Archives for posts with tag: ethics
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Super-Heroic Morality

May 9, 2026 //
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I’ve been watching the latest season of Daredevil: Born Again, and it’s forced me to contemplate the philosophy of superheroes once more. By dint of their title, superheroes are modern paragons of virtue. More than just heroes, these creatures of myth follow the long tradition of moral idols from Beowulf to Achilles to our boy Jesus Christ, guiding us using story toward redemption. Even the Iron Giant looked to Superman to determine what kind of robot he wanted to be.

Arguably one of the best Superman movies ever made.

Yet the moral standards that many (though not all) heroes represent are actually quite simplistic in their deontology: do not kill. However broken the system might be, it must be upheld and upheld in such a way that the villains live to antagonize another day. Batman has sacrificed every Aristotelian virtue in his crusade for justice, Batman routinely tortures people, but Batman will never kill. In further abandonment of the Greeks, the meaning of that justice is never questioned, particularly in the turnstile carceral system of Gotham City, but there is one moral rule that supersedes all others. The ends of justice would never justify the means of obtaining it if those means involve killing in any way. All other means are seemingly totally fine.

The problem with our cultural heroes throughout time is that their stories are understood to be aspirational. A Greek warrior will never be Achilles but can strive to his bravery. A Christian will always be a sinner but can do their best to live in grace. We can fight for justice, and if one or two people get killed, well, we’re no Batman. If our moral theory is at a baseline low bar, then us mere mortals are justified in not living up to that standard, and all of a sudden literally everything is on the table. Christ had so many rules that a good Christian is forgiven for fudging a few, but the superhero has only one. Characters like the Punisher are revered in vicious applications of the law because there is a perceived authenticity in his approach in comparison to the other heroes who constantly have to dwell and gnash their teeth on the singular moral rule they are obligated to follow.

Literal fascism cosplaying as action heroes.

Batman is frequently accused of being a murderer by allowing the Joker to live – as if it were up to him. The Joker is an irredeemable killing machine that will continue to produce murders until the off-switch is flicked. This is a canonical truism. This isn’t a reflection of reality; real-life monsters have more nuance than this one-dimensional murderous madness, but with the in-universe laws of human psychology, it is an undeniable fact. Superman kills Zod in the Zach Snyder movie because there is no other possible solution to the problem of a deranged Kryptonian. Theoretically, Zod could have been written to be convinced of the error of his ways and apologized to the people of Earth, spending the denouement of the film trying to redeem himself. Stories are malleable. But that is not the moral lessons superheroes teach – villains are a constant, and the philosophy of letting them live is allowed to be an actual debate. This blurring of the singular moral rule, even within the universes where it’s held to be paramount, pushes the boundary beyond any justifiable moral rationale into outright advocacy for murder. A real-life Punisher is a school shooter, killing perceived bad guys driven by a hazy sense of permanent justice.

A little while ago, I watched the John Wayne film The Seachers. In the film, Indians (it feels inappropriate to use a politically correct term) murder a nice, white family and abduct their two young, white daughters. John Wayne must track down these Indians, but while searching, one of the daughters is killed (with more than that being implied), and the other “goes native” and John Wayne must now kill her himself for losing her whiteness – this is the literal plot of the film. In the end, John Wayne meets up with her, and in the moment of truth where the question of whether or not John Wayne will murder a young woman in cold blood for the sin of being accepted into an Indigenous band, John Wayne uses his stoic machismo to convert her back into a proper white woman. This film is considered a cinema classic, and reflecting on it, were the Indians to be replaced by vampires or aliens or some other such non-human group, it likely would have stood the test of time.

I mean, who wouldn’t turn into a white woman looking into those baby blues??

What does this say about our current fictional monsters who are morally irredeemable? Would Batman or Daredevil be considered incredibly progressive if their rogues gallery were replaced by black gangsters, and all the world demanded their deaths, but these heroes refused to succumb to the social pressures of meting out an extrajudicial death penalty to the Central Park Five? Critically, without providing justification that the Central Park Five should not have been framed this way in the first place? The grotesque moral framing of these stories is much more obvious when the cartoon villains are replaced by the very real human beings typically at the root of these kinds of life-and-death deliberations – and very much on the wrong side of that debate. Who is Zod if not the Supreme Leader of Iran, his death a necessity for the sake of the world? The official narrative tells us we had no other choice. Who are the Venezuelan fishermen if not replicants of the Joker, and all of us but men, resigned to the fallibility of having to dole out deaths that perhaps only a Bruce Wayne could have otherwise avoided?

