John Lennon, will tell you that love is all you need. The leaders of this corps, the Zamarons (a group of female former Guardians), appear to believe that the only appropriate way to reason is to act on one’s feelings of love. For instance, the Guardian Scar says that “to believe that love will save the universe is naïve and irresponsible,” to which Queen Aga’po of the Zamarons responds, “That is your misguided, and dare I say it, irrational opinion.”7 Scar’s claim is deemed irrational because she used something other than love to arrive at it. The goal of the corps is clear: to “wield the violet light energy of love” and “convert all to their way of light.”8 They are so committed to this conversion that they go as far as to kidnap members of the Sinestro Corps and imprison them until they come to see (or are brainwashed to see, according to Green Lantern Arisia) the way of the Star Sapphire Corps.9 When reasoning means acting out of love, rather than intellect or some other emotion, there doesn’t seem to be much room for compromise.

The rage of the Red Lanterns is grounded in a belief that great injustices often go unpunished. The founder of the Red Lantern Corps, Atrocitus, experienced a life filled with such injustices. The Manhunters, the Guardians’ initial attempt at an intergalactic police force, concluded that the only way to prevent chaos from consuming the universe was to destroy all life—this led to the murder of all but a handful of people in Atrocitus’s space sector.10 Atrocitus and the other survivors of the massacre attempted to enact justice (or vengeance) on the Guardians for what they had done, and the Guardians responded by imprisoning them. From these experiences, Atrocitus now sees emotionless reasoning—the decision process of the Guardians—as responsible for the destruction of his home world.

Rage is all that Atrocitus feels after centuries of imprisonment, and it alone compels him to act. By his reasoning, emotions other than rage are bad, as they are likely to lead to passivity in the face of injustice by causing us to be concerned with the consequences of our actions. When Atrocitus is reborn as a Red Lantern on Ysmault he blames the Guardians for their sins, which “stretch back eons.”11 All he has left is rage, “the red light [which] is violent action with no consideration for consequence. It is uncontrollable.”12 Atrocitus’s rejection of other emotions can be seen in his interactions with members of the other corps; for instance, he rejects the power of hope, saying to Blue Lantern Saint Walker, “You wield coalesced hope. Empty prayers. Disembodied faith.”13

Perhaps the most surprising emotion that one might advocate as the proper impetus for action is avarice. Larfleeze, the only Orange Lantern (except for Lex Luthor’s brief stint in Blackest Night #6–8, 2010), explains his commitment to greed, talking to himself in Green Lantern, vol. 4, #39 (March 2009). Speaking about the Controllers, the creators of the Darkstars (an earlier alternative to the Green Lantern Corps), he says, “They want to protect the universe their own way. You can’t protect anything that big! You can only protect what you can hold.” Larfleeze’s point seems to be that ownership motivates people to protect things, a common point made in discussions of private property.

Another strange case is that of hope. The Blue Lantern Corps was founded by Ganthet and Sayd in the hopes of preventing the Blackest Night.14 Given the involvement of these well-spoken former Guardians, you might wrongly expect that they make the reasoned case for hope’s importance. Unfortunately, all we are told is that hope is the most powerful emotion, and that those who wear the blue ring are the saints of the universe.15 These aren’t really arguments, but assertions. These Lanterns don’t have an argument for hope being the most significant emotion—instead, what they have is hope that it is. Similarly, these Lanterns never give reasons why they think they will succeed in their goals; instead, they speak of hope that they will.

Despite not being able to give reasons for the supremacy of hope, the Blue Lanterns still try to dominate the other corps. When Hal Jordan asks Ganthet if he created the Blue Corps to replace “us,” meaning the Green Lanterns, Ganthet responds, “No. To aid you.”16 This suggests that the Blue Corps see a place for the two corps to coexist, but then they immediately try to talk Hal into leaving the Green Lanterns for their corps. Additionally, within the first few pages of our meeting the first Blue Lantern, Saint Walker, he uses his ring to soothe the anger he senses in another Green Lantern from Earth, John Stewart.17 In the end, it seems that while the Blue Lanterns aren’t openly hostile toward the Green Lanterns, hope still tries to dominate the green light.

Finding the Perfect Mean: A Job for Golden Lanterns?

While the representatives of the various color corps are able to make convincing cases for the moral significance of their emotions (or at least hope for that significance), philosophers stop short of defending the relevance of a single emotion over all others. Beginning with Plato (circa 428–348 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE), philosophers have argued that our emotions interact with reason when we engage in moral deliberation.

While Aristotle saw emotions as significant, he understood them very differently than do the members of the color corps, and this understanding is integral to his moral philosophy. For Aristotle, morality is all about becoming a particular kind of person—someone with a well-rounded character and the practical wisdom to recognize the right thing to do in any situation. Aristotle recognized that emotions have a strong influence on our actions, and, realizing their power, he thought carefully about the best way to harness them into service of the good. Emotions are not individual character traits, but rather exist on a series of spectrums. For any emotion, there are two extremes—an excess of the emotion at one end and a deficit of it at the other. In between is just the right amount of that emotion, which Aristotle called a virtue, and the goal of those striving to be good people is to harness this just-right amount of emotion.18

Aristotle thought that the key to achieving the proper amount of each emotion is reason, which gives moral agents the guidance needed to temper their emotions and to use them in service of the good. Without reason, agents will act in service of their own appetites, controlled by their passions rather than by a desire to do good.19 Reason is the cool, unemotional component of our psyches that can carefully assess each situation and determine how much of each emotion is called for. Consider this analogy from Plato: Just as a general is the person in charge, directing his soldiers who do the legwork, so reason should direct the emotions, which provide the motivating force for the action. Just as with the general and the soldiers, both reason and emotion are essential, but the person, like the army, will function well only if reason is in charge.20

Let’s think about this in terms of an example: the virtue of courage, which is the perfect midpoint between the extreme emotions (or vices) of foolhardiness and cowardice. It is good to act decisively in the face of fear, while running away from battles you are capable of fighting is cowardly and charging headlong into situations you can’t handle is foolhardy. Reason tells us when we can handle a frightening situation and when the wise action is to back away. In other words, acting from either extreme is intemperate. Once you are able to use reason to consistently hit the sweet spot—the “Golden Mean”—you possess the virtue of that mean, in this case, courage.21

For Aristotelians, the first mistake made by all of the color corps is that they are all acting in excess, something even the characters recognize about one another. Take the following exchange between Atrocitus and Sinestro in Green Lantern, vol. 4, #36 (January 2009):

Atrocitus: You believe fear to be the most powerful force in the universe? Fear is inaction. Fear is hiding away. Fear is cowering and begging. Rage is action. Rage is spilling blood.

Sinestro: Rage is uncontrollable.

Both observations bear out when we look at the Green Lantern comics. The beings Sinestro and his corps instill with fear are unable to act; even Green Lanterns can’t use their power rings when they are afraid. Meanwhile, Atrocitus’s rage makes him unfocused. He is so busy fuming and fighting that he misses several opportunities to do what he has set out to do—kill Sinestro and the Guardians. Similarly, the Violet Lantern Fatality removes her former enemy, Green Lantern John Stewart, from battle in an attempt to show him love and forgiveness; however, this renders Stewart unable to save his fellow Green Lanterns, whom he cares for deeply.22 Fatality’s single-minded devotion to love prevents her from recognizing that other elements and emotions are at play. Fatality’s focus on love to the exclusion of all other considerations enrages Stewart and causes him to reject her, because it resulted in his failure to help people he cared about.

The Rainbow of Emotions and the Prism of the Will

The second mistake made by the members of the color corps, if we follow Aristotle’s account, is that by acting out of a single emotion, they fail to see the interrelation of emotions and the unity of the virtues. According to Aristotle, if you have one of the virtues, then you have them all, and his explanation for this involves reason and judgment. In order to always hit the Golden Mean between emotional extremes, you must possess prudence, or right judgment. Without prudence, while you might still occasionally hit the Mean, you do not fully possess the virtue. With right judgment, you will always reason your way to hitting the mark, and if you have reason enough to do this for one of the virtues, then you have reason enough to do it all of the time (although this will take some practice).23

Aristotle is obviously correct that emotions are interrelated, something the color corps fail to acknowledge. On an intuitive level, we can see the interrelation between emotions in the lives of several of the corps’ leaders. In the case of Atrocitus, love for his family and his species, along with hope that the Guardians would be brought to justice, led to the development of his rage. In the case of Sinestro, love for his home world and avarice about being the best Green Lantern led to his use of fear to keep his home world free of crime.

Looking at the color corps stories as allegories, we can also see plenty of evidence to suggest that reason alone is not sufficient for moral decision-making. The most significant evidence for this is that the primary hero of the stories, Hal Jordan, invariably puts on one of the rings of the new corps in order to defeat the enemy he is facing. When fighting the Sinestro Corps, Hal puts on several yellow rings. When fighting Larfleeze, it is the combined use of the blue and green rings that enables him to defeat the Orange Lantern.24 While these moments are exciting for fanboys, we can also see that it is only when the emotions are channeled through the will or reason of the green ring that Hal can win the day. Similarly, throughout the Blackest Night miniseries, we see that the new Black Lanterns (the reanimated corpses of fallen heroes, villains, and loved ones) can be injured only when they are attacked by a Green Lantern’s light combined with any other color of the emotional spectrum. Again, it seems that reason and emotion are both needed, although ultimately emotion is subservient to reason, as Aristotle recommended.

Aristotle’s account of the role of emotions in ethics is not just an indictment of the single-minded emotional approaches of the new corps, but also of the Green Lantern Corps’ exclusive focus on will over emotion. Going back to the example of courage, you will recall that acting with no fear is considered vicious. As a person accustomed to thinking of Green Lanterns as heroes, this should shock you. After all, Hal Jordan, the quintessential Lantern, is prone to saying that he’s not afraid of anything. But Aristotle is clear: If an individual literally has no fear, he can’t be a good person. Consider also that the new third law in the Book of Oa forbids physical relations and love between Green Lanterns, implying that Green Lanterns are often required to ignore these feelings when making decisions.25 For Aristotle, will alone isn’t enough, since it is simply a prism through which emotion needs to be filtered in order to get to right action.

John Stuart Mill’s Green Approach to Emotion and Reason

Aristotle gives us good reason to reject the single-minded emotional approaches of the color corps. Does agreeing with Aristotle on that point mean that we must adopt his specific approach to morality, especially his claim about the unity of the virtues? Since this would require us to see the Green Lantern Corps in a negative light as well, it is a good thing that the answer is no.

Another option, more sympathetic to the Green Lantern Corps, can be found in the moral theory known as utilitarianism. Rather than focusing on a range of emotions from the outset, utilitarianism begins with the belief that the right action is the one that maximizes happiness and minimizes suffering for everyone impacted by it. Morality, in this view, is focused on producing good consequences and avoiding bad ones. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), one of the founders of utilitarianism, advises us to achieve this goal by approaching moral decisions from the perspective of a “benevolent, disinterested spectator,” concerned equally for everyone’s well-being, with no special consideration given to one’s own preferences or to the interest of loved ones.26 It was in an attempt to develop such disinterested spectators to police the universe that the Guardians created the robotic police force, the Manhunters.

Many criticize utilitarianism as being too far removed from human emotion, requiring the evaluator to be a detached observer. If this criticism sounds familiar, it is because it is often leveled against the Guardians as well (in fact, Atrocitus did so earlier in this chapter). So common is this criticism that Mill takes the time to specifically address and respond to it. He argues that the important thing is not the motivation for action, but merely the result, which makes sense if all you are concerned about is consequences. Many people will do the right action for emotional reasons, and that is not a problem in this theory, since the important thing is that good consequences be maximized. Mill thinks the most reliable way to get that result is through dispassionate reason, but he recognizes that there is more than one way to achieve the goal and advocates using whatever method necessary to get there.27 It was the failure of the Guardians to account for emotion in the programming of the Manhunters that led the robot police force to attempt to wipe all life from the Vega system; it’s also what led them to create the Green Lantern Corps. They realized that the best candidates to police a universe full of emotional individuals are beings who understand emotion but strive to overcome it, as Green Lanterns do.

Where the Guardians fail is not in being detached observers, as Green Lanterns like Guy Gardner often argue; rather, they fail in their assumption that they are, in fact, wholly detached. The Guardians, like all other species in the universe, are emotional beings, even if they wish they were not. Often, they make big decisions out of fear. As Sinestro points out, the decision to approve lethal force against Sinestro Corps members was made out of fear.28 Likewise, when they agreed to let Larfleeze keep his orange ring so long as he stayed in the Vega system, it was because they were afraid of having the power at large in the universe.29 On the lighter side of the emotional spectrum, Ganthet and Sayd made it clear that Guardians are capable of emotion when, out of hope, they left to form the Blue Lantern Corps.30

Mill acknowledges that even the best utilitarian will have other motivations besides utility: “Ninety-nine hundredths of all our actions are done from other motives, and rightly so.”31 However, he cautions that good agents will be aware of the impact of these other motivations and guard against them when engaging in moral decision-making, where they can be detrimental. The Guardians are great at manipulating the emotions of others for positive consequences (for example, by exploiting Larfleeze’s desire to kill a Guardian by promising him one of their own if he will help them defeat Nekron).32 Still, they would have done well to also apply this principle to themselves. Given that they are clearly emotional beings, they should recognize their own emotions and take them into account when computing their moral calculus. If the Guardians were more self-aware, they could have recognized that Scar was in the midst of a breakdown after her battle with the Anti-Monitor, and could have acted to prevent her actions that caused the Blackest Night.33

Triumph of the Will

So, where does this leave us? While at first it seemed that the new color corps posed interesting alternatives to the Green Lantern Corps, ultimately they all fall flat. The criticism of these single-emotional approaches from Aristotle, and the characters themselves, show that ultimately something other than just one emotion is needed in our moral decision-making process. While Aristotle’s theory offers one way to approach morality with an understanding of emotion and reason, it criticizes the Green Lantern Corps just as much as the other corps. The alternative approach to moral reasoning offered by utilitarianism offers a way to understand the role of emotion in moral reasoning that is more in line with our intuition that the Green Lantern Corps and the Guardians are getting it right. Not only does this theory allow us to see the Green Lanterns as heroes, but the debate regarding the appropriate amount of emotion in moral reasoning lets us account for the moral growth of the Guardians from their creation of the Manhunters to their realization, only recently, of the emotion within themselves. Now that the Guardians have recognized themselves as emotional beings, they will be able to move forward in a clearer way in their mission to protect the universe.34

NOTES

1. White and black corps have also been introduced, but since they represent life and death, rather than emotions, they will not be discussed in this chapter.

2. The way the green light is discussed in the comics can be a little confusing. When the emotional spectrum is discussed, the green light is included, suggesting that it should be understood as an emotion. At other times it is discussed as the ability to overcome fear (when a green ring approaches a new candidate for the corps, for instance). There is a long tradition in philosophy of referring to man’s ability to reason as his will, and it is in this tradition that we can best understand what the Green Lantern Corps represents. My discussion of the Corps and the Guardians in the last section of this chapter offers some textual (read: comic book) support for this position.

3. This first came to light in Green Lantern, vol. 2, #7 (July–August 1961), reprinted in black and white in Showcase Presents Green Lantern Volume One (2005) and in color in The Green Lantern Chronicles Volume Two (2009). For a full account of Sinestro’s actions on Korugar and the fallout from them, see Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn II (1991).

4. Sinestro explains this to Hal Jordan in Green Lantern, vol. 4, #26 (February 2008), reprinted in Green Lantern: Rage of the Red Lanterns (2009).

5. Green Lantern, vol. 4, #35 (November 2008), reprinted in Green Lantern: Secret Origin (2008). For more discussion of Sinestro’s motivations and how they might be justified, see Dryden’s chapter “The Greatest Green Lantern” in this volume.

6. The character of Star Sapphire actually goes all the way back to the Golden Age, making her/its first appearance in All-Flash Comics #32 (October–November 1947); her first Silver Age appearance (as Carol Ferris) was in Green Lantern, vol. 2, #16 (October 1962), reprinted in Showcase Presents Green Lantern Volume One.

7. Green Lantern Corps, vol. 2, #30 (January 2009), reprinted in Green Lantern Corps: Sins of the Star Sapphire (2009).

8. Blackest Night #0 (May 2009).

9. Ibid.

10. Green Lantern, vol. 4, #33 (July 2008), reprinted in Green Lantern: Secret Origin.

11. Final Crisis: Rage of the Red Lanterns (October 2008), reprinted in Green Lantern: Rage of the Red Lanterns.

12. Ibid.

13. Green Lantern, vol. 4, #38 (February 2009), reprinted in Green Lantern: Rage of the Red Lanterns.

14. Green Lantern, vol. 4, #25 (January 2008), reprinted in Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War, Volume 2 (2008).

15. Green Lantern, vol. 4, #26 (February 2008), reprinted in Green Lantern: Rage of the Red Lanterns.

16. Green Lantern, vol. 4, #36 (January 2009), reprinted in Green Lantern: Rage of the Red Lanterns.

17. Ibid.

18. A minor point, but one worth mentioning, is that Aristotle had a much more expansive list of emotions than discussed in the current Green Lantern storylines. While the Green Lantern list has just six (plus will), Aristotle not only takes there to be three emotions for every domain (cowardice, foolhardiness, and courage in the domain of fear, for example), he also has a more robust understanding of the domains of emotion, including things like a desire to please others and reaction to the success of others.

19. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2:3–4.

20. Plato lays out this theory in detail in Book IV of the Republic.

21. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2:10–12.

22. Green Lantern, vol. 4, #42 (June 2009), reprinted in Green Lantern: Agent Orange (2009).

23. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 6: 12–13.

24. Green Lantern, vol. 4, #42.

25. Green Lantern Corps, vol. 2, #31 (December 2008), reprinted in Green Lantern Corps: Sins of the Star Sapphire. For more on that law and the relationships between emotion and reason, the chapter by Donovan and Richardson in this volume.

26. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1863/1906), 25.

