One reason Batman is such a popular superhero (and fictional character in general) is that he has incredible devotion to his life’s goal, or his mission. At the risk of seeming insensitive, given the tragic reason for his adopting that goal, many of us might be envious of Bruce Wayne’s single‐minded focus and belief in the purpose of his life. (I know I am!) What’s more, that mission is altruistic, oriented toward making other people’s lives better, and motivated by his own loss at a young age. We can of course argue that he goes too far in pursuing his mission, in that he sacrifices his own personal happiness and any chance at romantic love. Some would say that he doesn’t go far enough, in that there are certain steps, such as killing his enemies, that he will not take even to further his mission. Yet others say that, if he really wants to help people, dressing up as a giant bat and beating up bad guys isn’t the best way to go about it. Even though we may be critical of the mission itself or how he executes it—and we’ll talk about that in later chapters—many of us admire Batman’s devotion to it in general.
But what exactly is his mission? As with most things in the world of Batman—save for his famous, oft‐quoted saying about criminals being a “cowardly and superstitious lot”—there is no definitive, canonical statement about his mission. However, there are several recurring elements of his mission which, although related and overlapping to some extent, reflect different aspects of it and shed light on its complexity as well as his devotion to it.
The most immediate one, which gets to the heart of what he does more than why he does it, is his never‐ending war against crime in Gotham City and elsewhere: as the narration to one story reads, “it’s what his life is about.”1 As Batman once said, “I made a promise. To honor my parents. Someday to rid Gotham City of the crime that took their lives.”2 Simply put, Batman is driven not only to fight crime but to end it, despite the futility of this goal, which he admits: as the narration to an overview of his early life and motivation reads, “he knows he’s set himself an impossible goal. No man can ever eliminate crime. All he can do is try.”3 And this he does, in full awareness of this impossibility. “I’ve dedicated my life to eradicating crime,” he thought to himself while combatting gangs in Gotham’s Chinatown. “At best a hopeless cause. Sometimes all we can do is maintain the balance of power.”4
Furthermore, Batman does not limit himself to major crimes or the antics of his colorfully costumed foes. On his way to catch Kite Man—yes, Kite Man—Batman heard a burglar alarm coming from a jewelry shop and considers driving by, but then thought, “a crime is a crime is a crime! It’s isn’t my job to judge them—just to stop them!”5 Even these crimes must be confronted, even though he knows he can never deal with them all, even on a night of “casual crimes and momentary madnesses … the same thousand sins of any normal night, anonymous evil I can never stop.”6 We’ll come to the way Batman sets priorities later, but for now the point is that, in theory, he doesn’t exclude any crime, no matter how small, from his mission—even if, in practice, he finds he must prioritize them somehow.
Although avenging the deaths of his parents played a clear and important role in driving his mission to eradicate crime—“turning a boy of bright hope into a man of dark vengeance,” which we’ll unpack later—Batman does not endure a constant battle against crime in Gotham City simply to make up for not saving his parents as a young boy.7 Neither is fighting crime an end in itself; there is deeper purpose behind it, namely to help, protect, and save people, especially the residents of Gotham. Inspired by his father’s devotion to medicine, Batman goes to extraordinary lengths to save innocent lives. As he dove off a cliff to catch a vial of deadly Ebola virus, the narration reads: “Millions of lives are at stake. Maybe all humanity. He doesn’t hesitate for an instant.”8 He famously lets criminals escape if he needs to save a life. After doing just that, a person he saved asked, “But why did you bother? I thought you only cared about catching criminals!” to which Batman replied, “You’re not alone in thinking that! I wish you were!”9 And it is not only the lives of the innocent that he tries to save, but all lives, even those of the most heinous and evil. We see this in the numerous times he saves the Joker, even at the expense of the countless people the Crown Prince of Crime will surely kill later—a central moral dilemma in the Batman canon that we will talk about often in this book.
These two simple goals—fighting crime and saving lives—cover most all of Batman’s actions as the Dark Knight, but each is more complicated than it seems, in terms of how each must be implemented in itself as well as when they conflict with or contradict each other. We’ll discuss those nuances soon enough, but in general they both reflect Batman’s overall motivation to help people, which corresponds to a school of moral philosophy that grounds the first part of this book.
