Batman and Ethics by Mark D. White

Author:Mark D. White
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119038030
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Similar to the legal sense, moral responsibility for a wrongful act also hinges on whether the person who performed it knew what they were doing was wrong and meant to do it anyway. Sometimes this comes down to a mistake of fact: for example, if the Penguin picks up somebody else’s umbrella by mistake on his way out of the bank, that isn’t a crime. (If he threatens to kill someone with it, that’s a different story.) Other times, it’s a failure to understand that an act was wrong, such as when a child takes something that doesn’t belong to them, or hits another child before being told it’s wrong. Batman is arguing that the Joker makes that mistake: although obviously intelligent, he lacks the basic conception of right and wrong that would give him the appreciation of his actions necessary to render him morally or legally responsible for them. As Batman said, a person can’t act wrongly if they don’t know it’s wrong; in such cases, what they did may be harmful and tragic, but the person can’t be held responsible for it.

This also implies such a person can’t be punished for crimes they committed, because punishment, as we saw, assumes guilt, which in turns assumes responsibility. But at the same time, if a person is a danger to others—as the Joker most definitely is—he must be quarantined from the rest of society. This is why even criminal defendants found “not guilty for reason of insanity” may nonetheless be confined to a mental health facility, both to pursue treatment as well as separate them from others they may hurt again.

It follows that, as Batman told the Spectre, criminals who are judged insane should definitely not be killed as punishment for their crimes—something he often emphasizes in reference to another of his frequent foes, Two‐Face. As he told government agent King Faraday, who told Batman to stay away from him while he chased Two‐Face,

You know that Two‐Face was once district attorney Harvey Dent—before acid scarred half his face and drove him hopelessly insane! Well, I owe a debt to the man that was! I owe it to the memory of Harvey Dent to put Two‐Face where he’ll never harm anyone ever again.63

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