27. Ibid., 26–28.

28. Green Lantern, vol. 4, #26.

29. Green Lantern, vol. 4, #41 (May 2009), reprinted in Green Lantern: Agent Orange.

30. Green Lantern, vol. 4, #25.

31. Mill, Utilitarianism, 26.

32. Green Lantern, vol. 4, #48 (November 2009), reprinted in Blackest Night: Green Lantern (2010).

33. Green Lantern Corps, vol. 2, #28 (April 2010), reprinted in Green Lantern Corps: Sins of the Star Sapphire.

34. I would like to thank Ruth Tallman for her helpful comments on this chapter.

Chapter 5

WHY DOESN’T BATMAN KILL THE JOKER?

Mark D. White

Meet the Joker

In the last several decades, the Joker has transformed himself from the Clown Prince of Crime to a heinous murderer without rival. Most notoriously, he killed the second Robin, Jason Todd, beating him to a bloody pulp before blowing him up. He shot and killed Lieutenant Sarah Essen, Commissioner Jim Gordon’s second wife—in front of dozens of infants, no less, whom he threatened to kill in order to lure Essen to him. Years earlier, the Joker shot Barbara Gordon—Jim Gordon’s adopted daughter and the former Batgirl—in the spine, paralyzing her from the waist down, and then tormented Jim with pictures of her lying prone, naked and bleeding. And let us not forget countless ordinary citizens of Gotham City—the Joker even wiped out all of his own henchmen recently!1

Every time the Joker breaks out of Arkham Asylum, he commits depraved crimes—the type that philosopher Joel Feinberg (1926-2004) calls “sick! sick! sick!,” or “triple-sick.”2 Of course Batman inevitably catches the Joker and puts him back through the “revolving door” at Arkham.3 Batman knows that the Joker will escape, and that he will likely kill again unless the Caped Crusader can prevent it—which, obviously, he can’t always do.

So why doesn’t Batman just kill the Joker? Think of all the lives it would save! Better yet, think of all the lives it would have saved had he done the deed years ago, just among Batman’s closest friends and partners. Commissioner Gordon has contemplated killing the Joker himself on several occasions, and Batman is usually the one to stop him.4 In a terrifically revealing scene during the Hush storyline, Batman is this close to offing the Joker, and it is Jim who stops him. Batman asks Jim, “How many more lives are we going to let him ruin?” to which Jim replies, “I don’t care. I won’t let him ruin yours.”5

So though he may have considered it on many occasions, Batman has never killed the Joker, decidedly his most homicidal enemy. Of course, with the exception of his very earliest cases, Batman has refused to kill at all, usually saying that if he kills, it would make him as bad as the criminals he is sworn to fight. But that seems almost selfish—someone could very well say, “Hey—it’s not about you, Bats!” Or . . . is it? Should it be? Usually we think a person is obligated to do something that would benefit many people, but what if that “something” is committing murder? Which is more important, doing good—or not doing wrong? (Ugh—Alfred, we need some aspirin here.)

In this chapter, we’ll consider the ethics of killing to prevent future killings, exactly the problem Batman faces when he balances his personal moral code against the countless lives that he could save. In fact, this issue has been raised many times, very recently by both the villain Hush and Jason Todd himself (returned from the dead), and earlier by Jean-Paul Valley (the “Knightfall” Batman), none of whom have the strict moral code that Batman adheres to.6 I’ll do this by introducing some famous philosophical thought experiments that let us trace through the ethics of a situation by whittling it down to its most basic elements, just like Batman solving a cleverly plotted crime. (Well, not quite, but you have to let a guy dream!)

Is Batman a Utilitarian or Deontologist? (Or None of the Above?)

The argument in favor of killing the Joker is fairly straightforward—if Batman kills the Joker, he would prevent all the murders the Joker would otherwise commit in the future. This rationale is typical of utilitarianism, a system of ethics that requires us to maximize the total happiness or well-being resulting from our actions.7 Saving many lives at the cost of just one would represent a net increase in well-being or utility, and while it would certainly be a tragic choice, utilitarians would generally endorse it. (We could add more considerations, such as satisfying the quest for vengeance on the part of the families of his past victims, or the unhappiness it brings to some people when anyone is killed, but let’s keep things simple—for now.)

Superheroes, however, generally are not utilitarians. Sure, they like happiness and well-being as much as the ordinary person, but there are certain things they will not do to achieve them. Of course, criminals know this and use it to their advantage: after all, why do you think criminals take innocent people as hostages? Superheroes—just like police in the real world—normally won’t risk innocent lives to apprehend a villain, even if it means preventing the villain from killing more people later. More generally, most superheroes will not kill, even to save many other lives.8

But why do they refuse to kill in these instances? The utilitarian would not understand such talk. “You’re allowing many more people to die because you don’t want to kill one?” In fact, that’s almost exactly what Jason Todd and Hush recently said to Batman. Hush asked, “How many lives do you think you’ve cost, how many families have you ruined, by allowing the Joker to live? . . . And why? Because of your duty? Your sense of justice?” Jason Todd put a more personal spin on it (of course): “Bruce, I forgive you for not saving me. But why . . . why on God’s Earth—is he still alive? . . . Ignoring what he’s done in the past. Blindly, stupidly, disregarding the entire graveyards he’s filled, the thousands who have suffered, . . . the friends he’s crippled, . . . I thought . . . I thought killing me—that I’d be the last person you’d ever let him hurt.”9 Batman’s standard response has always been that if he ever kills, it will make him as bad as the criminals he fights, or that he will be crossing a line from which he would never return—though he is very open about his strong desire to kill the Joker.10

While utilitarians would generally endorse killing one person to prevent killing more, members of the school of ethics known as deontology would not.11 Deontologists judge the morality of an act based on features intrinsic to the act itself, regardless of the consequences stemming from the act. To deontologists, the ends never justify the means, but rather the means must be justifiable on their own merits. So the fact that the killing would prevent future killings is irrelevant—the only relevant factor is that killing is wrong, period. But even for the strictest deontologist, there are exceptions—for instance, killing in self-defense would generally be allowed by deontologists. So killing is fine, but only for the right reasons? Might killing a homicidal maniac be just one of those reasons? We’ll see, but first we have to take a ride on a trolley. . . .

To the Bat-Trolley, Professor Thomson!

One of many classic moral dilemmas debated by philosophers is the “trolley problem,” introduced by Philippa Foot and elaborated upon by Judith Jarvis Thomson.12 Imagine that a trolley car is going down a track. Further down the track are five people who do not hear the trolley and who will not be able to get out of the way. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough time to stop the trolley before it hits and kills them. The only way to avoid killing these five people is to switch the trolley to another track. But, unfortunately, there is one person standing on that track, also too close for the trolley to stop before killing him. Now imagine that there is a bystander standing by the track switch who must make a choice: do nothing, which leads to the death of the five people on the current track, or act to divert the trolley to the other track, which leads to the death of the single person.

Let’s call the person in control Bruce. Is Bruce morally allowed to divert the trolley to the second track or not? If he is, can we also say that in fact he is required to do it? Thomson takes the middle road here, concluding that Bruce is permitted—but not required—to divert the trolley. A typical utilitarian would require Bruce to throw the switch and save more lives, while a deontologist would have problems with Bruce’s acting to take a life (rather than allowing five to die through inaction). Thomson’s answer seems to combine the concerns of both utilitarianism and deontology. Bruce is allowed (maybe even encouraged) to divert the train and kill one person rather than five, but it’s valid also for Bruce to have problems with doing this himself.

One way to state the difference between the utilitarian and the deontological approaches is to look at the types of rules they both prescribe. Utilitarianism results in agent-neutral rules, such as “Maximize well-being,” and utilitarians couldn’t care less who it is that will be following the rule. Everybody has to act so as to maximize well-being, and there is no reason or excuse for any one person to say “I don’t want to.” By contrast, deontology deals with agent-specific rules—when deontologists say “Do not kill,” they mean “You do not kill,” even if there are other reasons that make it look like a good idea. This is simply a different way of contrasting the utilitarian’s emphasis on good outcomes with the deontologist’s focus on right action. While throwing the switch to kill the one rather than five may be good, it may not be right (because of what that specific person has to do).13

Hush Will Love This Next Story . . .

Thomson likes to compare the trolley situation with a story involving a surgeon with five patients, each of whom is dying from failure of a different organ and could be saved by a transplant. Since there are no organs available through normal channels, the surgeon considers drugging one of his (healthy) colleagues and removing his organs to use for the transplants.14 By doing so, he would kill his colleague, but he would save his five patients.

With the possible exception of our bandaged and demented Dr. Hush, few people would endorse such a drastic plan (least of all Dr. Thomas Wayne, bless his soul). You can see where I’m going with this (Batman fans are so smart)—“What is the difference between the bystander in the trolley case and the surgeon in the transplant case?” In both cases a person can do nothing, and let five people die, or take an action that kills one but saves the five. Thomson, and many philosophers after her, have struggled with these questions, and there is no definitive answer. Most people will agree that throwing the trolley switch is justified, and also that the surgeon’s actions are not, but we have a very difficult time saying precisely why we feel that way—and that includes philosophers!

Top Ten Reasons the Batmobile Is Not a Trolley . . .

How does Batman’s situation compare to the trolley story (or the transplant story)? What factors relevant to Batman and the Joker are missing from the two classic philosophical dilemmas? And what does Batman’s refusal to “do the deed” say about him?

One obvious difference between the two cases described by Thomson and the case of Batman and the Joker is that in Thomson’s cases, the five people who will be killed if the trolley is not diverted, and the one person who will be killed if it is, are assumed to be morally equivalent. In other words, there is no moral difference between any of these people in terms of how they should be treated, what rights they have, and so on. All the people on the tracks in the trolley case are moral “innocents,” as are the patients and the colleague in the transplant case.

Does this matter? Thomson introduces several modifications to suggest that it does. What if the five people on the main track collapsed there drunk early that morning, and the one person on the other track is a repairman performing track maintenance for the railroad? The repairman has a right to be there, while the five drunkards do not. Would this make us more comfortable about pulling the switch? What if the five transplant patients were in their desperate condition because of their own negligence regarding their health, and the colleague was very careful to take care of himself? We might say that in both of these cases the five persons are in their predicament due to their own (bad) choices, and they must take full responsibility for the consequences. And furthermore, their lives should not be saved at the expense of the one person in both situations who has taken responsibility for himself.

But the Joker case is precisely the opposite: he is the single man on the alternate track or the operating table, and his victims (presumably innocent) are the other five people. So following the logic above, there would be a presumption in favor of killing the Joker. After all, why should his victims sacrifice their lives so that he should live—especially if he lives to kill innocent people?

This case is different from the original philosophical cases in another way that involves moral differences between the parties. Unlike the classic trolley and transplant cases, the Joker actually puts the others in danger. In terms of the trolley case, it would be as if the Joker tied the five people to the main track, then stood on the other track to see what Batman would do! (Talk about a game of chicken!) If we were inclined to kill one to save five, that inclination would only be strengthened by knowing that the five were in danger because of the one!

We might say that the one person on the alternate track has the right not to be killed, even to save the other five. While it would be noble for him to make this sacrifice, most philosophers (aside from utilitarians) would deny that he has such an obligation. This is even clearer in the transplant case. The surgeon could certainly ask his colleague if he would be willing to give up his organs (and his life) to save the five patients, but we could hardly tell him that he had to. Once again, the difference with the Joker is that he put the others in danger, and it would be absurd—in other words, appropriate for one such as the Joker—to say, “Sure I’m going to kill these people, but I should not be killed to save them!”

The recognition of the Joker’s role in creating the situation also casts light on the responsibility Batman faces. If we said to the Caped Crusader, as many have, “If you don’t kill the Joker, the deaths of all his future victims will be on your hands,” he could very well answer, “No, the deaths that the Joker causes are his responsibility and his responsibility alone. I am responsible only for the deaths I cause.”15 This is another way to look at the agent-centered rule we discussed earlier: the bystander in the trolley example could very well say, “I did not cause the trolley to endanger the five lives, but I would be causing the death of one if I diverted the trolley.”16

“I Want My Lawyer! Oh, That’s Right, I Killed Him Too”

What the surgeon does in the transplant case is clearly illegal. However, if the bystander switches the trolley from its track, knowingly causing one person’s death to save five others, the legality of his action is not clear. Of course, the legalities of the Batman/Joker case are a bit simpler. Let’s assume (for the time being) that Batman has the same legal rights and obligations as a police officer. Under what circumstances would a police officer be allowed to kill the Joker (aside from self-defense)? If the Joker was just about to murder someone, then the police officer would be justified—legally—in killing him (if mere incapacitation is impossible and deadly force is the only effective choice). So if Batman came upon the Joker about to kill an innocent person, and the only way to save the person was to kill the Joker, Batman would be justified in doing that. (Knowing Batman, though, I imagine he would still find another way.)

Let’s make the case a bit tougher—say Batman finds the Joker just after he’s killed someone. Batman (or a police officer) couldn’t do anything to save that person, but if he kills the Joker, he’ll save untold others whom the Joker will probably kill. Probably? Well, let’s be fair now—we don’t know that the Joker will kill any more people. “This is my last one, Batty, I promise!” The Joker has certainly claimed to have reformed in the past; maybe this time it’s for real. Or maybe the Joker will die by natural causes tomorrow, never to kill again. The fact is, we can’t be sure that he will kill again, so we can’t be sure we will be saving any lives by taking his.

Given this fact, it’s as if we changed the trolley example like so: a dense fog is obscuring the view on the main track, but we can see the sole person on the other track. We don’t know if anyone is in danger on the main track, but we know that sometimes there are people there. What do we do? Or, to modify the transplant case, the surgeon doesn’t have any patients who need organs right now, but he guesses that there will be some tomorrow, by which time his healthy colleague will be on vacation. Should he still sacrifice his colleague today?

I imagine that none of us would be comfortable, in either case, choosing to kill the one to avoid the chance of killing others. It’s one thing to hold the Joker accountable for the people he has killed, and this may include the death penalty (if he weren’t the poster boy for the insanity defense), but another thing entirely when we consider the people he might kill in the future. Admittedly, he has a well-established pattern, and he may even say he’s going to kill more in the future. What if we have every reason—as Batman clearly does—to believe him? Can we deal with him before he kills again?

Punishing people before they commit crimes has been called prepunishment by philosophers, and the concept was made famous by Philip K. Dick’s 1956 short story “The Minority Report,” more recently a movie directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise.17 While Batman killing the Joker would not literally be punishment—since he has no legal authority to impose such a sentence—we can still consider whether or not prepunishment is morally acceptable, especially in this case. Some would say that if the Joker intends to kill again, and makes clear statements to that effect, then there is no moral difficulty with prepunishing him. (There may, however, be an informational or epistemic problem—why would he confess to his future crime if he knew he would be killed before he had a chance to commit it?) But others say that even if he says he will kill again, he still has the choice to change his mind, and it is out of respect for this capacity to make ethical choices that we should not prepunish people.18 Prepunishment may trigger the panic button in all of us, but in an age in which very many can be killed very easily by very few, we may be facing this issue before long.19

So, Case Closed—Right?

So then, we’re all convinced that Batman was right not to have killed the Joker.

What? We’re not?

Well, of course not. Look at it this way—I consider myself a strict deontologist, and even I have to admit that maybe Batman should have killed the Joker. (I hope none of my colleagues in the North American Kant Society reads this—I’ll be on punch-and-pretzels duty for a year!) As much as we deontologists say the right always comes before the good, an incredible amount of good would have been done if the Joker’s life had been ended years ago. Compare this issue with the recent torture debates—even those who are wholeheartedly opposed to the use of torture under any circumstances must have some reservations when thousands or millions of innocent lives are at stake.

Luckily, literature—and by “literature” I mean comic books—provides us a way to discuss issues like these without having to experience them. We don’t have to trick people into standing in front of a runaway trolley, and we don’t have to have a real-life Batman and Joker. That’s what thought experiments are for—they let us play through an imaginary scenario and imagine what we should or shouldn’t do. Unfortunately for Batman, but luckily for Batman fans, the Joker is not imaginary to him, and I’m sure he will struggle with this issue for many years to come.

NOTES

1. Jason Todd was killed in A Death in the Family (1988); Lieutenant Essen was killed in No Man’s Land Vol. 5 (2001); Barbara Gordon was shot in The Killing Joke (1988); and most of the Joker’s henchmen were killed in Batman #663 (April 2007).

2. Joel Feinberg, “Evil,” in Problems at the Roots of Law (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), 125-192.

3. The Joker is the poster child for the insanity defense, so he never receives the death penalty.

4. For instance, after Lieutenant Essen was killed at the end of No Man’s Land.

5. Batman #614 (June 2003), included in Hush Volume Two (2003). Unfortunately, I don’t have room in this chapter to quote from Batman’s internal dialogue from this issue as much as I would like, but it’s brilliant writing, courtesy of Jeph Loeb.

6. See Hush in Gotham Knights #74 (April 2006), Jason Todd in Batman #650 (April 2006), and Jean-Paul Valley in Robin #7 (June 1994).

7. Utilitarianism is usually traced back to Jeremy Bentham’s The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1781; Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books edition, 1988).

8. Wonder Woman’s recent execution of Max Lord in the Sacrifice storyline, in order to end his psychic hold on Superman, is a significant exception and was treated as such in the stories that followed. (See Wonder Woman #219, September 2005, also collected in Superman: Sacrifice, 2006.)

9. See note 6 for sources.

10. In the scene with Jason Todd he explains that “all I have ever wanted to do is kill him. . . . I want him dead—maybe more than I’ve ever wanted anything.” In The Man Who Laughed (2005), as he holds the Joker over the poisoned Gotham City reservoir, Batman thinks to himself, “This water is filled with enough poison to kill thousands. It would be so easy to just let him fall into it. So many are already dead because of this man . . . [but] I can’t.”

11. The most famous deontologist is Immanuel Kant, whose seminal ethical work is his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785; Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993).

12. For Foot’s original treatment, see her essay “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” in her book Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 19-32. For Thomson’s version, see “The Trolley Problem,” reprinted in her book Rights, Restitution, & Risk, edited by William Parent (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), 94-116; and also chapter 7 in The Realm of Rights (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990).

13. For an excellent treatment of agent-relative rules, see Samuel Scheffler’s The Rejection of Consequentialism, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press: 1990).

14. Never mind the astronomical odds against one of his colleagues being a donor match for all five patients!

15. In Batman #614, he thinks, “I cannot . . . I will not . . . accept any responsibility . . . for the Joker.” But then he adds, “except that I should have killed him long ago.” And finally, after contemplating that the Joker may kill someone close to him again, “he dies tonight by my hand,” engaging in a graphic fantasy of several ways he could kill him. Makes you wonder what would have happened if Jim had not been there to stop him. . . .

