Be an X-Man?

“Help us! Fight with us!” Storm implores Wolverine midway through the first X-Men movie. “Fight with you?” Logan responds. “Join the team? Be an X-Man? Who the hell do you think you are? You’re a mutant. The whole world out there is full of people who hate and fear you and you’re wasting your time trying to protect them? I’ve got better things to do.”

The choice Wolverine faces is not unique to him. Nor, perhaps, is his attitude. And that’s one of the great things about the X-Men narrative. It focuses as much on groups as it does on individuals, giving us a world where superpowerful mutants are not a small-enough minority to avoid bumping into one another and the nonmutant public at large. As a result, mutants confront a complicated political landscape involving many factions that promote radically different agendas. Consider the two most popular mutant organizations: the X-Men, led by Professor Charles Xavier, and the Brotherhood of Mutants, led by Magneto. Under Professor X’s guidance, the X-Men are devoted to working with nonmutants in finding mutually agreeable means for peaceful coexistence. Not so with the Brotherhood, which under Magneto’s direction seeks to aggressively and often violently oppose the mutant prejudices it confronts. And these ideological differences often lead to bloody conflict between members of the X-Men and members of the Brotherhood.

Now suppose you find yourself in your teenage years waking up one day to discover that you shoot energy beams out of your eyes whenever you open them, or that everyone you touch loses his or her life energy. These really aren’t the kinds of things you can keep under wraps. What should you do? Do you join the X-Men or the Brotherhood or perhaps neither?¹ Should your choice be guided only by considerations about what these groups will do for you specifically, or should it also be guided by considerations about what they stand for—the goals they’re trying to accomplish and the consequences that pursuing those goals is likely to result in? And what about those goals in the first place? Is the Brotherhood’s agenda morally defensible? The X-Men’s? Which is better and how do you choose?

It’s All about Me—or Is It?

Let’s turn to the first set of issues. What factors should mutants take into consideration when deciding whether to go solo or to join the X-Men or the Brotherhood of Mutants? In answering this, let’s focus on a specific case, Ororo Munroe (aka Storm). And let’s consider her as she was some years ago in the X-Verse. At this point in time, she’s doing pretty well for herself. She is, after all, being worshipped as a rain god in the Serengeti.² But then Professor X attempts to recruit her to the X-Men team. Ought she to join?

This might not seem to be a very deep or interesting question; we might be tempted to answer it by saying something like, “Well, she should join if she wants to join and she shouldn’t join if she doesn’t want to, and that’s that.” But this is too hasty a response. Our question is whether Storm ought to join the X-Men. And questions about what Storm—or any of us—ought to do are not, on the face of it, simply questions about what we want to do. Wolverine may want very much to extend his adamantium-laced claws straight through Cyclops’s visor because of their jealous feud over the affections of Jean Grey. That doesn’t mean he should! Then again, there’s admittedly something to the idea that our desires matter, at least when it comes to determining what we ought to do. If, for example, Nightcrawler wants to teleport to the roof of the Xavier Institute to watch the sunset, it seems he should do so, all else remaining equal.

Philosophy can help us make progress on this issue by distinguishing two senses of “ought”: the prudential sense and the moral sense. When we ask what we morally ought to do, on the one hand, we are asking what it is in our self-interest to do. We are asking about what will promote our own individual well-being; that is, what will bring about something that’s good for us.³ When we ask what we morally ought to do, on the other hand, we are asking a question with a larger scope; we’re concerned with what will bring about the well-being of others in addition to our own well-being and, perhaps, with considerations involving respect for persons’ rights and the promotion of social justice. Although this is a rough way of putting the distinction, it’s enough to help us see that when we ask, “Ought Storm join the X-Men?” we could be asking either a prudential question or a moral one. Both are important. And our answers to them might be the same. Or they might not.⁴

How Badly Do You Want It, Bub?

It’s tempting to think that when it comes to promoting our own well-being (i.e., prudential concerns), what fundamentally matters is what we want to do. In other words, the satisfaction of our desires or our preferences is what constitutes our well-being, and when we ask what we prudentially ought to do, the answer is that we ought to perform whatever action best realizes our desires. If that’s right, then the impulsive response to the question of whether Storm ought to join the X-Men—she should if she wants to—is the correct one, at least when we restrict our attention to prudential considerations.

