Why We Relate to Batman

Batman is celebrating his 80th anniversary this year, and while he has served admirably as the protector of Gotham City, there is one mystery that the world’s greatest detective has never been able to solve: his own moral inconsistency. Many focus on his all-too-human motivation and lack of superpowers to explain why he’s more relatable than other superheroes, but most of us also share his struggle to reconcile the various elements of his moral code, which serves to make him a different sort of role model from most of his costumed colleagues as well.

Let’s start with Batman’s mission, the guiding principle of his life, sworn over his parents’ graves after their untimely deaths at the hands of a mugger: to save the lives of the people of Gotham, chiefly by fighting the scourge of crime. This is broadly consequentialist in its ethics, striving to do as much good as he can, both as the costumed crimefighter Batman and as wealthy philanthropist Bruce Wayne. At the same time, he breaks many common-sense moral rules in the process—he practices violence, often to the point of inflicting torture, and generally ignores the law when it is inconvenient—all of which would fly in the face of deontological ethics, which focuses on the right and wrong of actions rather than their consequences.

None of these actions, however, is the cause of his moral distress or inconsistency, because Batman justifies them all by how they help him further his mission. To him, the end does justify the means in such cases, which may be disagreeable to some (especially deontologists), but it is not morally inconsistent within Batman’s consequentialist mindset. If he believes that beating a reluctant informant senseless will help him save an innocent life, then he will do it (and he does it a lot).

For Batman, this reasoning justifies a lot of behavior that many others feel is wrong, but even the Caped Crusader draws the line at one wrongful act: killing. Countless times in the comics, Batman has refused to kill even his most homicidal foes, including the Joker, and even risks his own life to save theirs (yes, including the Joker). In other words, Batman will do almost anything to further his mission to save the lives of the citizens of Gotham, but to paraphrase the philosopher Meat Loaf, he won’t do that—he will not take a life, even to save many others.

This is the central moral conflict in Batman’s life: He refuses to perform the one wrongful act that would most significantly advance his mission and further his idea of the good. Here, his deontological convictions about means—perhaps his only one—run into his underlying consequentialist ends.

What accounts for his refusal to kill? Most of Batman’s explanations in the comics focus on the effects that killing would have on his moral character. For example, he worries that crossing that particular line will make him like the people he fights (as if their shared predilection for violence and lawbreaking weren’t enough). This concern is a key feature of virtue ethics, yet another school of moral philosophy, but Batman’s skewed version of it reflects an obsession with maintaining a virtuous self-image at the expense of the mission he has adopted as his version of the good life, and in the end, it furthers neither.

We could debate whether or not Batman should kill the Joker and his other murderous enemies until Bat-cow comes home. (Yes, there is a Bat-cow.) Certainly, comics fans have been doing this since before the first poisoned fish with a Joker grin popped up in Gotham Harbor. More important, however, Batman has long been debating this as well, both to himself and with his friends and fellow heroes, making much the same arguments I outlined above.

He is keenly aware of this essential moral conflict, which is much harder to dismiss than using violence or breaking the law to further his mission. In this case, Batman has to explain what makes his concern with his virtue more important than his mission, or what makes the life he would take more important than the lives his foes would take.

Batman’s ongoing struggles with moral inconsistency provide us with a point of reference to consider our own. Most of us have a concept of the good we want to further, whether it’s saving lives as first responders, curing disease as medical researchers, or pursuing justice as policymakers or activists. At the same time, we all have moral lines we refuse to cross, such as those at the borders of lying, cheating, or stealing, and we also have ideas of who we want to be as people that includes but also supersedes all of these considerations.

All of this moral “material” is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile and make consistent, especially when we have to marshal it in the face of hard choices. As many philosophers acknowledge, a faculty of judgment is necessary to combine, prioritize, and balance all of these moral criteria to make an actual decision. Philosophy professors teach the basic elements of ethics to our students, but as Immanuel Kant wrote in the Critique of Pure Reason, “judgment is a peculiar talent which can be practiced only, and cannot be taught.”

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Judgment is developed through experience over time (and many mistakes), and it is also learned through example—and not necessarily by those who exercise it well. It is more important to see the process of judgment than its results, and fiction can be just as valuable to this end as the stories of real people, if the characters portrayed in it are sufficiently complex.

Batman is indeed complex. Over his eighty years, he has developed into a fascinating character with a multifaceted ethics, and because of this he can not only entertain us but also inspire us. His struggle to reconcile his conflicted moral code, likely as impossible a task as eradicating crime in Gotham City, is yet one more reason he is considered so relatable to millions of fans around the world.

His moral and psychological extremes may not qualify him as a role model similar to Superman or Wonder Woman, but his awareness of his own conflicts, especially regarding trying to be moral in several different ways at the same time, is certainly worthy of admiration and emulation. Among superheroes, no one lives a more thoroughly examined life than Batman.

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(This post originally appeared at The Comics Professor.)