16. This also brings in the controversial ethical distinction between causing a death through action and causing a death through inaction. Merely allowing a death is usually considered less problematic than directly causing a death—consider Nightwing’s choice not to stop Tarantula from killing his archnemesis, Blockbuster, who also happened to pledge to kill many more people in the future (Nightwing #93, July 2004). Interestingly, Dick actually did kill the Joker once, although Batman revived him (Joker: Last Laugh #6, January 2002).

17. You can find the short story in Philip K. Dick’s collection The Minority Report (New York: Citadel, 2002). Tom Cruise, in case you don’t know, is mainly known for being married to actress Katie Holmes from Batman Begins. (To my knowledge, he’s done nothing else worth mentioning.)

18. Christopher New argues for prepunishment in “Time and Punishment,”Analysis 52, no. 1 (1992): 35-40, and Saul Smilansky argues against it (and New) in “The Time to Punish,”Analysis 54, no. 1 (1994): 50-53. New responds to Smilansky in “Punishing Times: A Reply to Smilansky,”Analysis 55 no. 1 (1995): 60-62.

19. Of course, Wonder Woman already faced this question with regard to Max Lord, who promised to force Superman to kill, and she came to the opposite conclusion. (Apparently she had read New’s papers.) But ironically, it was she who stopped Batman from killing Alex Luthor (who nearly killed Nightwing) in Infinite Crisis #7 (June 2006). Even more ironically, who eventually killed Alex at the end of the same issue? The Joker.

Chapter 6

CAN WE STEER THIS RUDDERLESS WORLD?: KANT, RORSCHACH, RETRIBUTIVISM, AND HONOR

Jacob M. Held

Because there is good and evil, and evil must be punished. Even in the face of Armageddon I shall not compromise this. But there are so many deserving of retribution . . . and there is so little time.

—Rorschach’s journal, October 13, 1985. 11:30 p.m.

Rorschach carries a terrific burden. He has seen the true face of the city. He has seen this world full of vermin for what it is: a cesspool of the wretched, each climbing over the back of his or her neighbor for nothing but one more trifling pleasure, to simply continue this pathetic life for one second, one minute, or one day longer. So, what do you do when confronted with such filth? Do you walk by and pretend there is no infestation? Do you focus only on the least repulsive and delude yourself into the belief that the world is good underneath it all? Or do you become an exterminator, stomping all the human cockroaches you can while relentlessly pursuing the rest? You’ll never get them all, for they scurry to the shadows when the light is turned on. But you can get some; you can make a difference. And even if all you manage is a tiny ripple in the fetid slime, at least you lived respectably; you never became one.

The mind of Rorschach is indeed a dark place, yet it’s ruled by a simple principle with a long and venerable heritage: evil must be punished. And it must be punished not because doing so makes the world a better place, but simply because it is evil and thus is deserving of punishment. Rorschach thus exemplifies the retributive theory of punishment. He maintains that wrongdoers must be punished for no other reason than that they did wrong; they deserve it. Likewise, the punishment they receive must be fitting. You don’t execute a petty thief and, some might argue, you don’t let murderers live or, for Rorschach at least, even multiple rapists. A retributivist dishes out just desert; you get what you deserve, and what you deserve is dictated by the heinousness of your deeds.

To some degree, we all desire retribution. We are all a little bit Rorschach. We all want to see wrongs righted and wicked people suffering. There is no shame in this, even if retribution often looks shameful. Rorschach, as is befitting his name, lets us see ourselves. Through him, we see our desire for justice pushed to its limits. With him, we see an uncompromising goal of meting out just deserts, its beauty and its horror. After witnessing Rorschach’s torturous ways and his lack of respect for any sense of rights, all in his quest to give people what they deserve, and even after we celebrate when he dispatches a murderous kidnapper in an oddly satisfactory way, we should ask a few questions: Why must evil be punished? Who determines what evil is? Who determines what is appropriate, or fitting, punishment? And in our quest to dispense deserved justice, do we risk becoming the monsters against which we battle?1

You don’t have to think too hard to see the connection between Rorschach and the Black Freighter, as our castaway feeds on “raw shark,” becoming darker and more sinister with every bite, in his quest to give what is owed to the demon ship.2 He himself becomes a demon. His mission is no longer about his love for his family and his desire to protect them but merely about wreaking vengeance on the demon ship; revenge pure and simple, blood lust. We should look at Rorschach and ask, Is it all about vengeance or is there something nobler in retribution or in paying back a criminal for his crime? In what follows, we’ll give retributivism a Rorschach test to see whether what lies beneath the mask is attractive or just fascinatingly ugly.3

Evil Must Be Punished: Retributivism, Basically

The city is dying of rabies. Is the best I can do to wipe random flecks of foam from its lips? Never despair. Never surrender.

—Rorschach’s journal, October 13, 1985

What compels Rorschach? If it were mere vengeance, a thirst for revenge, or simple hatred, he would be a much less interesting character. If all he wanted to do was hurt people out of sadistic urges and cover it over with the name of justice, reminiscent of Hooded Justice, he would be easy to ignore or condemn. But there is so much more to Rorschach. His motives are pure; it is about justice, right, and the moral order. In this way, he reflects what is desirable about retributivism: the guilty must be punished because they are guilty, and their punishment should be proportionate to their crimes. This sentiment is common, even if its justification is difficult to articulate.

Retributivism comes in many different varieties, but most basic formulations seem to include three elements: (1) only the guilty are to be punished, that is, you punish someone only for a voluntary wrongdoing; (2) the punishment must be equivalent to the wickedness done; and 3) the justification for punishing persons is that the return of suffering for wrong doing is itself morally good.4 The idea is that if someone causes harm or inflicts suffering on another, this warrants punishment—and the punishment ought to fit the severity of the wrongdoer’s misdeeds. Some argue that there is no deeper justification for retributivism, that it’s impossible to prove but nonetheless true. It’s simply just to return like for like; paying wrongdoers back is both justified and good. But, as we’ll see, there is a more elaborate justification, tied to respect, honor, and what it means to be a valuable person living a worthwhile life in a community of other moral persons.

When Rorschach administers punishment, say by drowning Big Figure in the toilet, even if at this point he is a very small threat indeed, he is administering the ancient law of retaliation, or lex talionis (“an eye for an eye”). Big Figure is surely a murderer (and probably worse), so in order for justice to be done, he must receive his payment in full. As we would expect, then, before Rorschach flees, he complies with the demands of justice and dispenses quick, wet justice to Big Figure.5 But the idea that we should harm another person simply because that person caused harm is often seen as brutal, barbarous, and a relic of the past. Indeed, drowning a midget in a toilet isn’t aesthetically pleasing; it doesn’t look “right.”

Thus, some people argue that the notion of an eye for an eye ought to be done away with and replaced with a more humane principle, such as rehabilitation or concern for the greater good. But to characterize retribution as simply returning harm for harm, as if it were rationalized revenge, is simplistic at best, disingenuous and misleading at worst. Even though in its most simplistic and extreme formulations, the lex talionis may lead to questionable practices such as killing a multiple rapist without a trial, that does not mean the principle is flawed.6 Rorschach may simply be an overly enthusiastic (and not too reflective) practitioner of an otherwise praiseworthy practice. We can disagree with Rorschach’s distribution of punishment without having to condemn the practice. Perhaps we ought to give criminals what they deserve, and Rorschach is just not that good at determining or dispensing just deserts.

Retributivism is clearly not a consequentialist idea—it is not an idea justified by its results. Under retributivism, we don’t punish criminals and wrongdoers because the punishment lowers crime rates, leads to rehabilitation, provides security, is cost effective, makes us feel good, or leads to any other desirable result. We punish those who deserve it because they deserve it, period. On this, there can be no compromise. Rorschach is unbending in his commitment to justice, just as was his philosophical progenitor, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Since Kant gives us the modern formulation of the lex talionis, it is to Kant whom we now turn.

Kant and Rorschach on Respect and Dignity

We do not do this because it is permitted. We do it because we have to. We do it because we are compelled.

—Rorschach (from the notes of Dr. Malcolm Long, October 27, 1985)

Kant stated simply enough, “[Punishment] must always be inflicted upon [the criminal] only because he has committed a crime.”7 Punishment shouldn’t be meted out for the criminal’s own good, for example, for reformation or rehabilitation. This would be treating him like an animal, like a dog. Also, punishment shouldn’t be handed out for the good of society, such as for security, deterrence, or crime prevention or any other desirable end. The criminal shouldn’t be treated as a mere means; we shouldn’t use people for society’s ends, “for a human being can never be treated merely as a means to the purposes of another.”8 By this, Kant meant that people deserve respect. But why respect criminals? Didn’t they lose this right? To understand why criminals must be punished because of what they did, and why their punishment must respect them as moral agents—that is, as wrongdoers to be held accountable for their actions—we need to look briefly at Kant’s ethics.

The aspects of Kant’s moral system we are most interested in are best illustrated by one of the versions of his famous categorical imperative: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”9 Herein lay two fundamental concepts for Kant: dignity and respect. All human beings insofar as they are autonomous—that is, can be the author of their own actions and determine the principles on which they will act—possess inherent dignity. They can decide to act on those principles, or maxims, that correspond with the “moral law” as described by the categorical imperative, or they can act out of selfish desires and self-interest and hence act immorally. Each person’s capacity to make this choice proves his or her moral value or dignity, and by virtue of this dignity, persons deserve respect, to be treated always as valuable ends in themselves and never only as means to someone else’s ends.

So basically, our status as dignified, moral agents obligates others to respect us and limits how they may treat us. And yes, criminals are people, too. Furthermore, in order to treat the criminal as a human being with dignity, we can punish him only if he has committed a crime. To punish him merely to send a signal to others, or for any other consequentialistic or utilitarian reason, is to use him merely as a means, and this is unacceptable, regardless of whom we are punishing. As Kant said, “The law of punishment is a categorical imperative, and woe to him who crawls through the windings of eudaemonism in order to discover something that releases the criminal from punishment or even reduces its amount by the advantage it promises . . . for justice ceases to be justice if it can be bought for any price whatsoever.”10 But if we don’t punish criminals for their own good, for society’s benefit, or because it makes us feel better, then why do we do it? Why must we punish the guilty?

Order and Value in a Morally Blank World

The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.

—Rorschach (from the notes of Dr. Malcolm Long, October 28, 1985)

What if society was founded on a set of values such as dignity and respect? These fundamental values would give human endeavors and human life their meaning, and maintaining them would be essential. In such a world, punishment would be—perhaps paradoxically—a reaffirmation of these values, mending the social fabric that was torn asunder by criminal wrongdoing.

Consider a trivial Rorschach example: his chastisement of Moloch for owning illegal prescription drugs and an unregistered firearm. We might ask, “Why do you care? He isn’t hurting anybody, right?” By breaking the law, Moloch is flaunting social norms, rules that hold the fabric of society together. In possessing drugs and a gun illegally, Moloch is making a statement that he does not share our common values or respect us enough to play by the rules. Rorschach’s world is ordered by common values, and deviants threaten its cohesiveness. But even if we don’t live in such a world, one could argue that we ought to strive for it; perhaps our dignity is found in acting as if the world were just, even when it clearly is not.

In general, we punish the criminal because it is demanded that he be held accountable for wrongdoing, and to do otherwise is disrespectful to him. If we failed to punish him, we would not be treating him as a full member of the moral community. We also punish the criminal in order to mend the social fabric and reaffirm the values he disregarded, including the value of the victim and his or her loss in cases of crimes against a person. As G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) noted, “[Punishment] is the cancellation of crime . . . and the restoration of right.”11 We can’t literally make a victim or society whole in the sense of restoring them to the state they were in before the crime occurred, but through punishment we can reaffirm the values that were transgressed and make the criminal feel the wrong he committed. This is the true sense of retribution, “to pay back,” to even the scales put askew by an act of criminal wrongdoing. We must punish because we value one another and society, because we respect the inherent dignity in each of us and wish to reaffirm these values on which our lives and society are, or ought to be, based. Punishment is one way we reproduce what makes life worth living—it is a tribute to life.

Arguably, then, punishment is meant to protect and reproduce an ideal moral order. Each person is to respect others and treat them as ends in themselves, that is, as people deserving of respect in virtue of what they are: free, rational agents. Punishment is merely an instrument for implementing this moral order. As Rorschach so poetically put it, “This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not god who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us.”12 Values are not to be found in nature; the world isn’t good in itself, but rather it is made so through our actions. Life’s value is in how it is lived. Kant stated, “For if justice goes, there is no longer any value in human beings’ living on the earth.”13 Without an order of right, without justice and ethical human relations, there is nothing but brute animals, human cockroaches left to their heroin and child pornography. But with justice and ethics, there comes value and respect. Thus, how we punish expresses society’s values.14 Do we punish because it benefits us? Do we use people? Or do we punish because they have done wrong and deserve it? Do we punish because moral agents need to be held accountable, and society’s fundamental values need to be reestablished and maintained?

Giving some persons their just deserts is holding them accountable to public values that ideally respect their worth as persons with dignity, even if they experience and act upon a moral lapse.15 And to answer your question, Laurie: Yes, rape is a moral lapse—one of the most grave, to be sure, but it in no way removes one from the community of moral agents. When we punish, we retain our connection to the criminal and his bond to the moral community. He is held to the values that define and give value to our shared human lives. There is much more than revenge or vengeance going on behind the mask of retributivism. One might even say that at root, it is a matter of honor.16

Honor Is Like the Hawk . . .

For my own part, regret nothing. Have lived life, free from compromise . . . and step into the shadow now without complaint.

—Rorschach’s journal, November 1, 1985

According to Kant, “Rightful honor consists in asserting one’s worth as a human being in relation to others.”17 So we ought to treat one another as free, moral agents; we ought to respect one another. If I deceive you, use you, or otherwise manipulate you, then I disparage your life and my own. It should be clear that Rorschach operates under this code. He is consistent, honest, transparent, and, above all else, honorable in his treatment of others. They are treated as their actions merit; they are respected as the authors of their acts.

At the very end of Watchmen, Rorschach stands outside Veidt’s complex staring down the barrel of a loaded Dr. Manhattan. He is going back. Evil must be punished. People must be told. If he lets Veidt get away with his scheme, then justice has been bought, not served. And, as Kant noted, without justice there is no value in human life. Without our dignity as moral agents, and without our self-respect and our honor, we are shameful. Regardless of the price, if you sell your dignity you’re a whore, and while Rorschach may be a whore’s son, he’s no whore. Rorschach refuses to compromise, to sell out justice, even if it means dispelling the illusion Veidt created and thereby guaranteeing that the millions who died did so in vain. As tears stream down, knowing his fate, he yells at Dr. Manhattan, “Do it!” and Dr. Manhattan evaporates him. Rorschach did not seek death; he didn’t commit suicide by Manhattan. But he understood what the others did not. “It is better to sacrifice life than to forfeit morality. It is not necessary to live, but it is necessary that, so long as we live, we do so honourably.”18 Even in the face of Armageddon, never compromise. Life is not valuable simply in virtue of not being death.

The absolute value of one’s life, one’s inherent dignity, stems from autonomy or freedom, the ability to act according to the moral law. Life isn’t valuable; freedom is.19 So it is that an honorable man is one who acknowledges this and lives a life of duty and not one subservient to the trivial pleasures of animal existence. No regrets, no compromise. “[An upright man] lives only from duty, not because he has the least taste for living.”20 Thus rightful or true honor is the manifestation of one’s life as a moral agent, and society reflects the praiseworthiness of the moral, upright life by publicly affirming the value of honor and shaming those who have acted dishonorably—that is, immorally or criminally. Punishment, as a public statement, is a shaming, a dishonoring of the wrongdoer that is meant to reinforce social values, attribute blameworthiness to the wrongdoer, and so reintegrate that person into the moral order. We punish only those we dignify as moral agents, and we punish them because we respect them.

This Last Entry

Gradually, I understood what innocent intent had brought me to, and, understanding, waded out beyond my depth.

—“The Black Freighter,” Watchmen, chapter XI, p. 13

So Rorschach exemplifies the retributive spirit, giving back to each his rightful due, out of respect for him as a person and respect for those values he has denigrated through his wrongdoing. Payback is about more than returning harm for harm; it is about balancing the scales, restoring order, and affirming fundamental values. Punishment is a social practice legitimated as supportive of the social fabric that gives us meaning, that is, the moral context by which we judge ourselves and others and discern moral praiseworthiness. But people do object to this notion. And Rorschach is not without his flaws. We probably wouldn’t want to live in a world of his making. Why?

Most objections to retributivism don’t attack the idea of respect or dignity. Rather, they see the problem as one of application. How do we determine someone’s just desert? Who determines a fitting punishment? Who determines which values are essential, how they ought to be affirmed, and so on? And to be sure, Rorschach is brutal. He kills those whom he claims deserve it. But should he alone determine desert? Perhaps the main objection people have against retributivism is not whether people deserve anything or even whether it can be calculated. Most people probably object because there needs to be a check on the practice so that it doesn’t get out of hand. We don’t want to go from Rorschach to “raw shark.” We probably don’t even want to go as far as Rorschach. We may doubt the certainty of our moral knowledge without doubting its necessity. We live in a nonideal world, but that doesn’t mean we need to live without ideals.

Perhaps all that we require is a simple check, something to balance our moral judgments. Such a check might merely be dialogue. Often an open discourse, an understanding of our history and our prospective future, can shed light on our present, put it in perspective and so serve a humbling function, freeing us from the hubris of our intellectual arrogance—when we assume that we know what is right or wrong, that we know what people deserve and couldn’t possibly be wrong. Rorschach’s shortcoming is that he never listened to anyone; he was overly confident and proud. When they disagreed with him, he called them decadent; when they wanted to bargain, he called it compromise—and for him there was no more disgraceful a word. Rorschach was judge, jury, and executioner, or, more accurately, the legislative, executive, and judicial branches all in one. And although each branch may be essential for justice, they function justly only when they function as independent checks on the others. The problem with retributivism isn’t the idea; it’s the application. If Rorschach had just a little humility, had recognized he might be wrong and others might be right, he might not be so fascinatingly ugly.21

NOTES

1. Chapter VI of Watchmen ends with a famous quote by Nietzsche, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 69.