Returning to the Greeks, Socrates casts doubt on traditional understandings of justice, but through his trademark condescending dialogue, is able to narrow the definition to the foundational structure of how a society is organized. Justice is a Just world. In Daredevil: Born Again, there is an obvious condemnation of Trump-style politics with paper-thin parallels to ICE abductions and unrepentant criminals being elected into public office. Of note, the overt racism of real-life Trump politics does not carry over into the show because Disney is a massive corporation that sees no financial benefit in chasing that allegory. Daredevil: Born Again follows the well-trodden path of Democratic lawmakers where they will be highly critical of the most obvious flaws of Trumpism (of note, while still ignoring much of the racism underlying American politics that brought us all to this point), but refusing to point to an alternative society that would be better than the one much of the world sees both Trump and Fisk as the answer to. In a binary choice between no option and a bad option to an unjust society, it turns out many people will turn to the bad option. As much as the narrative tries to frame it this way, Daredevil does not offer hope to New York City, he offers only negation.

Also Catholicism.

I’m not saying that superheroes need to add utilitarian calculus to their cinematic feats of bravery and prowess; that would be incredibly boring. However, to not offer a vision of the just society they’re fighting for is moral myopia. Every single instance of democracy in this world was born in slaughter. America had a war with the British. The British had a civil war. Germany and Japan lost a world war. The French killed literally everyone. I’m not saying that superheroes need to start killing folks (nor that utilitarianism is a viable ethical framework – it ain’t), but the singular focus on killing as the only moral rule worth elevating is harmful on so many levels.

I’ve seen around the internet a “joke” that says that the left’s vision of a utopia is a world where everyone has enough to live well and take care of themselves; the right’s utopia is a world where white people work 80 hours a week and everyone else is dead. This is perhaps reductive on both sides, but useful to ask where along this spectrum the “justice” that all these superheroes are fighting for sits. If our moral paragons had real ideals, not living up to their standard would be less important than believing in the world that we all should be fighting for.

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Categories Art, Fun, Philosophy, Politics

Social Work: The Noble Profession

Aug 18, 2024 //
0

I am a social worker in Canada, and with some frequency I am told that I work in a noble profession. And it’s always that word, too: noble. Social workers are paragons of virtue simply by dint of how we make a paycheck. We don’t toil monotonous labour; we don’t exploit those same labourers for surplus value – we transcend the capitalist dichotomy. Doctors, firefighters, and the like may be heroes, but social workers are noble. We’re not glamourously saving lives; we’re in the trenches helping the less fortunate. We sit among both the lepers and the crooks. It’s unclear what we actually do, as I find when talking to even those who work intimately with social workers, but our virtue is assumed – whatever it is we’re doing with those lepers and crooks is irrelevant. Our proximity to pain is enough.

So what do social workers do? Are we really so noble? Am I secretly a monster??

Pictured: a social worker

The Sixties Scoop refers to direct policies of colonial Canada to remove indigenous children from their homes and place them into white foster families or fully adopt them into other, equally white families. It ran from about the 1950s until the 1990s. It represented a shift in approach from the residential school policy which was established to follow the maxim, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” This approach aimed to “save” the indigenous person by “killing” everything that was indigenous about them, and the residential school program aimed to do exactly that by removing children from their families and culture, abusing them if they spoke their native tongue, and presenting them as superficially white with shorn hair and new clothes.

As abducting children from their homes and imprisoning them in abusive facilities became more and more gauche, the Canadian government needed a new methodology to “save” them. In comes the social worker to investigate indigenous homes, and when the indigenous parents are found lacking by white colonial standards, abducting the children from their homes and imprisoning them in abusive white families. This practice continues to this day in what’s called the Millennium Scoop, as the majority of youth in care across the country remain indigenous despite being a small fraction of the Canadian population. Social workers as a profession are responsible for this.

Pictured: another social worker

But surely social workers must do more than whisk babies away in the dead of the night to feed the endlessly hungry maw of settler colonialism! And we do! Socials workers are in schools, healthcare, all over the place. We even do more than just report new moms to child welfare when they’ve given birth while poor! We also connect those without an income to regular, adult person welfare which in British Columbia adds up to… $560 a month.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: that seems like less than table scraps. But there’s more! Social workers can also support low-income people in getting housing that is arguably worse than homelessness: insufficient temperature controls that have residents freezing during the winter and cooking in the summer; illegal practices by landlords including unlawful evictions; restrictions on guests preventing loved ones from ever visiting; health issues arising from mold, bed bugs, vermin, and general lack of upkeep; the list goes on. Those helped by social workers can enjoy their fraction of a scrap living in deplorable squalor.

