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Despite being a fairly good movie, The Dark Knight also inspired a pretty involved discussion among some of my friends with respect to morality. The topic in question was the presumably absolute principal on killing another person. Within the movie, Batman has several occasions where he may have been able to kill the Joker, and yet he doesn’t do so.

In order to effectively communicate my point, I think it is appropriate to break it down into several different outcomes or alternatives where we should be able to intuitively assess their morality.

1. Thou Shalt Not Take Another’s Life

This is typically the most popular answer, and definitely the one that I heard the most of from my friends yesterday. They were adamant that there is never any reason to take another person’s life. In the context of the film, they argued that if Batman were to take the Joker’s life, then what he stands for would no longer have strength. To this, I made sure to point out that the perception toward Batman is that he already is a murder, and so to fulfill the peoples’ beliefs would not change the strength that he imbues on the populace of Gotham City.

Unfortunately, they argued that merely holding to a principal was enough. Being more of a pragmatist, I couldn’t really understand their reasoning. What they are saying is that whether or not everyone thinks Batman is a murderous villain is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether Batman truly is a murderous villain.

Essentially they are talking about Emmanuel Kant’s deontological view of ethics. Kant proposes something that he calls the ‘categorical imperative’ that is designed to help us make ethical decisions. One formulation of the categorical imperative (there are 3) supposes that something is moral ’If, by my action, I can will what I do to be a universal law of nature’ (I paraphrase, but the point remains). So, this tells us that we should consider the situation as follows:

1. I am considering killing the Joker
2. This action constitutes killing
3. (formulation); Everyone ought to kill someone else when it can make their life easier.

You may disagree with my formulation of the categorical imperative, but it must be articulated in this way so that we avoid any utilitarian reasoning (which will be explained below). In any event, it is intuitively obvious that we do not think that we should kill others when it makes our lives easier. Thus we determine that the action of killing is immoral, and Batman should not kill the Joker.

2. The Greater Good

There are those that fall on the other side of the generally accepted morality, and they are proponents of the greater good. Whether they know it or not, they are using Jeremy Bentham’s ‘utilitarianism’ to justify their choice as morally right. Although the original formulation of utilitarianism was done by Bentham, there have since been revisions that go into refining the model to make it a little more acceptable to our sensibilities. Originally, utilitarianism was the maximization of pleasure, which could stem from any source, and thus included hedonistic pleasures.

When put through some thought experiments, we can definitely see that this formulation is lacking. One of the most prevalent of these is the sadist who takes pleasure out of hurting others. If that person’s pleasure outweighs the other person’s displeasure (or pain) then it is seen to be the morally justifiable ‘right’ thing to do. I think the vast majority of us would agree that this needs a little refinement. This was done by charting the different types of pleasure, and assigning relative values. This means that the aforementioned hedonistic pleasure would not be even close to outweighing the displeasure of being tortured. But I digress.

In the film, we can see that if Batman had taken the opportunity to kill the Joker, it could have saved hundreds if not thousands of lives. Clearly the displeasure felt by one man’s death is much less than the displeasure that would be felt by thousands of deaths. This is intuitively obvious, and we can see that utilitarianism would clearly say that killing the Joker is the morally right thing to do.

There is, however, one problem with utilitarianism. You are justifying your action as morally right because it will prevent thousands of deaths. Yet we can imagine a scenario where by removing the Joker, another villain claims his place, and the same people die. Though this seems to suggest that killing the Joker is not morally right because someone will take his place, it definitely does not. THis is because the information available at the time of the decision suggests that the deaths will be prevented. Unfortunately, utilitarianism does work retroactively, so if those people did indeed die following the Joker’s death, we could conclude that Batman was indeed wrong to kill the Joker.

3. Lesser of Two Evils

Despite the deontological argument and the weakness in the utilitarian position, I am going to suggest that Batman should indeed have killed the Joker. I think it is his duty as a crimefighter to take any action necessary to prevent unnecessary civilian death. Though we should hope that incarceration would satisfy this duty, in this case it cannot. This leaves us with only one other option that we might take to help prevent civilian deaths; killing the Joker.

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I would like to hear your opinions on this topic, because I’m pretty convinced that superheroes and crimefighters in general should eliminate the criminals. I think that just as soldiers are exempt from traditional morality concerning killing (murder), so too should those protecting our lives be exempt. I think the current justification for incarceration is weak-willed, and is attributed to a sameness bias. As these people are ‘like us’ (though admittedly psychopathic) we feel more inclined to spare their lives.

How many people ask questions about the insurgent militants that are being killed by the score in Afghanistan or Iraq? Why shouldn’t we just lock them up too?