Whatever their method or motivation, most superheroes try to help people. When Superman diverts an asteroid hurtling toward the Earth, Wonder Woman prevents one of the Olympian gods from enslaving humanity, or the Flash stops a bank robbery before most people realized it had begun, they are protecting people from harm, including the loss of property, freedom, and life. They are also serving the cause of justice and preventing wrong from being done—very important considerations, especially when they conflict with helping people—but most of what superheroes do can be summed up as helping, protecting, and saving.
In other words, superheroes use their fantastic powers and abilities to make people better off, just as real‐world heroes such as doctors, soldiers, and firefighters do with their skills, training, and courage. Implicitly, they regard people’s well‐being as something of moral importance, and they use their gifts to enhance that well‐being (or prevent it from being lessened).
This way of choosing how to express heroism closely resembles the school of moral philosophy known as utilitarianism. Although the basic idea dates to antiquity, utilitarianism was introduced in its current form by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who were philosophers as well as social reformers who wanted to improve the lives of all people. Utilitarianism is a specific type of consequentialism, the general view that the outcome or result of an act is what matters as far as ethics is concerned. In other words, consequentialism judges actions by their consequences rather than the intention behind them or their correspondence with abstract rules or principles, considerations belonging to other ethical systems we’ll talk about later.10
Utilitarianism is narrower than consequentialism because only one aspect of consequences is morally relevant: the total amount of utility they have. The word “utility” can mean benefit, happiness, or satisfaction, depending on which utilitarian you ask, but for our purposes, we can understand utility to mean whatever people regard as good to them.11 Each person gets their own individual utility from choices they make (as well as things that happen to them), and the total utility of a group of people is computed simply by adding up the individual utilities of every person. Although this summing up may seem obvious, it can also be considered the most radical aspect of utilitarianism, in that it implies that the utility of each and every person, regardless of class, race, gender, or religion, counts equally in the total. This idea was heretical in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when most societies were more formally stratified into classes, and would not be welcomed even today within some segments of even the most liberal democracies. It also represents an ideal of moral equality that gives utilitarianism much of its nobility, while at the same time generating problems when people with different capacities for utility, or “utility monsters,” twist the sums in their favor by dominating the utilitarian calculus.12 For example, if the Penguin derives twice as much utility from fresh halibut than anyone else, a goal of increasing total utility would imply that he should get more fish than other people would, even if they needed it more but enjoyed it less. This also points out the importance and difficulty of defining exactly what “utility” means, whether based on want or need, as well as the possibility of lessening the utility of some people to increase the utility of others if that will lead to a higher total—the controversial “ends justify the means” reasoning that we’ll see later.
Getting back to the main point, utilitarians maintain that we should choose actions that give people more utility (or make them better off), and if we have several such options, we should choose the one that gives them the most utility. For example, if Bruce Wayne decides to give ten million dollars to his favorite country club, that is an ethical and generous act, but it would probably be better to give it to a homeless shelter club because it is likely to do more good for people who need it. (Indeed, many have wondered if it would be better for Bruce to give away his fortune rather than spending it on Batmobiles and batarangs … we’ll get to that!) When an elderly and poor man asked Batman why he bothered to prevent him from being mugged rather than chasing “international criminals,” the Caped Crusader told him, “Crime is crime … and to you, the loss of a dollar is more important than the loss of thousands to a banker!”13 Batman’s statement is based on diminishing marginal utility, a fancy term for the simple idea that, after a point, extra amounts of things bring a person less happiness, so an extra dollar means more to someone who has few of them than to someone who has many. Although giving is generally good regardless of the recipient, it can do more good by steering it to people who have less.
While utilitarianism sounds simple in theory, it is actually surprisingly difficult to implement well in practice, at least if you always aim for the one decision that will increase utility the most (or maximize it). One reason is that utility can be very difficult to measure. I loaded the deck a bit in the last paragraph when I gave Wayne the stark choice between giving money to a homeless shelter or a ritzy country club. But what if his choice were between two reputable charities? Wayne believes that each would do a lot of good with the money, but how is he supposed to compare the “lot of good” each would do? It would be hard enough to compare how much good it would do to donate money to one person or another: the money would certainly raise each person’s utility, but how do you compare them to know which person would get more utility from it? Philosophers call this the problem of interpersonal comparisons of utility, and it has proven a thorny issue precisely because a person’s feelings of happiness or utility are typically considered internal and therefore subjective, and there is no way for one person to express how happy they are in units that another person can also use. This isn’t a fatal problem, though: Utilitarians can acknowledge it and still make their best estimate, because doing some good is better than nothing even if you’re not sure you’re doing the best you can.