2. The “raw shark”/Rorschach connection is clearly made in Watchmen, chap. V, p. 22.

3. I had to make a bad Rorschach pun. I apologize to the reader. It’s out of my system now.

4. See H. L. A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 230-237.

5. Of course, Rorschach is acting here as a vigilante and not as a functionary of the penal system, and the distinction is important. But for the remainder of this essay, we can deal with Rorschach and his version of retribution as if he were a legitimate state authority who could mete out punishment. Vigilantism is another issue entirely.

6. Again, the question is about determining fitting punishments and not whether vigilantism is justified. Beyond the obvious problem of Rorschach’s executing criminals without trial, we may still wish to ask whether execution is a fitting punishment for rape, and for some people, the disparity between the punishment and the crime in this case would be evidence for the barbarity of lex talionis. But such a case still wouldn’t condemn the practice, simply particular (mis)applications.

7. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 331. The page numbers for Kant’s works reflect the standard German edition, Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Royal Prussian (later German) Academy of Sciences—these page numbers are given in all reputable editions of Kant’s works, so that other editions can be consulted.

8. Ibid.

9. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 429.

10. Ibid., pp. 331-332.

11. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 124.

12. Watchmen, chap. VI, p. 26.

13. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 332.

14. See Joel Feinberg, “The Expressive Function of Punishment,” in Doing and Deserving (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 95-118.

15. For a good account, see M. Margaret Falls, “Retribution, Reciprocity, and Respect for Persons,” Law and Philosophy 6 (1987): 25-51. It is odd that Rorschach describes the Comedian’s attempted rape of Silk Specter as a “moral lapse.” But even if this seems to trivialize the act of rape, it may be indicative of an idea that one bad deed, no matter how heinous, can’t remove one’s status as a moral agent.

16. For a good account of lex talionis and its role in honor cultures, see William Ian Miller, Eye for an Eye (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

17. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 236.

18. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 373.

19. Much of the work on honor and Kant was inspired by a paper by Benjamin S. Yost, “Kant’s Justification of the Death Penalty Reconsidered,” given at the American Philosophical Association’s Central Division Meeting, April 2008.

20. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 88.

21. Thanks to Mark White, Bill Irwin, and Ron Novy for their helpful suggestions on early drafts of this chapter.

Part Three

Marvel Superheroes

Chapter 7

FORGIVERS ASSEMBLE!

Daniel P. Malloy

The very first comic book I ever bought was an issue of West Coast Avengers, a long-running spinoff of the main Avengers book. I don’t remember what it was about or which issue it was. I only remember three things: it cost me 75 cents (!), it ended in a cliffhanger of some kind—and it had a really cool cover, which is why I bought it. The cover featured this great drawing of some guy dressed in purple and sporting a bow and arrow. I didn’t realize it then, or even after I’d read the book (many many times), but that guy on the cover was a villain. Not in that comic, of course, by which time he was a well-established hero, but much earlier in his purple-clad career. Years later I found out that the character whose design and weaponry had gotten me interested in comic books—Clint Barton, the hero named Hawkeye—had actually started his life as a villain.

Hawkeye isn’t the only former villain among the Avengers’ ranks. Several other high-profile team members over the years—Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver, Vision, Wonder Man, and the Black Widow, to name a few—began life on the wrong side of the law. Certainly other superhero teams have recruited from the ranks of their enemies, but not quite as often or as prominently as the Avengers have. This remarkable fact gives us a chance to explore two of the most fascinating yet troublesome topics in moral philosophy—forgiveness and redemption—issues that must be dealt with together. Without forgiveness there can be no redemption, and forgiveness that does not grant redemption is hollow.

Time Travel, Retcons, and Forgiveness

In the universe of comic books, unlike the real world, it’s possible to change the past. Sometimes heroes or villains go back in time to change or preserve the course of history—that’s Kang the Conqueror’s modus operandi. More often, writers decide that something happened in the past that they failed to mention or that their characters didn’t know about, so they fill in the gaps, not changing history as much as completing it (after the fact). In the most extreme cases, the writers judge that the history of their characters doesn’t work anymore, for some reason, so they just make up a new one. Fans—often in a critical tone—call this process a retcon, short for “retroactive continuity,” changing past stories to make them consistent with present ones. This fantastic ability possessed by comics creators is one of the reasons very few heroes and villains in comics ever stay dead—if writers can’t find a way to bring them back to life in current stories, they change earlier ones so they didn’t actually die.

Unfortunately, we in the real world are pretty much stuck with the past as it is. Oh, we can deny it or lie about it, but we can’t actually change past events—what has happened has happened, and that’s the way it always will be. This is what philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) called the “predicament of irreversibility.”1 Once an event has occurred or an action has been taken, there is no going back. This predicament affects us most personally when the thing we would like to reverse is some action of our own or one that has affected us. Who wouldn’t want to go back and retract those hurtful words or get in that one great comeback that you thought of only after you’d left the party? Who wouldn’t want to avoid getting mugged or being betrayed? We can’t do it, though. The best we can do is manage how we feel about that event.

Because we’re talking about forgiveness, let’s focus on a case where one person has harmed another—or, at least, where one person feels they’ve been harmed by another. Consider Simon Williams, the Avenger known as Wonder Man and originally, like Hawkeye, a villain. With the help of the villain Baron Zemo, Simon was exposed to “ionic energy” and acquired superpowers in an attempt to exact revenge upon Tony Stark (otherwise known as Iron Man). Stark Industries was in direct competition with Williams Innovations, which Simon’s family owned. Stark did not compete with Williams unfairly—he simply offered better products or cheaper prices or some combination thereof. Nevertheless, Williams believed he had been wronged by Stark, and became Wonder Man to seek revenge.2

There are several ways we can deal with being wronged, but they all start from a basic, perhaps even instinctual reaction: resentment. Resentment is not a bad thing in itself. In fact, it is arguably an important part of self-preservation—at least, according to philosopher and theologian Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752). In Butler’s sermons on resentment and forgiveness, he argues that resentment should not be looked on as a moral failing. It is simply a necessary reaction to being harmed or wronged, and teaches us to avoid similar situations in the future.3 It can, however, become a moral failing if we allow excessive resentment to control our actions, as is the case with Wonder Man. Excessive resentment leads to revenge—and the antidote is forgiveness.

Butler’s arguments for the link between forgiveness and resentment have been taken as gospel (pun intended—please forgive me) by most contemporary philosophers who think about forgiveness, although they also typically argue that Butler’s definition is correct but incomplete. For instance, excuses pose a particular problem for Butler’s account. By excuses I don’t mean the classics like “The dog ate my homework” or “I have a headache.” In this context, an excuse is a reason for having acted or failed to act that mitigates or eliminates moral (or legal) responsibility.4 For instance, since the Vision was an artificial “synthezoid” created and programmed by Ultron to destroy the Avengers, he was arguably not responsible for those actions, so he has an excuse in our sense.5 The problem with excuses as far as Butler’s account of forgiveness is concerned is that they too suppress or reduce resentment, but in a completely different way. We have to add to Butler’s account that forgiveness does not deny the wrongdoer’s responsibility for his or her actions.

At the same time, forgiveness, like excuses, maintains an aura of disapproval. When I forgive someone, I must maintain that the action for which I am forgiving him was wrong to begin with. It is not made right by my forgiveness—forgiveness does not condone an action. This may seem a fairly obvious point, but that does not prevent people from getting confused about it. For instance, take the case of the second modern Black Knight, Dane Whitman. Attempting to prove his worth to the Avengers and atone for the misdeeds of his uncle (his villainous predecessor as the Black Knight), Dane infiltrates and then betrays the second incarnation of the Masters of Evil.6 Now, in all likelihood, Dane had to do some pretty unsavory things to join the group—they are the Masters of Evil, after all. At the very least, we know that Dane had to lie to his fellow Masters of Evil. These deeds, however, do not need to be forgiven. We would condone them; whatever evil Dane did was ultimately in the interest of preventing even greater evil by the Masters of . . . well, you know.

Can Cap Forgive the Rest of His Kooky Quartet?

So, forgiveness is the act of giving up resentment against a wrongdoer without denying his responsibility for doing wrong (as excusing him would) or the wrongness of the wrong (as condoning it would). There are (at least) two reasons for offering forgiveness. First, forgiveness benefits the one who forgives, because to hold onto resentment is to allow the wrongdoer more power over oneself than he deserves. Second, by forgiving wrongdoers, we make reconciliation between ourselves and them possible. Offering forgiveness is a step toward reestablishing a relationship between the wrongdoer and the person wronged. This is why answering the question in the title of this section—“Can Cap forgive the rest of his kooky quartet?”—is tricky but essential to understanding the infamous second lineup of the Avengers, as well as forgiveness itself.

In issue 16 of The Avengers (vol. 1, May 1965), the founding members of the team decide that they need to take a break. They are not disbanding the team or leaving the team altogether—they simply need some time off (after a grueling first fifteen issues). So they look for replacements, and they find them rather quickly in the form of three reformed supervillains: Hawkeye, Quicksilver, and the Scarlet Witch. Previously, Hawkeye had been a minor foe of Iron Man (under the sway of the Black Widow, no less, also a villain at the time), and Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch had been members of (their father) Magneto’s original Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (note the word “evil”). Together with honorary founding member Captain America (who the “real” founding members thawed out from a block of ice in the fourth issue of the series), these baddies-turned-goodies became the new Avengers lineup.

The problem with Cap’s “kooky quartet,” as this incarnation of the Avengers came to be known, is that they somehow became heroes “overnight.” In hindsight, several decades and hundreds of stories later, there’s no doubt that they were sincere, although Quicksilver is still an arrogant, hot-headed jerk, Hawkeye—well, he’s an arrogant, hot-headed jerk too—and the Scarlet Witch, well, she has her own issues that we’ll talk about later. (In contrast, Cap just died a few times, but he’s better now.) Nonetheless, we should still be concerned about the fact that these three have performed evil deeds. A villain can’t simply say, “Oh, uh, look, I’ve thought it over, and well, I’m a good guy now.” Evil deeds don’t disappear when one has a change of heart, nor do they vanish when just anybody says it’s okay. In this case, it’s appropriate that it was Iron Man who introduced the new Avengers lineup, because Hawkeye’s entire criminal career basically consisted of trying to defeat him. So Iron Man has what contemporary philosopher Claudia Card calls the “moral power” to forgive Hawkeye: as a victim of Hawkeye’s crimes, Shellhead has the authority to grant absolution and forgiveness.7

Who Will Forgive the Mutants?

But Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch—mutant siblings Pietro and Wanda Maximoff—pose more of a problem. To be sure, there are mitigating factors in their case: for example, they only joined the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants to repay a debt to Magneto for saving Wanda’s life from an anti-mutant mob.8 To show their gratitude, Wanda and Pietro swore their allegiance to Magneto’s pro-mutant cause, and went on to become supervillains. When they decided their debt had been paid they left Magneto’s service, and later (naturally) they turned up on the Avengers’ doorstep, ready to serve. They did, however, commit crimes while with Magneto, albeit reluctantly, and they were never punished. So we have to assume that their crimes were forgiven or excused. By whom, though? The only people with any obvious power to forgive or excuse are the victims, and we never see or hear anything from them. Without that, there is no way to say that forgiveness has been granted.

There are unusual cases, however, where forgiveness can be granted without the victim’s assent. For instance, suppose Pietro and Wanda had, in the course of their careers as supervillains, accidentally caused the death of a security guard named Stanley. Obviously, in the case of death, the victim can’t forgive or excuse what happened. If Stanley is not available to forgive Pietro and Wanda, who can? Perhaps nobody, in which case theirs will be an evil deed that is forever on their heads. But maybe the security guard had a wife. This, of course, makes their crime worse, but there is a bright side. Stanley’s wife is a victim of the Maximoffs’ crime also, and as such, she has the right to speak not only on her own behalf, but on her husband’s as well. She can, if she chooses, grant Pietro and Wanda forgiveness.

That’s a fairly uncomplicated case of what we call third-party forgiveness. Things become much more complicated when the third party is not a direct or indirect victim of the crime, as when the Avengers grant Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch a sort of absolution by allowing them to join the team. To see why this is a problem, think back to Bishop Butler’s analysis, in which forgiveness is foregoing revenge and overcoming resentment. A third party who isn’t injured by the evil deed has no reason to feel resentment and no motive for revenge. Therefore, it would seem that there can be no such thing as third-party forgiveness, and the Avengers, even Cap, cannot absolve Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch of their crimes.

That understanding of forgiveness, however, takes a rather narrow view of what it is to be injured by a crime. A crime is a violation of a law, and our duty to obey laws, moral or otherwise, does not depend solely on our relationship to any random person we may harm by not obeying them. This duty is owed to the community more generally—that is why we can be punished for crimes that have no specific victim. When I jaywalk, for instance, I am not harming anyone—I’m just crossing the street in an illegal way. In fact, the only person likely to suffer any bodily harm from my habit of ignoring crosswalks is me (if it weren’t for my Herculean frame, that is). Nonetheless, by ignoring the laws about when and where I may cross streets, I am causing harm to the community as a whole: I am disrupting the orderly flow of traffic and the overall harmony of the community. Admittedly, others are probably disrupting it more: arsonists, kidnappers, and mimes, as well as supervillains (and mimes), all come to mind as excellent examples of disruptive influences in a community. But my jaywalking is also disruptive—just not to the same degree (especially compared to mimes).

Since the community as a whole is being injured by a crime (which, you will note, rhymes with mime), the community would seem to have the moral power to forgive, at least in the absence of a direct victim. And the Avengers are representatives, in a way, of the community, so it follows that they do have some right to forgive Wanda and Pietro for their crimes. Notice, though, that this right of the community takes a backseat to the rights of the victims themselves. If the victims are in a position where they are capable of offering forgiveness (that is, they are neither dead nor comatose, still in possession of their faculties, and are not practicing mimes) and refuse to do so, the community must respect that (to some degree). There are cases where a refusal to forgive would be utterly unreasonable, and ones where, arguably, forgiveness should never be offered. (Here’s a hint: mimes.)

Forgive Me!

Once we know who does and does not have the right to forgive a crime, the next question is, when should someone forgive a crime? This question may be the trickiest of the bunch. There are actually two sides to it: first, what sorts of crimes can be forgiven and under what circumstances, and second, whether there are crimes that are simply unforgivable.

In thinking about the first problem, we have to realize that while victims of a crime have a right to forgive, they have no obligation. Only the victim can decide when and if a crime should be forgiven. Still, it’s possible to establish some broad guidelines about forgiveness. A person shouldn’t be too quick or too slow to forgive. Forgiving too quickly displays a lack of self-respect, while being too reluctant to forgive manifests a grudging resentment. In each case, the victim of the crime is granting too much power over themselves to the perpetrator. The victim who forgives instantly is almost agreeing with the perpetrator that the victim was worth little enough to justify the crime. The person who forgives too slowly, or refuses to forgive altogether, remains forever defined as the victim of another.9

In deciding what should be forgiven and when, we need to consider not just the victim but the perpetrator as well. We often hear reformed villains speak about “earning forgiveness,” but this notion is false. To earn something is to acquire a right to it, and there is no right to be forgiven. Such a right would imply an obligation on the part of the victim to forgive, and that right simply doesn’t exist. However, by displaying remorse, performing acts of repentance, or making reparations, a perpetrator can make it more reasonable for a victim to forgive, even to the point where it seems unreasonable to withhold forgiveness.

Take Hawkeye, for instance: in his criminal days he harmed Tony Stark, so Stark has the right to forgive him—something he does quite quickly (perhaps too quickly). But suppose Stark had not been so quick to forgive—at what point would his refusal have become unreasonable? There is no clear answer, but in Hawkeye’s case, he clearly repented of his earlier criminal behavior and changed his ways, making him a likely candidate for forgiveness. Once he’s helped to save the world once or twice, he becomes still more likely. Once he’s saved Tony’s own armor-clad bacon a few more times, it seems that Tony would be unreasonable if he still resented Hawkeye’s earlier actions.10

Hawkeye is a fairly easy case (if there is such a thing as an “easy” case of forgiveness). Suppose we look at something a little more difficult—what if the perpetrator of the crime is unrepentant? Could, for example, Cap forgive the Red Skull, or the Fantastic Four forgive Doctor Doom?11 From what we’ve already said, the answer is yes, of course they could, so the real question is whether they should. The answer seems to be no, unless they have good reason to believe that such forgiveness might actually spur the villain in question to become repentant. Part of the purpose of forgiveness is to reestablish harmonious relations. If the perpetrator is unrepentant and likely to remain so, then forgiveness will fail in this purpose. On the other hand, if the perpetrator has admitted wrongdoing and expressed remorse for it, or seems likely to do so given the right encouragement, then forgiveness can serve this purpose. To forgive the Red Skull or Doctor Doom, given their immense pride in their criminal actions (as well as their refusal to admit any wrongdoing, thinking themselves righteous and noble), would be equivalent to condoning their actions. But to forgive someone on the verge of repenting his or her actions might be the last bit of encouragement needed to start reforming them.

Forgiveness in the House of M

We’ve discussed guidelines for forgiveness in terms of the people involved in a crime, the victims and perpetrators, but we’ve neglected the issue of the crime itself. It’s one thing for Hawkeye to make amends for his attacks on Iron Man, but it’s quite another for the Wasp to forgive her husband, Hank Pym, for hitting her, or for the Marvel Universe to forgive the Scarlet Witch for warping reality itself.12 There are various degrees of crimes to consider, some of which are more easily forgiven than others. There are also a variety of factors to be considered, including the severity of the harm and the number of people impacted by a particular crime. To cut to the chase, though, let’s consider whether there are any crimes that simply ought not to be forgiven, ever.

As we consider the possibility of an unforgivable crime, we can take one of two approaches. The first claims that certain crimes are unforgivable by their very nature: there is something inherent in the crime itself that makes forgiveness unthinkable. For instance, we could argue that Hank Pym’s abuse of his wife was unforgivable, not because of the actual physical harm he inflicted, but because of the violation of their relationship that it represented. By that logic, Janet Van Dyne should never have forgiven Hank, or was at least behaving unreasonably when she did. Also, some stories hint that the Scarlet Witch may have been molested as a child.13 If it is true that Wanda was molested as a child, forgiveness for the perpetrator may simply be out of the question; that crime itself is too terrible to forgive, regardless of any circumstances in any particular instance of it.