Many contemporary philosophers like this approach. One reason is that preferences are more or less easy to measure, allowing for substantive, specific answers to be given to the question of what a person should prudentially do in a particular situation. For example, suppose we’re wondering what Wolverine prefers more: a date with Jean or an opportunity to avenge himself on the people who tried to turn him into the first Weapon X.⁵ We could measure his preferences by seeing how much he’d hypothetically be willing to pay to satisfy each, that is, how much he’d be willing to spend to acquire a night on the town with Jean and how much he’d be willing to spend to acquire a night of vengeance against the members of Department K. The choice he’s prepared to pay more for is the one he prefers more. Suppose it’s the latter. If he then faces the decision of either going out with Jean or avenging himself, and he wonders what he ought to do, prudentially speaking, the answer is that he ought to pursue vengeance. That’s what he prefers more, and optimizing the satisfaction of his preferences is, in this view, what constitutes his well-being—it’s what’s good for him.

Returning to Storm, we can answer the question of what she prudentially ought to do by determining what she prefers more: sticking around and being worshipped as a god, or, um, throwing herself in harm’s way all the time by joining the X-Men and fighting, among other things, legions of Sentinels. Put this way, it’s hard to imagine her wanting the latter more than the former. But another good feature of this approach to well-being is that it provides a clear goal for Professor X to have when recruiting the likes of Ororo. Simply put, he has to make her really, really want to join the X-Men. The same idea goes for Magneto when he’s recruiting for the Brotherhood of Mutants. We therefore have in place the following picture about the relationship between mutants and the organizations that are interested in recruiting them. Groups need to work hard at being desirable for mutants to join, perhaps by making mutants want to achieve the same goals the group wants to achieve, or, if not actually instilling them with these desires, then at least emphasizing that mutants already do want what the groups want, if that’s the case. Mutants, in turn, have a prudential obligation to join the specific group (if any) that optimizes the satisfaction of their preferences.

It should be obvious that this desire-based account of well-being is very much an “economic” one. The focus is on preference-satisfaction—getting what you want—and organizations are encouraged to create desires in persons when the desires aren’t already there. For some, this guilt-by-association with a marketplace mentality might make them suspicious of this view as an adequate characterization of well-being. Before proceeding, then, it seems only fair to briefly examine the chief rival account of what well-being amounts to.

Once More, with Feeling

Long before the desire-based account of well-being was made popular, a different view, advanced by Jeremy Bentham (1748- 1832), among others, had reached the status of orthodoxy.⁶ At its heart is the idea that a person’s well-being consists in her maximizing her pleasures and minimizing her pains.

Undoubtedly, there is a strong intuitive force to the idea that what is good for us consists in these sorts of experiences. Why is listening to Beethoven’s Ninth good for Professor X? It’s good because of the pleasure it produces in him. Why are Mystique’s shape-changing powers good for her? Because they allow her to avoid the pain that comes with being socially ostracized for her natural looks. How should Storm decide whether joining the X-Men is good for her? By weighing the pleasures and the pains that would likely result in doing so against the pleasures and the pains that would likely result from making other choices available to her. We can even accommodate the idea that satisfying preferences is good for us. That’s true in this approach, but not because the story simply ends there, as it does with the desire-based account. Rather, satisfying desires is good in this view because of the pleasure associated with doing so, and having desires unsatisfied is bad because of the painful frustrations associated with doing so.

With all of the support for this account, it might seem curious that it hasn’t remained the orthodoxy. As it turns out, though, it faces some surprising difficulties. We’ll analyze just one, which is perhaps the most famous.⁷ Suppose that Professor X is able to create something very much like the Danger Room. Its focus, however, is not on simulating combat for training purposes. Rather, it allows him to “plug” a child into the room and have her undergo, throughout the span of her life, exactly the same experiences that Rogue in fact undergoes, no more and no less. To appreciate this case, it’s important to understand that the idea of Rogue and this child both sharing the very same experiences should be taken as meaning that they both share the same mental life, not that they both do the same thing. Obviously, they don’t. This example is relying on the well-worn distinction between the way things are and the way we experience them as being; the distinction between, for instance, Beast discovering that his girlfriend is a spy and the rich array of experiences in his mind that accompany that discovery: visual, auditory, tactile, emotional, and so on.⁸

Suppose Professor X, who’s been known to have a bit of a dark side from time to time, does plug this child into his experience room. Let’s call the girl Eugor and let’s further suppose that she never discovers what her situation is really like. So we have Rogue and Eugor, and they share the same mental life. Both have the experience of putting poor Cody Robbins into a coma by trying to steal a kiss from him, of being recruited to the Brotherhood of Mutants by Mystique, of later joining the X-Men, and so forth. Now, if well-being merely amounts to the set of pleasures and pains experienced, then it seems we’re forced to conclude that the life Rogue lives and the life that Eugor lives are both on par as far as well-being is concerned; their lives both have the same prudential value. But that seems absolutely wrong! If we had a choice between which life we’d like to live, Rogue’s (where the experiences undergone would point to things actually happening to us) or Eugor’s (where the experiences undergone would be someone else’s and would not at all be indicative of what our actual situation was like), it’s pretty obvious we’d choose Rogue’s life over Eugor’s. Her life is better off in terms of well-being. If that’s right, though, then well-being can’t simply amount to the pleasures and the pains experienced, since Rogue and Eugor share all of those. Hence, there’s something seriously amiss with the analysis of well-being in terms of pleasures and pains.