Another problem with implementing utilitarianism, and indeed any type of consequentialism, is that most outcomes or results happen in the future and are therefore uncertain. Bruce can’t be sure what the charity he donates to will do with the money or how much they will use it to help people versus padding their executives’ bank accounts. As Batman, he can’t know for certain which patrol route will lead to more criminals he can fight or people he can save. He doesn’t know which heroes to invite onto teams like the Justice League or the Outsiders who will best aid him in his mission. And he definitely doesn’t know how long it will take for the villains he puts away in Blackgate Prison or Arkham Asylum to escape and wreak more havoc. All he can do is make the best decision he can based on the information he has. Because he’s Batman, he has as much information as anyone can have, and the experience to know how to craft it into a decision, but he must still make informed guesses before making a decision how to best further his mission in specific circumstances. All utilitarianism can ask is that we make the best decision we can, even if we can’t hope to make a perfect decision, but this is still a very tough task—especially for someone who has sworn to do the impossible.14
The difficulties with putting utilitarianism into practice point to the importance of using judgment to fill the gaps in the information that is needed to do it perfectly. On the surface, utilitarianism may seem easily reduced to numbers, comparing the benefits and costs of various options, but we have seen that the numbers themselves are rarely obvious or clear. Even in the context of business investment, which is literally a numbers game in which people choose between opportunities with various rates of return and levels of risk, investors need to use judgment to decide which combinations of risk and return are most attractive. Also, the numbers themselves are based on estimates that someone arrived at using judgment, because they are all predictions about an uncertain future. But when the choices involved in a utilitarian decision are not so easily put into numbers—such as when they involve human lives—judgment is all the more important.
But the vague and indeterminate nature of these hard decisions also makes them more subject to being questioned or challenged. Superheroes often face hard moral choices in the comics, and other heroes, colleagues, and (of course) the readers all debate their decisions. Judgment is based in part on one’s experiences and way of understanding ethics, beyond formulas and rules, and as a result each person’s judgment is unique. Think of the nine justices on the United States Supreme Court, all brilliant and experienced legal minds, but each with a unique way of looking at the law and the hard cases they encounter. Even when they arrive at a unanimous 9–0 decision, each justice may justify her or his decision in a different way, as often expressed in their separate opinions and concurrences.
One of the issues we’ll address throughout the first part of this book is whether Bruce Wayne is doing the most good he can as Batman, both in terms of being Batman at all and the way he conducts himself as Batman. Because there are so many factors involved in this determination, ultimately this is a judgment call. There is no simple ethical rule or formula that can definitely answer any of these questions, and as such there will inevitably be disagreement. For instance, Henri Ducard, a detective who helped train a young Bruce Wayne, disagreed with Batman’s focus (even as Ducard starts to realize the two men are one and the same):
While Batman busies himself with petty thieves and gaudy madmen, an abyss of rot yawns ever wider at his feet. He’s a band‐aid of a cancer patient. I am of course no moralist, but this Batman has a very poor understanding of the world.15
I guess we should be thankful he’s not a moralist!
Many have questioned Batman’s focus and methods, both within the context of his particular brand of utilitarianism and also how he integrates other moral perspectives to moderate and modify it. Although we can certainly question the decisions he makes and how he makes them, in particular situations as well as how he generally chooses to live his life, we must be generous enough to acknowledge that Bruce Wayne is trying to do good with the cards that life has dealt him, both the good and the bad. By examining his moral decisions, we can start to appreciate how difficult they are, and also how difficult our own moral decisions are—and by criticizing the way he makes them, we can begin to see how we can make better ones, especially through a better integration of the various aspects of our moral personalities or characters. We begin that task in the next chapter as we look at ways in which Batman limits his own utilitarianism by how he defines his mission.