The other approach to unforgivable crimes maintains that there is no crime that is unforgivable by its nature, but there are some crimes that are unforgivable depending on their degree. For example, a single murder might be forgivable, but attempted genocide would not be. We can look again to the Scarlet Witch: in the House of M miniseries (2005), Wanda used her reality-warping powers to, well, warp reality, but this time on a grand scale. She attempted to grant every hero his or her fondest wish. In theory, that sounds great, but in actuality, it meant forcing the entire world to live a lie, one that robbed each and every person of their individual histories and identities. There are some mitigating factors: Wanda was in the middle of a breakdown and perhaps not entirely responsible for her actions. If we accept that, then there is no crime to be forgiven, because it is excused. If, however, the reality-warping was voluntary and intentional, with no excuse available, then we might have an unforgivable crime.

These two approaches are usually combined, which brings to mind the contributions of Wanda’s brother, Quicksilver, to this whole reality-warping business. In the latter stages of House of M, it is revealed that it was actually Pietro who caused the whole mess—albeit with the best of intentions. With Wanda’s reality-warping powers expanding and her sanity collapsing, many of the world’s heroes gathered to decide what should be done about her. When Pietro heard someone suggest killing Wanda to save the world, he went to his sister and suggested the bit of reality-warping that began the whole storyline. In doing this, Pietro arguably performed both sorts of unforgivable crime. On the one hand, he was indirectly responsible for the warping of reality on the largest scale imaginable, and on the other, he manipulated his mentally unstable sister to achieve it.

The Paradox of Forgiveness

To be sure, not everyone accepts that there is such a thing as an unforgivable crime. French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) argued that if forgiveness is to have any meaning, it must be granted to the (seemingly) unforgivable.14 Forgiving the forgivable is (relatively) easy and comes with benefits; by forgiving a repentant and remorseful friend, for instance, we repair the friendship, generating a type of exchange. But forgiving the unforgivable is the only kind of “pure” forgiveness (similar to “pure” altruism), where there can be no expectation of reward. To forgive that which cannot be forgiven is to forgive without hope, or need, or want. If this is how we understand forgiveness and the unforgivable, then the crimes we have examined so far have not been unforgivable. In each case, those who would be called on to forgive have the possibility of establishing or reestablishing a relationship with the forgiven person. In order to find an unforgivable crime, by Derrida’s logic, we don’t need a particular kind of crime, but a particular kind of criminal: namely, an unrepentant one. Or, to make the situation perfect, a deceased unrepentant criminal would be ideal—there is then no hope of the forgiven criminal having a change of heart.

Derrida’s discussion of the forgivable expresses what some have called the “paradox of forgiveness,” though it is really the paradox of forgiveness and repentance. The paradox runs something like this: you can’t forgive an unrepentant criminal, because then you are simply excusing the crime. At the same time, there is no need to forgive a repentant criminal, because in repenting of the crime, the criminal has already taken steps to erase it.15

Avengers, Forgive!

There is a potential conflict between forgiveness and a team called the “Avengers” that we need to address. To avenge and to forgive seem to be opposites. To avenge is to punish in order to right a wrong, while to forgive is to forgo punishment—or so it seems. In fact, avenging and forgiving can be united. Forgiving doesn’t involve forgoing punishment—it involves forgoing resentment and revenge. Revenging and avenging are related, but distinct. Avenging has to do with justice, and may be sought by anyone, not just the victims of a crime or wrongdoing. Superheroes usually pursue justice in the names of the people they are sworn to protect, not for themselves. Revenge, on the other hand, is personal. I cannot revenge a wrong done to you—no offense, but I probably don’t even know you. I can’t feel the kind of personalized harm necessary for revenge.16

There is no conflict between avenging and forgiving because the Avengers (and avengers in general) can forgive as well as punish. For instance, there have been two occasions where an Avenger has been given the ultimate punishment—expulsion from the team—only to be readmitted later. Iron Man was expelled in the wake of the Armor Wars after he caused the death of the Gremlin,17 and Hank Pym was expelled for a variety of bizarre actions, including attacking a foe who had already surrendered.18 Both were welcomed back later; they were punished, and then forgiven.

This is possible because punishment and forgiveness serve distinct purposes. Forgiveness is largely about reestablishing relationships, while punishment is usually about retribution. By violating the rules, these Avengers incurred debts to the rest of the team, and when they were punished, they repaid those debts. Thus, Tony and Hank can be readmitted once they have paid for their crimes. Punishment as retribution can be thought of as making reparations for a crime—a step on the road to forgiveness. Still, while we may repay a debt by being punished, we should keep in mind that forgiveness can’t be earned like a reward or a paycheck, which a person deserves, but must be granted voluntarily by the victim.

Ultimately, this is what we should take away from these reflections about the Avengers: we cannot demand forgiveness for past missteps, nor can forgiveness be demanded of us. We can, however, make it more (or less) reasonable to grant forgiveness through our subsequent behavior. Just asking for forgiveness may not merit it, but it certainly helps if the request shows the victim that the criminal acknowledges and owns the crime. Those Avengers, like Hawkeye, who are former criminals and villains, never deny what they did in their past lives, and their continuing service as heroes shows that they are worthy of forgiveness.

NOTES

1 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 236–243.

2 The Avengers, vol. 1, #9 (October 1964), reprinted in Essential Avengers Vol. 1 (1998).

3 Bishop Joseph Butler, “Sermons VIII and IX,” in Fifteen Sermons (London: Ware, Longman, and Johnson, 1774).

4 For a brilliant philosophical discussion of excuses, see J. L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” Philosophical Papers (New York: Oxford, 1979), pp. 175–204.

5 The Avengers, vol. 1, #57 (October 1968), reprinted in Essential Avengers Vol. 3 (2001).

6 The Avengers, vol. 1, #54–55 (July–August 1968), reprinted in Essential Avengers Vol. 3 (2001).

7 Claudia Card, The Atrocity Paradigm (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 8.

8 X-Men, vol. 1, #4 (March 1964), reprinted in Essential Uncanny X-Men Vol. 1 (2010).

9 For more on this, see Charles Griswold, Forgiveness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

10 For Tony’s own issues with forgiveness and atonement, see Christopher Robichaud, “Can Iron Man Atone for Tony Stark’s Wrongs?” in Iron Man and Philosophy, ed. Mark D. White (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010), pp. 53–63.

11 For that matter, could anyone forgive a mime?

12 What, no mime joke? Can’t think outside the box? Ha-ha . . .

13 For instance in The Avengers, vol. 1, #401 (August 1996).

14 Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 32–33.

15 Leo Zaibert, “The Paradox of Forgiveness,” Journal of Moral Philosophy, 6 (2009): 365–393.

16 For more on the distinction between justice (or retribution) and revenge, see Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 366–70.

17 Iron Man, vol. 1, #229 (April 1988), reprinted in Iron Man: Armor Wars (2007).

18 The Avengers, vol. 1, #213 (November 1981).

Chapter 8

DOES PETER PARKER HAVE A GOOD LIFE?

Neil Mussett

Spider-Man is a geek. Don’t get me wrong—I call him that with affection. I myself am quite a geek: computer programmer by day, secret philosopher by night. I’m just saying that if Batman weren’t a superhero, he’d spend his days on yachts with supermodels; Superman would work as a pro bono lawyer; and Wonder Woman would start an animal preserve in Kenya. (Can you tell I’m more of a DC guy?) Peter Parker would work at a lab in a university, design web pages, or teach high school science. We care about Spider-Man because he’s just like us, but with special powers. Peter Parker has all sorts of problems: he’s an orphan. He was raised by his older, old-fashioned aunt and uncle. He grew up poor, and stays poor in many of the storylines. Even when he does find love, he doesn’t seem to be any good at it. He’s interesting because he doesn’t have it together. Even his superpowers cause problems for him—he has to lie to the people he loves to protect them, and that keeps him from getting close. Other superheroes have their secrets, but for some reason, Peter always feels the consequences more than they do.

The question is, then, would you like to be Spider-Man? Does Peter Parker have a good life? What is a good life anyway? It seems like a simple enough question. Some answers seem too simple: If I play “The Sims” video game, I learn that the good life consists of color-coordinated furniture, successful parties, career advancement, and regular trips to the bathroom. Other answers sound good (or at least complicated), but don’t stick with you: when I see an author on this week’s talk show promoting his Secret to Happiness, I can’t help wondering what happened to last week’s Secret on the same show.

If philosophy is good for anything, it has to be for the Big Question, the Meaning of Life. There have been a lot of philosophers since Thales of Miletus (c. 624–546 BCE) first put in his big plug for water. In this chapter, I’m going to discuss just five: a Roman slave, a begging friar, a novelist, a psychiatrist, and an academic. Two atheists, and three followers of three different religions. Three of these were imprisoned, two were tortured. Two spent time in concentration camps. One lived under an assumed name to protect the innocent, and we don’t even know the name of another. One never wrote a book, and one wrote more than 45. Three have appeared in comic books. Each of these philosophers has given us a complete, and completely different, way to understand ourselves and our lives, and a way to find place for pain and pleasure, other people, morality, and God in the good life.

Paul Kurtz: A Life of Pleasure and Care for Others

I’ll start with the contemporary philosopher Paul Kurtz, partly because he lives near me in Buffalo, New York, but also because I suspect that his answer to the Great Question will most resemble yours. You may not have heard of him, but he’s the author or editor of over 45 books and more than 800 published articles. He has popularized the term “secular humanism” to describe an approach to life that focuses on joyful, creative living, a rejection of all religious claims, and a rational, consequence-based ethics.

The good life, Kurtz tells us, has two components: First, the good life is the happy life. What is happiness? Historically, philosophers have described happiness either as pleasure (the hedonists) or as self-actualization (the eudaemonists). Kurtz argues that both are essential to the good life:

If an individual is to achieve a state of happiness, he needs to develop a number of excellences. I will only list these, without explication: the capacity for autonomous choice and freedom, creativity, intelligence, self-discipline, self-respect, high motivation, good will, an affirmative outlook, good health, the capacity to enjoy pleasure, and aesthetic appreciation.1

Does this describe Spider-Man? Peter has certainly determined his own destiny. We know that he’s smart; he actually invents his own web shooters in the comic book. In general, he keeps his cool, but we have seen Spider-Man lose control at times. In Spider-Man 3, we see him go to some strange lengths to embarrass Mary Jane at a jazz club after she breaks up with him. However, he is young, and at the time he was under the influence of an evil spider suit from another planet, so we can forgive him.

Does he enjoy pleasure? His parents are dead. His uncle is dead, and it’s his fault. His aunt is poor, alone, and constantly in danger. In the comic, Peter accidentally kills his first love, Gwen Stacy, when he pulls too hard on his web while trying to save her from a fall. It does not seem that Peter has enjoyed the “multiplicities of sexuality” that Kurtz sees as “so essential to happiness.”2 He never seems to have any money. He’s a brilliant scientist, but he doesn’t have the reputation he deserves. J. Jonah uses the newspaper to turn the public against Spider-Man, so Peter can’t even enjoy popular acclaim. I submit to you that it is part of the very essence of Spider-Man that he has a pointedly painful life.

For Kurtz, happiness is important, but we can’t live the truly good life alone. Kurtz insists that each of us needs to develop in ourselves the ethical principles of integrity, trustworthiness, benevolence, and fairness. We also need to “develop love and friendship for their own sakes, as goods in themselves.”3 Finally, we need to “consider all members of the human family to be equal in dignity and value.”4 Not only does Peter Parker place himself in danger to save innocent lives, he’s also a good friend, loving nephew, and kind boyfriend. They don’t call him “friendly” for nothing.

It wouldn’t be a discussion of Kurtz’s philosophy without mentioning religion. Kurtz believes strongly that God is a postulation without sufficient evidence.5 Does Pete believe in God? It’s hard to say. God and religion aren’t central to Spider-Man’s story, but some have argued that Peter may be a mild Protestant Christian.6

I think for Kurtz, the jury is out on Peter Parker’s life. On the plus side, he has realized his extraordinary talents and displayed goodwill toward humankind. On the minus side, his difficult life and obsession with monogamy have robbed Peter of some of the best parts of living. Kurtz might say that Peter is happy; he does have an “active life of enterprise and endeavor,” but Kurtz also believes that life should be fun,7 and fun seems hard to come by for Peter.

Ayn Rand: Life and Integrity

Although Paul Kurtz and Ayn Rand (1905–1982) are both atheists, they give incompatible answers to the Big Question. Kurtz wants you to realize that you can be altruistic without religion; Rand wants you to stop being altruistic. Kurtz asks you to develop a “deep appreciation for the needs of other human beings”8; Rand asks you to “learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man’s demand for your help.”9

You may know her through the video game Bioshock, which was inspired by her writings. You may have seen the 1999 movie The Passion of Ayn Rand, based on her life. You may also know her as the star of the comic book Action Philosophers! #2 (June 2005). Steve Ditko, the original artist for The Amazing Spider-Man, had what one author calls a “cultish devotion” to her philosophy of Objectivism.10

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905, Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum’s family suffered at the hands of the Communist Revolution of 1917. After completing a degree in history, she moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter. She changed her name to Ayn Rand when she began to write anti-Soviet stories, fearing for her family’s safety in Russia. She’s most famous for her 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, about a future in which the producers, artists, and entrepreneurs of the world go on strike. (I just checked Amazon.com, and it’s still #1 in political philosophy.)

In a lifeless world, she says, there are no choices and no alternatives. With life comes the most fundamental alternative: existence or nonexistence. Matter is indestructible, life is not. A living organism can succeed or fail to sustain itself. If it fails, it dies. Life creates “Value,” that which a living organism acts to attain. Things are good or evil to the extent that they sustain or destroy life. Happiness is achieving one’s values, and “pain is an agent of death.”11

Man has the unique power of rationality. Just as non-rational animals use whatever faculties they possess to survive, man’s rational nature demands a rational means of survival. He has no instinct of self-preservation, no “automatic code of survival.”12 The lower animals have no choice but to act for their own good; man must choose his own actions by thought. “What are the values his survival requires?” she asks. “That is the question to be answered by the science of ethics.”13 Rand’s model for an ethical act is the trade. In a trade, each man must “give value for value.”14 The opposite of the trade would be force, violence, or theft, which would be unethical because it requires the sacrifice of one rational agent for the benefit of another.15

I’m afraid Ayn Rand wouldn’t have good things to say about Spider-Man. Think about it: Peter Parker has superhuman strength, scientific genius, and the ability to climb walls and see the near future. How does he use it? At first, he uses it to make money as a professional wrestler (in the comic, he has quite a successful career). When he decides not to intervene in a robbery that has nothing to do with him, his uncle is murdered. This event moves him to dedicate his life to saving a public that hates him. He hides his identity and lives in squalor, all for the sake of his uncle’s advice about power and responsibility. In other words, Peter becomes Rand’s “prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number.”16

In many ways, Spider-Man is an allegory, a fairy tale, of what Rand calls the “morality of sacrifice,”17 which she believes is the opposite of true ethics. For the morality of sacrifice, the good is always the good of others. The morality of sacrifice praises any act motivated by the welfare of another person, and criticizes any act motivated by one’s own welfare. Rand summarizes the morality of sacrifice this way: “If you wish it, it’s evil; if others wish it, it’s good; if the motive of your action is your welfare, don’t do it; if the motive is the welfare of others, then anything goes.”18 This self-destructive theory demands that we love those whom we do not value, and tells us that “To love a man for his virtues is paltry and human . . . to love him for his flaws is divine.”19 This is the sort of love Spider-Man has for his public, and it’s the reason why Rand would say that he is not living the good life.

Epictetus: Self-Control, Duty, and Knowledge of the World

Ayn Rand believes that (traditional) morality is destructive to happiness, but there’s a philosopher who believes that morality is sufficient for happiness. Unlike Rand, who lived under an assumed name, we don’t even know the name of this philosopher. All we know of him is that he was a slave in Rome, so we call him “Acquired” (epiktetos in Greek). He was born about 55 CE, and if our five philosophers were to fight, I would put my money on him. Origen gives us a snapshot of a man who is tough as nails:

[T]ake Epictetus, who, when his master was twisting his leg, said, smiling and unmoved, “You will break my leg;” and when it was broken, he added, “Did I not tell you that you would break it?”20

While he was still a slave, Epictetus attended lectures from a Stoic philosopher, Musonius Rufus. He became a philosopher himself, and when he was given his freedom sometime before the year 89, he taught philosophy in Rome and lived to be eighty years old.21

Epictetus lived the life of a slave and an exile, but he considered his own life to be good. His answer to the Big Question is simple: to have a good life, you must 1) master your desires; 2) perform your duties; and 3) think correctly about yourself and the world. Most people neglect the first two and focus only on the third.

Epictetus would say that Kurtz and Rand have a huge underlying problem: they base happiness on chance. Most of life is out of our control. The pleasures they describe may sound attractive, but what if you were born a slave? What if your parents die and your uncle is killed? What if there is more pain in your life than pleasure? Is your life bad? Epictetus puts happiness in the one place that’s immune to life’s disasters: your own power of choice. We can lead happy lives under any circumstances as long as we master our desires and depend only on those things that are in our control:

I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?22

Epictetus addresses something that is essential to Spider-Man and every other superhero: attachment. What is Spider-Man’s greatest weakness? His attachment to Aunt May and MJ. Even if Spider-Man were immortal, his friends aren’t. Nothing he has is his very own; it is given to him for the moment, not forever or inseparably, but for a season. Peter should remind himself of this whenever he saves his loved ones from danger or even takes pleasure in their company. Epictetus asks us this provocative question:

What harm is there in whispering to yourself as you kiss your child, “To-morrow you will die,” and to your friend in like manner, “To-morrow you or I shall go away, and we shall see one another no more?”23

Would Epictetus give Spider-Man a passing grade in his school for Stoics? Peter is a hero and a scholar, so he gets full credit for duties and learning. Has Peter mastered himself? Peter is no coward—he doesn’t run from pain or mortal danger. However, self-mastery is more than courage in battle; it’s freedom from the pains of this world. In the movies, he spends years pining for MJ, basing his happiness on something he can’t obtain. He spends his life torn between the call of duty and a need for personal comforts. He doesn’t prepare himself for loss and pain, so when they happen to him, he loses his peace. Spider-Man has a long way to go before he can be counted among “The Wise.” As much as he cares for Aunt May, he needs to learn that his obsession with her safety keeps him from living the truly good life.