And the remedy, according to many contemporary philosophers, is to embrace the desire-satisfaction account of well-being that we began with. Rogue and Eugor both have the same desires, since they share the same mental life, but Rogue satisfies those desires, whereas Eugor, plausibly, does not. She thinks she does, of course. She thinks that she has done what she wanted to do and has, for instance, joined the X-Men, but in reality she hasn’t. It just seems to her that she has, because she’s being given someone else’s experiences. It is the fact that Rogue satisfies her desires, while Eugor doesn’t, that supports the intuitively correct verdict that her life is prudentially better than Eugor’s.

Reporting for Duty

We’ll stick to the idea, then, that when it comes to determining what a person ought prudentially to do, the best avenue to pursue is the one that focuses on determining what preferences would be satisfied, rather than on what pleasures and pains would result. Returning to the case of Storm, let’s assume for the sake of argument that she would in fact optimize the realization of her desires if she joined the X-Men. That’s what she prudentially should do, then. But is it what she morally ought to do; is it, at least, morally permissible for her to join the X-Men, if not obligatory?

Let’s pause to ask why this question matters. Since we’ve already assumed that it’s in Storm’s prudential interest to join the team, why do we have to worry about whether it’s morally permissible for her to do so? The answer is that we typically take moral concerns to trump prudential ones. In other words, if it turns out that Storm prudentially ought to join the X-Men but morally oughtn’t, then it would be wrong for her to join the X-Men, all things considered. Acknowledging this is particularly important when we consider whether a mutant ought to join the Brotherhood. If it turns out that the Brotherhood engages in morally impermissible activities, then regardless of whether it’s in Toad’s or Pyro’s or Sabretooth’s personal best interest to join this group, it nevertheless would be wrong for them to do so, because they morally shouldn’t, even granting that they prudentially should.

We’re turning our attention, then, to the moral concerns associated with joining a group like the X-Men or the Brotherhood. And it seems reasonable to focus our attention on the goals and the activities of these groups, since doing so will help us determine whether they are acting morally appropriately and, hence, whether joining them would be morally permissible. We’ll be using a broadly nonconsequentialist moral framework to evaluate these goals and activities, one that focuses not only on the overall well-being promoted by these groups, but also on whether the groups respect individuals’ rights and whether they aim at contributing to social justice. And we’ll acknowledge from the start that neither the X-Men nor the Brotherhood of Mutants always do the morally right thing or the morally wrong thing. Our interest is in the moral status of the trends, or the overall agenda, that these groups adopt.

It might still seem perplexing why there’s anything here worth exploring. The X-Men are committed to peaceful cooperation between mutants and nonmutants, looking for mutually agreeable ways to exist side by side. The Brotherhood is at the minimum committed to aggressive resistance to anti-mutant policies and institutions, the latter of which they take to include most, if not all, governments. If these are the basic agendas of the two groups, is there really any question about which one has the moral high ground?

Absolutely. And that’s because the universe of the X-Men is one of perpetual conflict, not simply between mutants, but between mutants and the nonmutant population at large. It is irresponsible to evaluate the agendas these different groups have adopted without acknowledging important details about the world in which these groups are situated. Specifically, with things such as mutant registration acts and, in the film X-Men: The Last Stand, a “cure” for mutanthood that ends up being weaponized, mutants are arguably the object of institutional prejudice, at best, and the targets of a potentially genocidal program, at worst. In light of these facts, it’s an open question what a morally appropriate agenda is. The path of peace and persuasion is not obviously the morally right one to pursue, just as the path of violent resistance is not obviously the morally wrong one. The challenge is finding a plausible moral principle or set of principles that help determine when it’s acceptable to move along the spectrum from peaceful persuasion to violent resistance.

You Say You Want a Revolution

Building on the work of contemporary political philosopher Ronald Dworkin (b. 1931) in his article “Civil Disobedience and Nuclear Protest,” we can distinguish three different reasons mutants might disagree with the policies directed against them and then connect each type of disagreement with an intuitively plausible course of action.⁹ The least severe kind of disagreement is policy-based. Beast, for instance, might think that the passage of the Mutant Registration Act is simply bad policy; it’s going to increase tensions between the mutant and nonmutant communities. If that’s the case, the morally appropriate course of action is persuasive engagement. Legitimate governments pass bad policies all the time; that doesn’t warrant us in taking up arms against them or even forcing them to change their minds. Rather, the responsible course of action seems to be to take certain nonviolent steps, which may include protesting, to force the government to reconsider its position—to pick up the debate again, as it were.

