X-Men and Philosophy by William Irwin

Author:William Irwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2010-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

X 3 : UNITED

HUMAN ETHICS AND MUTANT MORALITY IN THE X-VERSE

X

MAGNETO, MUTATION, AND MORALITY

Richard Davis

The question is not whether evolution is connected with ethics, but how.

—Michael Ruse, Evolutionary Ethics: A Phoenix Arisen

Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) may well be the most influential and controversial book ever written. It contains an idea so revolutionary that it has been compared to Copernicus’s discovery that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and not (as previously thought) the other way around. What is that idea? That individuals everywhere are engaged in a “struggle for existence”—a struggle whose outcome is determined not by God but by Nature herself. Those individuals possessing features that are conducive to survival and reproduction (an opposable thumb, say, or perhaps webbed feet) have an adaptive advantage; they are more likely to beat out their competitors in the game of life. Nature looks on them (or rather on their traits) favorably and passes them down the family tree to the next generation of offspring. And thus organisms change and evolve—in our case, as the first X-Men reminds us, “from a single-celled organism into the dominant species on the planet.”

It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of Darwin’s thought. “If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had,” said philosopher Daniel Dennett (b. 1942), “I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else.”1 Hefty praise indeed. The idea is also deemed “dangerous,” in that it has expansionist tendencies; it tends to creep into other areas, sometimes stepping on the toes of disciplines outside the realm of biology. There are, for example, evolutionary explanations of art, love, mathematics, and even religion.2 If Dennett is right, Darwin’s dangerous idea “unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.”3 In other words, it explains the meaning and the purpose of our lives in a purely naturalistic way.

The story of the X-Men is the story of genetic mutation and the incredible powers and advantages it confers. With PhDs in genetics, biophysics, psychology, anthropology, and psychiatry, Charles Xavier, mutant mentor, is no intellectual slouch. One of the world’s most powerful telepaths, he can project his thoughts into the minds of others. With Cerebro—a device that magnifies telepathic ability—at his disposal, it is within his power to annihilate the entire human race. Yet he doesn’t. Indeed, in the face of compulsory mutant registration, Xavier is hopeful. He pleads with his friend Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto), “Don’t give up on them, Erik.” But Magneto merely replies, “I’ve heard these arguments before,” referring, of course, to the forced registration of Jews in Nazi Germany, a seemingly innocuous request that ultimately led to the death camps (where in the first X-Men movie we are introduced to Magneto as a boy).

How can we be sure the nonmutants aren’t proceeding down a similar slippery slope? Professor Xavier assures us, “That was a long time ago. Mankind has evolved since then.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.