Viktor Frankl: Meaning and Sacrifice

Perhaps it’s just the opposite. Perhaps genuine care for others is what the good life is all about. Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) lived a life just as hard as Epictetus’s, but came up with a different answer. Frankl was a Jewish psychologist who suffered in several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Dachau, and one camp the name of which he did not know. While he was in Auschwitz, he decided that the best way to keep himself going was to write a book on the psychology of death camps. He did survive, and what started as a book became an entirely new school of psychology that seeks to relieve emotional distress through meaning.

For Frankl, the good life is the life of meaning. “Meaning” is primarily a matter of responsibility—there is some good I need to do.24 In a meaningful life, I have a sense of my own irreplaceability—nobody else can carry out my particular duty for me. In that sense, there’s no one “meaning of life.” Rather, each person’s life has an entirely unique meaning that needs to be discovered.25 Meaning shapes and organizes everything else within my life. It’s the reason I get out of bed in the morning. Meaning also changes the nature of suffering. Frankl claims that “there is nothing in the world . . . that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst of conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning to one’s life.”26 He’s fond of quoting Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who writes, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”27 If suffering is associated with meaning, with love, it becomes sacrifice. Sacrifice, rather than being something to avoid, is actually an essential part of the good life. Frankl is very clear that the very worst life is the life of boredom, which can only lead to an obsessive pursuit of temporary highs.28

To decide whether Spider-Man has a good life, it’s not enough to admire his heroic actions—Peter must see the purpose himself. While it’s obvious to us that nobody else can do what he does, he may not see the point of it all. The pain in Peter’s life is real. Not only did Peter suffer from his childhood as a poor, unpopular orphan, he suffers in the present from his own actions and lifestyle. He suffers when he gets hurt, and he suffers in his personal life.

Frankl, on the other hand, would ask Peter to decide whether his life is good. He would sit Peter down and ask him, “Why don’t you kill yourself?” This rather shocking question would not be meant to encourage Peter to jump off a bridge. Instead, it would force Peter to find the things that keep him going despite the suffering. Frankl says that it’s ironic that most people think the job of the psychologist is to relieve stress. The best way to help people in crisis is often to increase the amount of tension in their lives by helping them to focus on their responsibilities. He uses a metaphor from architecture—to strengthen a weak arch in a building, you add weight. Frankl could add to Uncle Ben’s advice: with great responsibility comes the knowledge of your own purpose.

The closest thing we have to Peter’s answer to this question may be the encounter he has with the evil psychologist, Dr. Judas Traveller, in Amazing Spider-Man #402 (June 1995). During the infamous “Clone Saga” (1994–1996), Traveller meets Spider-Man at an all-time low point in his life: Aunt May is dead, his baby with MJ may have genetic defects, and Peter has been imprisoned. Traveller offers Peter a chance to have the peaceful life he always wanted, but at the cost of innocent lives. He refuses and attacks Traveller. In doing so, Peter shows us that he’d rather live a life of great sacrifice and pain than betray his love of humanity.

Thomas Aquinas: God and Virtue

There’s one superhero we haven’t talked about so far. You may not have heard of him, but there are specialty stores where you can still get his books, pictures, and even his emblem on a chain. Like Harry Osborn, he was born to a rich and powerful family. They wanted to use their influence to get him a cushy job, but he wanted to join a ragtag band of men who wandered the world helping those in need. His family was so opposed to his plans that they had him kidnapped and locked in a castle tower for almost two years. His mother had a change of heart, and had his sisters rescue him with some ropes and a basket. He has some nicknames, The Angelic Doctor and The Dumb Ox, but most know him simply as Thomas.

Yes, I am talking about St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274). I put him last—a dead giveaway that he’s my favorite. Thomas Aquinas wrote on most major branches of classical philosophy. Believing that faith and reason are entirely compatible, he also wrote on a wide variety of subjects, including angels and even economics. If you’re brave, get ahold of the medieval equivalent of a comic book, Dante’s Divine Comedy (including the ultraviolent Inferno), which is an epic poem about a man who travels from Hell to Purgatory to Heaven. Dante was so inspired by Thomas’s philosophy that he used it as the setting of his poem.

Like Kurtz, Thomas argues that all men want happiness, and that a perfectly good life would fulfill all our desires, including that for the perfection of our bodies.29 Also like Kurtz, Thomas believes that it’s an essential part of our nature to care for others, and that all people are capable of living virtuous lives, whether or not they accept Christianity.30 Like Rand, Thomas believes that true morality will always benefit the one who acts, and that pleasure in acting increases the moral worthiness of the action.31 He holds, with Rand, that we love what’s good, what’s deserving and praiseworthy and excellent.32 Even the best person shouldn’t love other people more than he loves himself.33 Thomas agrees with Epictetus that happiness is ultimately a choice, and cannot be taken away by the actions of others.34 Finally, like Frankl, Thomas believes that in the good life, love is the ultimate motivation, and love allows us even to enjoy suffering for our friends.35

How can Thomas say all this? I don’t have enough room here to give even the roughest sketch of Thomas’s ethics. It’ll have to suffice to say that for Thomas, everything is good: our bodies, our minds, the world, and especially God. The only way you even get anything bad is when a thing is missing something it should have (people usually use blindness as an example, or a car without brakes, or a superhero without a costume). Every desire we have points to some good thing that can fulfill it. Our desire for happiness has no limit, and the more we experience of the world, the more we know that it can’t perfectly satisfy us. Thomas says that everybody wants to be happy, but what they don’t realize is that only God, who is unlimited Goodness, can make them perfectly happy.36

Reading Kurtz or Rand, one would think that Aquinas hates this world, hates life, and hates the body, but it is quite the opposite. Thomas adopts Aristotle’s (384–322 BCE) concept of a virtue. Yes, a virtue is a good habit, but it is more than that. A virtue changes you—it makes you enjoy doing good. A generous person actually likes giving. Doing an occasional nice thing here or there is fine, but if you do it enough, you get hooked, and it stops being work to do the right thing. That’s how Thomas can link morality with pleasure. The truly virtuous person is filled with joy when doing good, and, in a sense, can do whatever he or she wants.

Without any notion of God, people can still love one another, because every person is born with a sense of decency, a sense that moral actions are compatible, appropriate, and healthy. This is because of the Natural Law, so-called because it comes from our nature as rational beings. We start with loving ourselves, but we can come to identify with others, see them as other selves, and love them as well. Through God’s action, we can be given the virtue of charity, which allows us to love God in a completely selfless way, to love those around us as images of God, and to love ourselves and our bodies as God’s creations.37

What would Thomas say about Spidey’s life? I actually find it difficult to picture driving Thomas Aquinas to a movie theater, but if we could arrange it, I think he would have good things to say about Mr. Parker. He would praise Peter’s moral and intellectual virtues: courage, creativity, good judgment, compassion, and restraint. Most of us don’t have the opportunity to do good to all men, but Peter does, and his beneficence is very close to the highest virtue, charity.38

The life of a superhero does have its pleasures. Thomas would say that Spider-Man enjoys saving the world for three important reasons: first, the effect—the love he has for the people he saves allows him to enjoy their good as if it were his own. Second, the end—Peter knows (or at least hopes) that he’ll receive good things for his efforts, like gratitude and praise. Finally, the principle—he enjoys using his superpowers, exercising his virtues, and doing things out of love.

What about Peter’s suffering? Thomas believes that in itself, sorrow or pain is not evil in a moral sense (disagreeing with Ayn Rand). There are actually several kinds of good pain: remorse, or sorrow for all the harm we have done, is actually very good. Uncle Ben’s advice is powerful because it’s associated with a tragic mistake. The anger and loss Peter feels at the crimes of his opponents are also a kind of pain, but a good pain. Suffering heightens Peter’s awareness of risk and a desire to avoid repeating past mistakes, which is very helpful. Thomas agrees that suffering can be bad, but he insists that no suffering, interior or exterior, can outweigh the badness of failing to reject evil.39 If there’s a balance to be struck, Peter has come out on the right side.

What Next?

Nothing is more depressing than talking to a philosopher who doesn’t believe in anything. I have very strong beliefs about the Meaning of Life (a combination of Frankl and Thomas, with a little Dietrich von Hildebrand, an anti-Nazi activist and philosopher of ethics, beauty, and sexual love, thrown in for fun), but it’s not my plan to argue for one particular winner in this chapter. There are two general approaches to answering this question, the academic (read everything you can and make a decision) and the concrete (find someone who has what you want and ask how they got it). Whichever way you choose, it’s vital for you to pursue the answer.

NOTES

1 Paul Kurtz, Living without Religion: Eupraxophy (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1994), p. 41.

2 Paul Kurtz, Embracing the Power of Humanism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), p. 6.

3 Ibid.

4 Paul Kurtz, “Toward a New Enlightenment: A Response to the Postmodernist Critique of Humanism,” Free Inquiry, 13 (1992–1993), pp. 33–37.

5 Kurtz, Living without Religion, p. 33.

6 http://www.adherents.com/lit/comics/Spider-Man.html.

7 Paul Kurtz, “Where Is the Good Life?: Making the Humanist Choice,” Free Inquiry 18 (1998), pp. 23–24.

8 Paul Kurtz, Vern L. Bullough, and Timothy J. Madigan, Toward a New Enlightenment: The Philosophy of Paul Kurtz (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1994), p. 21.

9 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 1059.

10 Andrew Hultkrans, “Steve Ditko’s Hands,” in Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, ed. Sean Howe (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), pp. 209–223.

11 Rand, Atlas Shrugged, p. 940.

12 Ibid., p. 939.

13 Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Penguin, 1964), p. 24.

14 Rand, Atlas Shrugged, p. 410.

15 Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 32.

16 Ibid., p. 1030.

17 Ibid., p. 959.

18 Rand, Atlas Shrugged, p. 1030.

19 Ibid.

20 The Writings of Origen, trans. Frederick Crombie (Edinburg: University of California: T & T Clark, 1872), p. 475.

21 John Lancaster Spalding, “Critical and Biographical Introduction,” in Discourses of Epictetus, trans. George Long (New York: D. Appleton, 1904), p. iv.

22 Epictetus, Discourses of Epictetus, trans. George Long (New York: D. Appleton, 1904), p. 3.

23 Epictetus, Epictetus the Discourses and Manual, trans. P. E. Matheson (London: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 97.

24 Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984), p. 127.

25 Ibid., p. 131.

26 Ibid., p. 126.

27 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (London: Ware, Wordsworth Editions, 2007), Axiom 12: “If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how.”

28 Ibid., p. 128.

29 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia IIae, q.1, aa.6–7; and Ia IIae, q.4, a.6.

30 Ibid., Ia IIae, q.91, a.2.

31 Ibid., IIa IIae, q.27, a.3; IIa IIae, q.123, a.12; IIa IIae, q.27, a.8; Ia IIae, q.59, a.2.

32 Ibid., Ia IIae, q.10, a.1.

33 Ibid., IIa IIae, q.26, a.4; Ia IIae, q.29, a.4.

34 Ibid., Ia IIae, q.3, a.2; Ia IIae, q.4, a.7.

35 Ibid., Ia IIae, q.32, a.6.

36 Ibid., Ia IIae, q.2, a.8.

37 Ibid., IIa IIae, qq.23–46.

38 Ibid., IIa IIae, q.31, a.3.

39 Ibid., Ia IIae, q.39.

Chapter 9

THE STARK MADNESS OF TECHNOLOGY

George A. Dunn

For me, it was the jet boots.

Not that I didn’t also covet that incredible array of weapons built into Tony Stark’s armor—the repulsor rays, missile launchers, pulse beams, and flamethrowers—but it was those jet boots that really got me salivating. To my preadolescent mind, it was Tony’s marvelous ability to lift himself off the ground and soar through the clouds that made him a bona fide superhero and not just some hotshot engineer outfitted with an admittedly awesome arsenal of weapons. After all, the prefix “super” comes from a Latin word meaning “above,” so to watch a real superhero in action you should need to crane your neck and look up in the sky.

But the jet boots were also emblematic of what to my mind was the most glorious thing about Tony’s way of being a superhero. Unlike, say, Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four, Tony wasn’t simply someone who happened to be a superhero in addition to being a hotshot engineer. He was a superhero because of those jet boots and the enviable power they gave him, which is to say that it was his extraordinary engineering prowess that allowed him to make himself super, without having to wait around for gamma rays or a radioactive spider bite. Consequently—and best of all, to my way of thinking—you didn’t even need to be Tony to wield his remarkable superpowers (at least until recently, when Extremis transformed him into a full-fledged technological artifact in his own right). All you needed was access to Stark technology. In principle, anyone could become the Iron Man. Of course, as the memorable “Armor Wars” story line drove home with a vengeance—and by “vengeance,” I mean Tony Stark in a murderous rage—you would be ill-advised to use that technology without the permission of its creator.1 On the other hand, you might get to be one of the lucky few, like James “Rhodey” Rhodes, “Happy” Hogan, or, more recently, Pepper Potts, all of whom Tony has authorized at one time to don some version of his Iron Man armor and take flight.

And the upshot to all this was that while I might have missed my chance to be born on Krypton, the prospect of flying with those gleaming red jet boots wasn’t entirely beyond the reach of my juvenile imagination and its superheroic aspirations.

“A Heart of Gold and an Appearance to Match”

The enduring appeal of Iron Man owes a great deal to how Tony Stark personifies the spectacular promise of technology to turn our dreams into reality, a promise that has stoked a fire in the bellies of countless men and women in the modern era, not only in preadolescent boys with airborne imaginations. Occasionally, the promised marvels fail to materialize. While my youthful hopes shone brightly for the day when ads for genuine jet boots appeared in the comic book pages right next to the ones pitching Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys and X-Ray Specs, I’ve learned that this isn’t likely to happen any time soon. Decades of trials with jet-powered apparatuses have established that the human body isn’t aerodynamically suited for this type of flight, except in the zero-gravity conditions of outer space. (The Sea-Monkeys were a big disappointment, too.)

But in all probability, the appeal of Iron Man owes just as much to the way his gleaming golden armor bathes him in the glory of a mythical past, a romantic world of medieval knights-errant, often graced with superhuman abilities, invincible in battle against an endless succession of menaces that threaten the peace of their kingdoms. Consider Stan Lee’s account of how he first came up with the inspiration for Iron Man:

I thought, Well, what if a guy had a suit of armor, but it was a modern suit of armor—not like years ago in the days of King Arthur—and what if that suit of armor made him as strong as any Super Hero? I wasn’t thinking robot at all; I was thinking armor, a man wearing twentieth century armor that would give him great power.2

Medieval knights often ruled over a kingdom of their own or were pledged to the service of some honorable and righteous lord who commissioned their noble exploits and invested them with the authority to act on his behalf. Tony Stark certainly fits that bill, as does Iron Man in his guise as Tony’s most recognizable “employee.” Like a feudal knight, Tony reigns over a powerful kingdom—an industrial kingdom, in his case—that owes its prosperity to his wisdom and foresight. Most important, as one of Tony’s female companions once described his Iron Man alter ego, “he has a heart of gold and an appearance to match his golden deeds.”3 He is the very essence of chivalry—noble, generous, and courageous; a perfect gentleman; skilled in the arts of war; and a formidable fighter for justice.

In short, Tony epitomizes not only the dream of technology enhancing human powers far beyond the limits of our natural endowments but also the possibility of the noble chivalric ideal surviving into the technological era, despite all of the other transformations the human condition is bound to undergo, transformations perhaps more profound than we can currently foresee. He’s a sublime anachronism, an inspired amalgam of past and future at their best. And, to the extent we can persuade ourselves that this hybrid really is a portent of things to come, the future looks as bright as the fire spitting from the heels of Iron Man’s jet boots.

These days, however, when I think about knights, I often recall the words of a seventeenth-century philosopher named René Descartes (1596-1650). In his Discourse on Method, Descartes offered an assessment of the education he received at one of the top schools in Europe, judging almost the entire curriculum to have been a colossal waste of his time. His appraisal of the value of the literature he was required to read concludes with his remark that “fables make us imagine many things as possible that are not” and even the authors of “histories” are guilty on occasion of “altering or exaggerating the importance of matters in order to make them more worthy of being read” and “at any rate, will almost always omit the baser and less notable events.” Consequently, “those who regulate their conduct by the examples they draw from these works are liable to fall into the excesses of the knights-errant of our tales of chivalry, and to conceive plans beyond their powers.”4 Could Tony Stark, a character in a modern-day fable, mislead us into thinking that impossible things are really possible? (I’m not just talking about the jet boots, by the way.)

“Masters of Nature”

No doubt, you’ve heard the old wisecrack about the philosopher’s boots being firmly planted in the clouds. Clearly, this droll image of thinkers traipsing around the stratosphere is meant to belittle philosophy as a lot of rarefied nonsense with little or no relevance for life as it is lived by the rest of us here on the ground. But couldn’t we interpret it instead as an acknowledgment that philosophers—some of them, at least—might have something in common with high-flying superheroes like Iron Man?

Descartes was the sort of philosopher who enjoyed pondering the perennial questions of what was then known as “first philosophy”—the existence of God, the nature of the soul, and other lofty matters—whenever he could squeeze in a short break from his main preoccupations, such as inventing analytical geometry, working out the law of refraction in optics, and offering some of the first mathematical descriptions of the behavior of light.5 While these may seem like fairly modest accomplishments compared to the invention of a lightweight exoskeleton that doubles as a high-tech weapons arsenal, the truth is that neither Stark Industries nor the Iron Man armor could have gotten off the ground without Descartes’ pioneering contributions to science and mathematics. But Descartes was a forerunner of Iron Man in another, even more important, respect. In addition to helping shepherd into being the experimental, mathematics-based methods that launched the scientific revolution, he was among the first to promote the idea of using these new scientific methods to equip human beings with wonderful new abilities, in addition to significantly enhancing our existing ones.