The next kind of disagreement is justice-based. Jean Grey, for instance, might think that the Mutant Registration Act isn’t merely bad policy, it’s unjust. Since this is a more severe complaint against it, there is a more serious type of morally appropriate response available to change it. Persuasive strategies again are permitted, but so, too, are unpersuasive ones, where those are understood as being more aggressive, nonviolent ways of forcing the government to abandon its policy even if it doesn’t rethink its position. The crucial idea is to force the policy change, circumventing the intervening step of requiring further deliberation. Jean Grey might therefore think it morally appropriate to send out a telepathic “ringing” in people’s minds until the Mutant Registration Act is revoked.

The most severe kind of disagreement is integrity-based. Here the complaint against the policy is that it asks persons to do things that violate fundamental moral beliefs. Magneto, presumably, believes that being compelled to register as a mutant is just such a moral affront. This kind of disagreement morally permits most forms of resistance short of violent confrontation. For Magneto, then, destroying property or incapacitating government capabilities in the process of refusing to register is allowable.

Notice that none of these disagreements allow for violent resistance. But that is because they assume that the government responsible for the policy in question is still legitimate, even if the policy itself is unwise, unjust, or unethical. It seems reasonable, though, that if the government’s policy moves beyond this last category and becomes not simply unethical but outright threatening to the lives of certain persons, then the government has lost its legitimacy and thereby has allowed for morally acceptable violent resistance to take place. The weaponization of the mutant cure is just such a problematic program. For Magneto and undoubtedly most of the Brotherhood, this government action is the equivalent of an enemy country putting tanks and army brigades on the borders of another. It’s a clear and serious threat, and it morally permits a violent preemptive strike.

We might resist the seriousness of the supposed threat against mutants by arguing that the weapon in question will not kill them. Perhaps. But it will destroy what is distinctive about them. And that’s quite significant. Moreover, it’s not even clear that mutants wouldn’t be killed, in a sense, by the cure. Some philosophers maintain that being human is essential to us; it’s not possible for me to have been a dog or a toaster or the aurora borealis. Mutants, presumably, aren’t born human. They’re born mutants, who appear to be human but in fact aren’t. If that’s so, then just as I couldn’t be a mutant, any more than I could be a dog, mutants can’t be humans. So any drug that affects a mutant’s biological kind thereby destroys that mutant. In its place is a human who shares a remarkable psychological history with a now-deceased mutant.

Thank You, Professor X, but I’ll Make Up My Own Mind

Metaphysics aside, at least some case can be made for the moral appropriateness of the Brotherhood’s agenda to a certain extent. This is not to suggest that the X-Men’s agenda is incorrect; it’s only to cast doubt on it being obviously right. Trying to peacefully persuade people who are directly or indirectly trying to destroy you is not necessarily a morally appropriate response. But if that’s right, then we return to our original question: what ought Storm to do, morally speaking? And the answer, dissatisfying as it is, is that only she can determine that.

The X-Verse is compelling because of the many shades of moral gray it paints. Mutants are constantly faced with the two crucial questions we’ve posed here: What group, if any, is it in their best interest to join? And which group, if any, is doing what morally ought to be done? The answer to the first of these questions is manageable for a mutant to arrive at, since, as we’ve seen, it ultimately comes down to what preferences the mutant has. But the answer to the second of these questions is quite difficult. This is perhaps why the allegiance of so many mutants has switched from one organization to another throughout the history of X-Men. Ultimately, we may question their loyalty, but we understand their uncertainty.

NOTES

1 For simplicity’s sake, I am significantly reducing the number of options available. We know that the organizations in the X-Verse are vast and varied, to say the least. Besides the many official X-Men teams and Brotherhood groups, there are, on the one hand (to name but a few), the New Mutants, X-Factor, X-Force, and Excalibur, while, on the other hand, there are (again, to name but a few) the Acolytes, the Marauders, the Alliance of Evil, and the Mutant Liberation Front.

2 Uncanny X-Men #102 (1976) and Uncanny X-Men #117 (1979).

3 An excellent survey of the literature on well-being, on which this article draws, can be found in Roger Crisp’s entry “Well-being” for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/well-being/.

4 According to some contractarian moral views, the questions of what we prudentially and morally ought to do are permanently interwoven, because self-interest, in these accounts, is in some sense the ultimate ground of morality. We will be assuming that contractarian accounts of morality are false.

5 Marvel Comics Presents #72-84 (1991).

6 See Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789).

7 What follows is an adaptation of Robert Nozick’s experience machine thought experiment, found in Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 42-45.

8 Amazing Adventures #15 (1972).

9 In A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 104-116.