Consider his research in optics, undertaken for the expressed purpose of enhancing the power of the human eye. “All the management of our lives depends on the senses,” he wrote in the opening line of his essay the Optics, “and since sight is the noblest and most comprehensive of our senses, inventions that serve to increase its power are undoubtedly among the most useful there can be.”6 To tackle the problem of designing superior optical instruments, he offered a definition of light, analyses of the human eye and the phenomenon of vision, a formulation of the law of refraction, a discussion of lenses for “perfecting vision” and correcting the “faults of the eye,” and, finally, directions for constructing a machine that could manufacture those lenses. By contemporary standards, the results may not be all that impressive, paling in comparison to the fantastic sensory enhancement Tony Stark enjoys due to his Iron Man armor. But it’s a start and, most important, an indispensable foundation for greater inventions to come.

It’s Not All in the Hardware

Still, from another perspective, Descartes was an even more stupendous inventor than even the illustrious Tony Stark, despite the fact that the most earth-shattering products of his ingenuity, his new methods in mathematics and natural science, didn’t contain a speck of “hardware.” As a number of recent philosophers have argued, we would be hugely mistaken to think that the essence of technology consists of hardware. The “most obvious, massive, and impressive example” of technology may be the machine, argued the French philosopher and social theorist Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), but the essence of technology (or technique, as he called it) is something less tangible, “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given state of development) in every field of human activity.”7 Wrapped in that thicket of words is a simple and cogent insight: what makes our technological civilization possible is not our tools but rather the rules that tell us how to construct and use them. In the “starkest” terms, the essence of technology lies not in the Iron Man armor and arsenal but in the know-how that created and that operates them. At bottom, argued Ellul, technology is a set of proven methods to get the job done—whatever it may be—in the most efficient way possible. Machine technology is simply an external embodiment of those methods, kind of like their “exoskeleton.”

Descartes was a vigorous proponent of yoking science to a tried-and-true method. Patterned after “the procedures in the mechanical crafts,” the rules of his method required every scientific question to be framed as a search for some unknown quantity in a mathematical equation. Because mathematics was, in his opinion, what made the procedures of first-rate craftsmen so reliable, translating scientific problems that weren’t ostensibly about numbers and figures into ones that were seemed like a surefire way to find solutions that would be not only rigorous but, just as important, useful for the invention of new devices to expand human powers. One measure of Descartes’ success is that three centuries later, when young Tony Stark was enrolled at MIT, the curriculum he studied was imbued from top to bottom with Cartesian zeal for mathematics. Although Descartes’ private use of his method produced little technological hardware, it wouldn’t be at all off the mark to call him one of the chief engineers of the “software”—the intangible directives and protocols—that has directed the assembly of our modern technological civilization.

Descartes’ vision of what a technologically oriented science could accomplish extended far beyond the manufacture of machines to make better lenses. He expected nothing short of marvels from the triumphant parade of top-notch scientists and engineers who would follow in his footsteps—or maybe even, as in the case of Tony Stark, blaze a trail up above his footsteps in the sky. Consider Descartes ’ stunning prediction of how, through his method,

we could know the power and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies in our environment, as distinctly as we know the different crafts of our artisans; and we could use this knowledge—as the artisans use theirs—for all the purposes for which it is appropriate, and thus make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature.8

When we understand how nature works, we’re in a position to put nature to work for us. Then we can, as people often say, “master nature.” But when Descartes used the term “master” (maître) in the passage we just quoted, he was thinking of something much more specific than simply elevating us to a position of dominion over the rest of nature. To be a master in his century was to be a highly accomplished artisan, someone possessing the knowledge and skill to craft the right raw materials into beautiful and functional artifacts. Using science to become masters of nature suggests that we can eventually turn all of nature into a store of raw materials to be refashioned however we like.

If you’ re thinking that Descartes is beginning to sound like Tony Stark’s own personal publicist, heralding his technological prowess centuries in advance, then just wait until you hear this. Descartes believed that we could eventually come to understand the natural world every bit as well as an artisan understands his machines because nature is in fact nothing other than an incredibly intricate machine. The only real difference is that the operations of artifacts are for the most part performed by mechanisms that are large enough to be easily perceivable by the senses—as indeed must be the case if they are capable of being manufactured by human beings. The effects produced by nature, in contrast, almost always depend on structures that are so minute that they completely elude our senses.9

This simply means that as our machines come to be composed of more intricate and miniaturized parts, they increasingly approximate the designs used by nature itself. And that’s exactly where Stark technology has been heading from the beginning. It was microtransistors that made the Iron Man armor possible when the character was first introduced in March 1963 in the pages of Tales of Suspense #39. Ever since, Tony’s passion has been miniaturization, with every upgrade of his armor requiring circuitry of progressively more minute components, shrinking over time to microscopic dimensions.10 Tunneling ever deeper into the nano-regions of reality, manipulating structures that lie far below the threshold of detection by our unaided senses, Stark technology has long been advancing on the ability to create an entirely synthetic nature, new and improved, built to human specifications.

The Heroism of Generosity

But what should those specifications be? When it comes to guidance on how best to use our technological power, that avatar of mathematical precision Descartes became curiously vague. In the end, his counsel came down to extolling a virtue and prescribing a maxim. The virtue is generosity, one of the chief virtues that traditionally defined the practice and ideals of the knight in shining armor. The mark of a generous person, according to Descartes, is that he never swerves from his constant “volition to undertake and execute all the things he judges best.”11 That sounds like a pretty admirable trait, but it does leave us wondering what exactly Descartes’ generous knight would judge to be best. What if someone—a villain like Norman Osborn, for instance—judges it best to use the technological power at his disposal to achieve world dominion and turn superheroes into outlaws (and vice versa)? ¹² In that case, Descartes might refer us to his maxim: We should abide by “the law that obliges us to do all in power to secure the general welfare of mankind.”¹³ Of course, it’s the line between concern for the general welfare and preoccupation with private gain that has always divided the heroes from the villains in the comic book universe, so Descartes’ maxim will undoubtedly have a familiar ring to many of us. But while taking the side of the general good may be a fine maxim for a hero, it doesn’t yet tell us what really is best for ourselves and others.

At one time there was a general consensus among philosophers that we could discover what was best for human beings by looking to the nature of our species and, more specifically, to the things that we all naturally require in order to survive and flourish. Basic needs like health and safety must be met, but most philosophers agreed that human happiness also depended on satisfying our so-called higher needs for such goods as friendship, aesthetic enjoyment, and intellectual understanding. Our need for these things is so deeply embedded in our nature—or, as people say nowadays, they’re so hardwired into our brains—that they’ve usually been thought to provide a stable yardstick for judging what really does and doesn’t contribute to “the general welfare of mankind.” But what if our technology were to advance to the point where we could refashion not only our natural environment but even human nature itself, including the human brain and nervous system? What could guide our decisions then?

When Descartes was describing how to design a machine to grind better lenses, his aim was the enhancement of human powers, specifically, our ability to see clearly and distinctly things that are very small or a great distance away. Descartes’ lenses are elementary prosthetic devices, designed to supplement and remedy the defects of the senses with which we were born. Tony’s Iron Man armor, with its assortment of sophisticated sensory and motility enhancing devices, may seem leagues beyond Descartes’ lenses, but they ’re still essentially the same type of thing. Jet boots are also prosthetic devices, albeit extraordinarily cool ones. But in this day and age, when so many of us not only wear glasses but also walk around with cell phones and mp3 players fastened semipermanently to our ears, we’re no longer impressed by the idea of prosthetic enhancement, even as we continue to marvel at some of the forms it can take, such as synthetic exoskeletons or implanted neural stimulators.

“The Body Is Wrong”

However, in the critically acclaimed “Extremis” story line, Warren Ellis’s 2004 reboot of the Iron Man comic, a new technological threshold was crossed, as Tony faced a threat to his life that could be countered only by the most radical technological means.12 In the past, Tony’s life was saved by a magnetic chest plate, a prosthetic device that kept the shrapnel in his chest from reaching his heart. But in “Extremis,” only a top-to-bottom redesign of his very physiology holds out any hope of saving him.

“Extremis” features a flashback to Iron Man’s origins in Afghanistan, in which Tony tells Dr. Ho Yinsen, with whom he was held captive by Afghan guerrillas, that “adapting machines to man and making us great” have always been the goals of his research.¹⁵ It was with Yinsen’s help that Tony built the first primitive prototype of his Iron Man armor with a lifesaving magnetic chest plate, a textbook case of constructing a machine adapted to human needs. Now fast-forward to the present: once again mortally wounded, but this time in battle with a terrorist possessing superpowers acquired through biotechnology, Tony turns to the experimental serum Extremis, both to save his life and to give himself a fighting chance against his foe: the same two ends his armor served in Afghanistan.

But listen to Maya Hansen, the designer of the Extremis technology, as she explains how it works, and ask yourself whether you think that what it does should also be described as “adapting machines to man”:

It’s a bio-electronics package, fitted into a few billion graphic nanotubes and suspended in a carrier fluid. . . . It hacks the body’s repair center—the part of the brain that keeps a complete blueprint of the human body. . . . The normal human blueprint is being replaced with the Extremis blueprint, you see? The brain is being told the body is wrong. . . . Extremis uses the nutrients and body mass to grow new organs. Better ones.13

Extremis uses bioelectric robots to rebuild Tony’s body, including his nervous system, from the inside out: healing his injuries, making him stronger than ever before, and equipping him with a broad spectrum of new abilities. He now stores the undersheath of his Iron Man armor in the hollows of his bones, “wired directly into my brain,” and can make it emerge at will. He can direct the other components of his armor at a distance by using brain impulses to manipulate a “vectored repulsor field,” allowing him to suit up with the speed and effortlessness of thought. The operating systems of his armor are similarly linked directly to his brain. To top it off, he’s jacked into every electronics system in the world—every satellite, cell phone, and computer network—making him an information security expert’s nightmare.

Yet enviable as these powers may be, we can’t help but wonder whether this overhaul of Tony’s physiology is really an extension of his program of “adapting machines to man” or more a case of adapting a man to the machines: specifically, adapting Tony to his technological milieu by transforming him into another technological artifact. And once we begin redesigning human beings to make them interface more efficiently with our artificially constructed technological environment, don’t we become like cogs in a giant machine that has commandeered us, rather than vice versa?

The twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) expressed a similar set of concerns about the direction our technological civilization was heading in a famous essay titled “The Question Concerning Technology.”14 For Heidegger, technology isn’t simply a set of hyperefficient means to achieving our goals, whatever they may happen to be. Even more essentially, technology is a way of understanding and interpreting the world, in which the whole of nature is approached as “standing-reserve,” a store of raw materials and energy waiting to be extracted, stored, shifted around, transformed, and controlled (ostensibly, at least) by human beings. But as this technological worldview becomes so dominant that it crowds out every other way of interpreting the world, Heidegger thought that we would come “to the brink of a precipitous fall.” Having trained ourselves to view everything as “standing-reserve” from which energy can be extracted to be reconfigured for our use, the denizen of modern technological civilization is bound to reach “the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve.”15 And that ’s precisely what Extremis does when it commandeers the brain, tells it “the body is wrong,” and uses the body ’s existing mass as a “standing-reserve” from which a new enhanced human organism can be constructed.

And so we return to our earlier problem. When human nature itself becomes “standing-reserve,” one last frontier of the natural world for us to technologically master and modify, then our old-fashioned conceptions of human flourishing automatically become outdated and can no longer offer any guidance for determining “the general welfare of mankind.”

“How Many Have Drawn Blood with My Sword?”

But maybe the obsolescence of those antique standards is good news, and we’re completely free to use our power however we choose, free as a bird or at least free as a man with jet boots, unchained from the human nature we inherited from the past of our species, with nothing to prevent us from forging whatever ersatz nature suits our fancy. Then again, however, maybe that sense of freedom is an illusion. We often speak of how the human race has gained unprecedented freedom and power through the technological conquest of nature, but that language is somewhat misleading inasmuch as it implies that technology empowers us all equally. As we all know, it’s those who possess or control access to the new technology—corporations like Stark Industries and the governments of rich nations—who are most empowered, often at the expense of those who lack access. This is not to deny that the powerful might have benign intentions, but, on the other hand, they might not.

The earliest Iron Man comics were bursting with optimism about how a courageous and well-intentioned hero like Tony Stark, armed with cutting-edge technology, could vanquish the many foes of freedom in the world. But by the mid-eighties, it had become clear to Tony that he had unleashed forces he couldn’t control. Unable to prevent the dissemination of his Iron Man armor designs to villains like Spymaster and Obadiah Stane (Iron Monger), Tony faced the sickening realization that the very technologies he designed to make the world safer were actually being used to put it at graver risk than it ever would have been without them. Of particular interest is Stane, a sort of dark doppelganger of Tony. Like Tony, he’s a powerful tycoon and weapons mogul, although his corporate intrigues are not in the service of old-fashioned chivalric virtues such as generosity but rather the newfangled capitalist virtue of greed instead. Suddenly, Tony’s archenemy is no longer a communist in another country intent on destroying our way of life but a ruthless domestic capitalist who ends up possessing much of Tony’s technology and none of his ideals.

All of this was a prelude to “Armor Wars,” one of the most celebrated Iron Man story lines of all time. By that time, Tony was no longer a cold war munitions manufacturer. In a minor revision to his history, we’re told that he supplied the U.S. military with weapons during the Vietnam era but only because he was “eager to end an unsavory war.” Since then, he’s been “dedicating himself to the positive aspects of life through his brilliance and business acumen and his courageous secret life as the heroic Avenger called Iron Man.” But when he discovers that despite his precautions, his armor technology has fallen into the hands of a host of villains—including Force, Stilt Man, the Raiders, the Controller, the Crimson Dynamo, and the Mauler—he exclaims in horror, “How many have drawn blood with my sword?” Feeling responsible for every murder committed with the aid of his technology and needing to redeem himself, the golden knight goes on the offensive to confiscate or disable all of the armor made from his designs, using whatever means prove necessary.16 Hanging in the balance is whether he was deluded to pride himself on being such an unalloyed force for goodness.

The course of events in “Armor Wars” doesn’t give Tony much cause for reassurance. In fact, Tony’s zeal to regain exclusive control of his technology yields nothing but grief on several fronts for himself and others. He almost destroys his own company, sullies the reputation of Iron Man so thoroughly that Stark Industries must “fire” him as a corporate spokesman, finds himself pitted against Captain America and the U.S. government, and nearly provokes an international incident as a result of a deadly battle with the Gremlin, a Russian scientist whose Titanium Man armor makes him a target in Tony’s crusade. Powering up his jet boots to escape the Gremlin’s crushing embrace, Tony inadvertently ignites his adversary’s titanium armor and kills him in the blazing inferno.17 Oh, my beloved jet boots! Those emblems of freedom have become nightmarish instruments of death.

Jet Boots and Clay Feet

“Armor Wars” illustrates what contemporary philosopher John Gray has called “the chaotic drift of new technologies,” their tendency to proliferate into new applications that their designers neither intended nor foresaw, even coming to serve ends that their designers may find downright abhorrent.²¹ This suggests a reason our modern relationship to technology can never be as simple and straightforward as the medieval knight’s relationship to his sword, a tractable tool that is so perfectly obedient to the will of the expert swordsman that it feels more like an extension of his own arm than an independent entity. The swordsman’s art depends on a highly specialized set of skills acquired only in the course of a long apprenticeship, but the power of modern technology consists of stores of information that can travel around the world with the push of a button. To master his sword, the knight need only train his body and mind, but to “master” modern technology in a way that would ensure that it is used solely for benign ends, we would need to rein in the proliferation of knowledge—or, if that proves impossible, to eradicate greed and the lust for power from the human heart.

No doubt, top scientists are at work on these problems as we speak, but to the extent that they succeed, we may find that instead of extending our freedom as originally promised, technology has engineered it away. Certainly, one lesson of “Armor Wars” is that among the casualties of the struggle to master technology may be some of the high ideals we once believed technology ought to serve. In any case, it seems unlikely that either the flow of information or the evil imaginations of the human heart will ever cease. Consequently, wrote Gray, “If anything about the present century is certain, it is that the power conferred on ‘humanity’ by new technologies will be used to commit atrocious crimes against it.”18 Not even the genius of Tony Stark can shield us against that.

For me it was the jet boots, as I’ m sure it was for a lot of boys who shared my fascination with the freedom and power that technology seemed to confer. But Iron Man’s devoted fans didn’t consist only of boys. Discussing the early years of the Iron Man comic, Stan Lee recalled, “We later learned that, of all our Super Heroes, Iron Man got the most fan mail from females.” Our hero’s wealth and glamorous lifestyle undoubtedly accounted for some of this volume of mail, but Lee believed that it was also because “he had that weak heart and was a tragic figure.”19 The tragic nature of Iron Man was, in fact, as much a part of Lee’s original conception of the character as his aura of being a knight in shining armor. Indeed, as we’ re first being introduced to Tony Stark in the issue of Tales of Suspense that gave Iron Man to the world, we’ re offered glimpses of his life in a series of panels that show him adored by beautiful women who swoon over him as “the dreamiest thing this side of Rock Hudson.” But at the same time, we ’re alerted that “this man who seems so fortunate, who’s envied by millions—is soon destined to become the most tragic figure on earth!”20

I must confess that the crippled and vulnerable heart beneath the armor never struck me as the most salient aspect of Iron Man, at least not until many years later when, like many other observers of modern civilization, I began to suspect that our technological prowess engendered as many problems as it solved. It was then that I realized those gleaming jet boots really hid feet of clay.

NOTES

1 Iron Man, vol. 1, #225-232 (1987-1988), collected in trade paperback in 2007.

2 Quoted in Andy Mangels, Iron Man: Beneath the Armor (New York: Del Rey, 2008), p. 4.

3 Tales of Suspense #40 (April 1963).

4 René Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. I, trans. John Cottington, Robert Stoothoff, and Dougald Murdoch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 114.

5 The Cartesian coordinates, the x and y axes we all used when graphing equations in high school algebra, are named after him.

6 Descartes, Philosophical Writings, p. 152.

7 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), pp. xxv, 3.

8 Descartes, Philosophical Writings, pp. 142-143.

9 Ibid., p. 288.

10 See the chapter “The Literal Making of a Superhero ” by Travis Rieder in this volume for more on miniaturization and nanotechonology and their ethical implications.

11 René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen H. Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), p. 104. 12. If that sounds preposterous, see the “Dark Reign ” story line introduced in the aftermath of “Secret Invasion ” in Marvel Comics titles starting in December 2008, and especially the “World ’s Most Wanted” story line in Iron Man, vol. 5, #8-19 (2009). 13. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, p. 142.

12 Iron Man, vol. 4, #1-6 (2005-2006), collected in trade paperback in 2007. This story also contains an update of Iron Man’s origin story, elements of which were incorporated into the 2008 Iron Man film. For instance, Iron Man’s original origin story from Tales of Suspense #39 (March 1963) was set in Vietnam during the height of the cold war, but Ellis relocated the action to a more contemporary hot spot, Afghanistan. 15. Iron Man, vol. 4, #5 (January 2006).

13. Ibid., vol. 4, #3 (April 2004).

14. Included in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 3-35.

15 Ibid., p. 27.

16. Iron Man, vol. 1, #225 (December 1987).

17 Ibid., vol. 1, #229 (April 1988). See the chapter “Can Iron Man Atone for Tony Stark’s Wrongs? ” by Christopher Robichaud in this volume for more on Tony ’s action to reclaim his stolen technology in “Armor Wars.” 21. John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 177.

18 Ibid., p. 14.

19. Quoted in Mangels, Iron Man: Beneath the Armor, p. 8.

20 Tales of Suspense #39 (March 1963).

Chapter 10

AMNESIA, PERSONAL IDENTITY, AND THE MANY LIVES OF WOLVERINE

Jason Southworth

In Hulk #180-182, Wolverine makes his first appearance as little more than a feral man in a colorful costume with no memories of his past or seemingly of anything (in fact, in Giant-Size X-Men #1, he has no memory of the Hulk appearance). The Weapon X stories in Marvel Comics Presents show us some of the things the character has done as an agent of the Canadian government, and Origin gives us a glimpse of the character prior to his time at Weapon X, when he was more at peace with the world.

Over the years, Professor Xavier and Wolverine had very little success in reversing the amnesia until House of M, when Wolverine finally recovered all of his memories. But rather than answer questions about his identity, the sudden emergence of these memories has raised more questions for Wolverine about who he really is.

What Is Personal Identity?

The issue of personal identity is actually a set of issues that are entangled and, at times, may be conflated. The questions philosophers try to answer when they discuss personal identity are: What constitutes personhood? Who am I? And what does it mean for a person to persist over time?

When establishing what constitutes personhood, philosophers are trying to figure out what makes a person a person (rather than, say, a comic book). What properties must that entity have to count as a person? Many nonphilosophers may not think this is an interesting or difficult question to answer, as our common use of the term person is synonymous with human. The case of the mutants in the X-books shows why this is an unsatisfactory answer, as they are not humans—they are Homo superiors, not Homo sapiens. If mutants are persons, then being a human is not a necessary condition (it is not required) for being a person. As you might imagine, philosophers do not spend a lot of time talking about Homo superiors, but we do spend quite a lot of time talking about other animals and artificial intelligence. You might consider whether Kitty Pryde’s pet dragon, Lockheed, and the Scarlet Witch’s robot husband, the Vision, are persons.

When we consider the question of “Who am I?” we are trying to establish the characteristics that make you the person that you are, as opposed to some other person. Again, this question appears deceptively easy to answer. You might think that you can just rattle off a description of your character traits, but the answer is going to have to be more complicated than that, because we can often be described in a variety of ways, some of which might be in tension. The question of who counts as a person and why is one of the recurring tropes of Wolverine’s storyline. We see this when the Ol’ Canucklehead goes on one of his tears, complaining that he is not the animal that some people think that he is.

Personhood and persistence over time also feature prominently in X-Men. Consider the classic story “Days of Future Past” (which appeared in Uncanny X-Men #141 and 142), in which we encounter characters who seem to be many of the X-Men we know (including Wolverine), but in the future. How do we know that they are the same characters? They look the same. This is the standard, unreflective first response people often give to the question of personal identity: people persist over time if they occupy the same bodies. Same claws and pointy hair? Well, it must be Wolverine. That’s just common sense—which, as we’ll see, isn’t always as common or sensical as we might initially think.1 Still, you might say, who cares?

Well, the main reason we should care about personal identity concerns moral culpability. All moral frameworks involve the attribution of blame and praise, and many call for punishment. In order to attribute praise and blame for an act, we have to be certain that the people to whom we are giving the praise and the blame are the ones who deserve it, based on their actions. If, for example, it turns out that the man called Logan is not the same person who committed atrocities for the Canadian government under the code name Weapon X, then he should not be punished for the behavior of that person. Likewise, if the current Wolverine is not the same person that he was in the past, Sabretooth and Lady Deathstrike would be wrong in their attempts to punish him.

Cassandra Nova, Charles Xavier, and John Locke

The philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) argued against the commonsense view that the body is the source of personal identity, using a modified example from the pop culture of his own time. Locke told a story that was essentially The Prince and the Pauper, except the individuals exchanged minds, rather than simply roles. If Locke were around today, he might instead have talked about Charles Xavier and Cassandra Nova. In Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men (if you haven’t read it, you should be ashamed of yourself), we learn that Cassandra Nova placed her mind in Charles Xavier’s body and placed Xavier’s mind in her body. The Xavier body with Nova’s mind forced Beak (if you don’t know who Beak is, you should be doubly ashamed of yourself) to beat the Beast so badly, he had to be hospitalized, and started a war between the Shi’ar Empire and the X-Men.2 When the body of Xavier manipulated Beak, it referred to itself as Cassandra. Likewise, later in the story, when Jean Grey communicates with the mind in Cassandra Nova’s body, it reports to be Xavier. Prior to discovering the switch, the X-Men naturally believed the actions of Xavier’s body to be those of Xavier. After finding out about this switch, however, they do not hold Xavier accountable for the actions taken by his body. Instead, they condemn Cassandra Nova for them and discuss how to defeat her. So, it seems personal identity is not a matter of body but of mind.

Having rejected the body theory in favor of something mental, Locke tries to determine the nature of the mental thing. What mental properties or characteristics could indicate persistence over time? Locke quickly rejects any type of character or personality traits because such traits are constantly in flux. We’re always trying to become better people, and, as a result, our morality, tastes, and preferences tend to change often. Yet we remain in essence the same people.

By process of elimination, we come to memories as the source of personal identity. Locke does not mean that we need to have all and only the memories that a previous individual in time has had. You have “sameness of memories” even if you have additional memories that come after the memories that you have in common with yourself at an earlier time. So, we would say that Wolverine is still the same person he was the day he joined the New Avengers as he was the day after, since he has the same memories he had the day before.

Of course, we don’t remember everything that happens to us—and some of us are more forgetful than others. Locke isn’t forgetful on this account, though: he complicates things by introducing the concept of connected memories. One memory can be connected to another as follows: I remember a time when I had a memory I no longer have. As long as I can remember such a time, then those earlier memories still count as mine.3 So, even if Wolverine no longer has memories of the first time he performed the Fast Ball Special with Colossus (in Uncanny X-Men #100. I didn’t even have to look that up. I am a walking OHotMU), as long as he remembers a time when he did remember that day, then he is still the same person as he was on that day. Likewise, since on the day he joined the X-Men, Wolverine did not have memories of his encounter with the Hulk in Hulk #180-182, nor does he have memories of a time when he had memories of this, there are no connected memories, and he is, as a result, not the same person who encountered the Hulk on that day.

Bringing It All Back to Wolverine

If sameness of memory gives us sameness of person, then it seems several different people have inhabited the body we recognize as Wolverine’s. Let’s go through the history of Wolverine as it has been revealed to us so far and yell out, “New Wolverine!” every time we spot one.

The known history of Wolverine begins in Origin (2002). In this story, we learn that he was born in the nineteenth century on a plantation in Canada under the name James Howlett. Howlett left the plantation and adopted the name “Logan,” the last name of the groundskeeper on the plantation. He had several adventures after leaving the plantation, first living with a pack of wolves, then with Blackfoot Indians (marrying one of them known as Silver Fox), joining the Canadian military, living in Japan under the name “Patch,” and fighting in World War II with Captain America.4 After returning to Canada, Logan is recruited by Team X, and as a part of the program, Wolverine has his memory erased and replaced with memories of a life that no one ever lived.5

New Wolverine!

The man involved with Team X has no memory of the life prior to being a part of the team, so we are on the second life of Wolverine.

While a member of Team X, Logan was abducted by the people at the Weapon X program. As a part of the Weapon X program, he was given the name Mutate #9601 and once again had his mind erased.

New Wolverine!

And thus ended the short life of the second Wolverine.

Not all of the life of Mutate #9601 has been documented, but we have seen some of his nasty and brutish life in Barry Windsor-Smith’s feature “Weapon X” that appeared in Marvel Comics Presents #72-84 (every comic fan should own a copy of this, as there is little better than Windsor-Smith art). Eventually, the Winter Soldier (a brainwashed Bucky) frees him, and the creature referred to as Weapon X goes feral in the woods of Canada and has his famous fight with the Hulk.6 After some time, he is discovered by James and Heather Hudson (of Alpha Flight fame), with no memory of what he was doing in the woods, the fight with the Hulk, or the Weapon X project, and in time is civilized.7

New Wolverine!

At this point, the Wolverine we all know and love is born.

I will spare you a complete rundown of the rest of Wolverine’s history (as I am sure you know it all), except to point to two other important events. When Apocalypse captures Wolverine to make him serve as his horseman Death, in Wolverine Vol. 2 #145, he was once again brainwashed.

New Wolver—okay, that’s probably enough of that.

With the conclusion of House of M, we discover that after Wolverine’s body heals from the Scarlet Witch’s messing with his mind, he finally has all of his memories restored, giving us one final new person, in Locke’s view. Wolverine now has memories or connected memories to every person who inhabited that familiar body. At this point it seems that if Locke is right, the inhabitant of the Wolverine body will in one moment go from not being responsible for any of the things done by the other inhabitants of that body to being responsible for all of them.

Jamie Madrox and Derek Parfit

The contemporary philosopher Derek Parfit (b. 1942) has famously objected to the memory account of personal identity with a thought experiment about a brain being divided into two parts and placed in two separate bodies. Had Parfit been an X-Men fan, he could have used the example of Jamie Madrox, the Multipleman. For those who don’t know, Madrox has the ability to create up to ninety-nine duplicates of himself at a time. To form a duplicate, a force must be applied to Madrox from outside himself, or he must apply the force to an outside object—in other words, he has to be hit by or hit something. At any time, two adjacent Madroxes can recombine by an act of mutual will.

When the Madroxes combine, all memories each of them had separately are joined into the new entity. Likewise, whenever a duplicate is formed, it has all of the memories of the Madrox from which it came. So, as we learn in the miniseries Madrox (2005), if one of the duplicates studies Russian or anatomy, then all other duplicates that are made after it has been reabsorbed will have this knowledge as well. From the moment it is created, each duplicate begins to have unique memories and experiences that no other Madrox has. So, Madrox is an even more complicated case than Parfit was concerned with, as there can be up to one hundred individuals that exist at the same time, with the same memories.

Parfit thinks that it would be wrong to say of the one hundred Madroxes that they are the same person. If they’re the same, we get big problems: if one multiple were to go to the refrigerator and get a sandwich, but all of the other ones did not, it would follow that Madrox both did and did not get a sandwich. This certainly looks like a contradiction. Considering each of the Madroxes to be a different person who is unique until reabsorbed, at which time that particular Madrox is destroyed, seems like an obvious way to avoid this contradiction.

X-Factor #70-90, written by Peter David, features conflicts between the different duplicates. Some of the duplicates refuse to allow themselves to be reabsorbed, as they claim it would end their existence. In fact, one of the duplicates professes to hate the original Madrox. In addition, in the Madrox miniseries, it turns out that a duplicate ends up being the villain of the story, while the original Madrox and some other duplicates were the heroes fighting against him. Was Madrox getting into arguments with himself? Fighting himself? It doesn’t seem like it. We thus have reason to conclude that sameness of memories is not a sufficient condition for sameness of identity.

This kind of thought experiment leads Parfit to conclude that there must be something physical involved in personal identity. Because the brain houses the mind, Parfit concludes that “sameness of brain” means sameness of identity over time. This is more complicated than it sounds, however, because the human brain changes over time. All cells in the human body, including neurons (a very special type of cell found only in the brain), break down and are replaced with new versions. It takes about seven years for all of the matter in the human brain to get completely broken down and changed. Due to this, Parfit concluded that personhood can persist for only, at most, seven years.8

Bringing It All Back to Wolverine (Again)

Wolverine’s case is special. Wolvie is the head-trauma king. Every time he is severely injured in his brain, there is brain damage. And every time the old healing factor kicks in and repairs it, we are looking at a new Wolverine. In cases where there is only light brain damage (so the whole brain isn’t affected), the healing factor still manages to reorganize his brain so quickly that the length of time to a new Wolverine is much shorter than seven years.

When you start thinking of all of your favorite instances of Wolverine brain damage, you realize there are so many that we will not be able to count all of the new selves in this short chapter. Just for fun, though, some of my favorites are: the Punisher running over Wolverine with a steamroller, leaving it parked on his head in Punisher Vol. 3 #16; when the Wrecker hits him with his magic crowbar in New Avengers #7; and when Sabretooth thinks he has drowned him and walks away, only for the Ol’ Canuklehead to get up again.

Be Slow to Judge

Now that you know Wolverine is in fact many individuals, you should see him in a new light. And if Parfit is right, it should make you think twice about how quickly you judge all of the characters in the X-Verse (and the real world). People who commit terrible acts of violence may need to be given the benefit of the doubt until it can be established that they are in fact the same person. In the X-Verse we should be less dubious of Emma Frost working with the X-Men; the less catlike Beast should question whether, even if the secondary mutation were reversed, he would be the character they miss; and the next time Jean Grey comes back from the dead, we should all stop complaining that she seems different from before.

NOTES

1 This is known as the bodily theory of personal identity.

2 New X-Men #118-121.

3 John Locke (1690), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994).

4 Wolverine: Origins #16.

5 Wolverine Vol. 2 #68.

6 Wolverine Vol. 3 #38.

7 Alpha Flight #33.

8 See Derek Parfit’s “Personal Identity,” Philosophical Review 80 (1971): 3-27.

Part Four

About the Series

New!

Green Lantern and Philosophy: No Evil Shall Escape This Book

Is Hal Jordan a murderer?

What kind of strength is willpower?

Do emotions help or hurt a Green Lantern?

Can a Green Lantern power ring do anything imaginable—and should we worry if it can?

How can insects, mathematical equations, and planets be Green Lanterns?

Green Lanterns and their awesome power rings inspire a sense of possibility and wonder that can last a lifetime. Anyone who dreams of how to make the world a better place can imagine ways to make that dream come true with a Green Lantern ring. Green Lantern and Philosophy shines an emerald light on the many philosophical questions raised in the comics, the films, and the animated series, tackling issues from Aristotle’s view of the effect of emotions on virtue to what Plato’s tale of the Ring of Gyges tells us about Green Lanterns and the lust for power to deciding who is the greatest Green Lantern of all time. So whether you’re a fan of Hal Jordan, John Stewart, Guy Gardner, Kyle Rayner, or Alan Scott—and let’s not forget Soranik Natu, Kilowog, Katma Tui, Salaak, Mogo, and even Sinestro—Green Lantern and Philosophy will bring enlightenment to help turn the blackest night into the brightest day!

Also Available!

Iron Man and Philosophy: Facing the Stark Reality

Can Iron Man’s armor actually think?

Is Tony Stark’s intelligence the greatest source of Iron Man’s power?

Can Iron Man be both a superhero and the corporate property of Stark Industries?

Does the Iron Man technology point the way to a brighter future or a darkening horizon?

Can Tony Stark be a genuine superhero and a hard-drinking womanizer?

On the surface, Iron Man appears to be a straightforward superhero, another rich guy fighting crime with fancy gadgets. But beneath the shiny armor and flashy technology lies Tony Stark, brilliant inventor and eccentric playboy, struggling to balance his desires, addictions, and relationships with his duties as the Armored Avenger. Iron Man and Philosophy explores the many philosophical issues that emerge from the essential conflicts found in the decades of Iron Man stories in comics and movies. What kind of moral compass does Tony Stark have? Is Iron Man responsible for the death of Captain America after the Marvel Universe “Civil War”? Should people like Stark run the world? How does Tony’s alcoholism impact his performance as Iron Man, and what does it say about moral character? Ultimately, what can Iron Man teach us about the role of technology in society?

The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, and a healthy helping of popular culture clears the cobwebs from Kant. Philosophy has had a public-relations problem for a few centuries now. This series aims to change that, showing that philosophy is relevant to your life—and not just for answering the big questions like “To be or not to be?” but for answering the little questions: “To watch or not to watch House?”

Thinking deeply about TV, movies, and music doesn’t make you a “complete idiot.” In fact it might make you a philosopher, someone who believes that the unexamined life is not worth living and the unexamined cartoon is not worth watching.

House and Philosophy: Everybody Lies

Edited by Henry Jacoby

Is being nice overrated?

Are we really just selfish, base animals crawling across Earth in a meaningless existence?

Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy: Curiouser and Curiouser

Edited by Richard Brian Davis

Should the Cheshire Cat’s grin make us reconsider the nature of reality?

Can Humpty Dumpty make words mean whatever he says they mean?

Batman and Philosophy: The Dark Knight of the Soul

Edited by Mark D. White and Robert Arp

Why doesn’t Batman just kill the Joker and end everyone’s misery?

If everyone followed Batman’s example, would Gotham be a better place?

The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles

Edited by Gregory Bassham

Is death something to be feared . . . or “mastered”?

What can Severus Snape teach us about the possibility of redemption?

True Blood and Philosophy: We Wanna Think Bad Things with You

Edited by George A. Dunn and Rebecca Housel

Does God hate fangs?

Are all vampires created evil?

Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test

Edited by Mark D. White

Does Dr. Manhattan really know what’s going to happen in the future?

Is the Comedian actually a comedian (or just a jerk)?

For more information about the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series, to buy books, or to suggest and vote on new topics, visit our website:

http://andphilosophy.com