The resources that social workers can actually provide to the people they’re “helping” are so insufficient it seems somewhat surreal to refer to it as helping at all. This is the parsimonious bounty the system provides, and social workers are the smiling face of the miser doling it out. People don’t typically know what social workers do because even in the best case scenario, the real answer is so close to “nothing” that we would all collectively die of embarrassment if anyone actually looked into it.

Pictured: still another social worker

If our jobs are so trivial, how did we become noble? In this instance, it’s useful to look at the etymology of the term. Noble comes from the Latin nobilis, referring to the high-born families of the time: the nobility, duh! It is a moral framework steeped in hierarchy. Noble people are those who embody the ethic of the aristocracy, and social workers do exactly that.

The idea of the welfare state is to help the less fortunate, but capitalism can’t actually address any of the root causes of poverty and inequality because that would upend capitalism itself. Welfare is the compassion of capitalism whose sole purpose is to never solve anything. Monetary policy requires a percentage of the population to be unemployed; when there is inflation, the central bank raises interest rates in order to produce more poor people. Our system requires poverty, and if any of the methods utilized by that system ever did anything to address it, society would collapse into itself in a Dadaist paradox. Social workers are the systemic representation of that compassionate farce. We are noble because we are the morality of the capitalist elite. When approaching indigenous population, we are the ethic of the white settlers, taking up the white man’s burden to serve our captives’ need. We ease the worries of an otherwise apathetic middle-class, comforted knowing that social workers are there as a bulwark against the cognitive dissonance from class and racial guilt.

Pictured: a final disparaging caricature of social workers

We are not, however, a moral profession. As compassionate and as genuine as social workers tend to be, our “help” is often harm. Indigenous families do not look upon social workers as saviours but as destroyers, tearing up their families in the name of an oppressive fantasy of “doing good.” The impoverished do not see social workers as angels coming down from on high, but merely as a means of drowning less quickly. We try to be good, but good on whose terms? We try to help, but we’re in denial, cogs maintaining the facade of a benevolent state. True solutions would not involve social workers at all, but a restructuring of the world so that the horrifying outcomes of colonial capitalism would not be produced in the first place.

If the ethic of nobility is the delusion social workers use to sleep at night, it is useful to look at the Latin once more to try to break free from that corrupted reverie. We traditionally think of the vulgar as the offensive, the crass, the unclean. In its origin, however, it referred to the low-born, everyone else outside of the nobility. These are the people social workers are supposed to support, yet we remain detached and aloof. How can we bridge that gap? What would an ethic of the vulgar look like? What would social work practice look like if it embraced the vulgar instead of the noble?

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Categories Social Criticism

Palestine, The Haitian Revolution, And The Ethics Of The Slave Revolt

Nov 5, 2023 //
7

I often find myself thinking about the Haitian Revolution. Not because I’m a historian, nor do I feel any particular personal connection to slavery. I am quite Caucasian, thank you, and my natural empathic connections lay in far more privileged in-groups. Frankly, I have more in common with the French slavers than I do the Haitians, and that is precisely my point.

Hello comfort zone!

The Haitian Revolution was vicious. When the slaves rebelled, they did so with ferocious gusto. The Haitians tortured and slaughtered every single French family on the island, ostensibly to prevent further enslavement, but arguably as revenge for the crimes of their colonial nation. The only White folks who were spared were the Germans and Poles. In retaliation, the French set up a blockade around the island with their navy of warships and forced reparations from the new republic, demanding the former slaves pay their slavers approximately $3.5 billion USD in today’s currency, with Haiti only paying it off finally in 1947. Haiti’s modern day impoverishment was imposed by a jilted nation bitter about losing the people they owned as property.

The Haitians brutalized French civilians, killing entire families including children. Did France have the right to defend itself? In a just world, should they have invaded the poor nation to reestablish the status quo? Let’s say for the sake of argument that the French would have been delicately proportionate in their response, and avoided killing civilians, targeting only the militants who overthrew the slaver regime. They were one of the few republics globally at that point, deposing their own tyrannical rulers in their own notably dovish way; surely their cause must have been just – they were an oasis of democracy in the world! Would their resolute nobility justify returning the Haitian people to enslavement? Should we condemn the Haitians for their revolution? Surely a peaceful solution was possible, and while we may mourn the tragedy of French retaliation, devastating in its reality, we cannot abide the violence of a slave revolt. Surely.

I don’t think the Haitians had truly exhausted their kumbaya resources

Slavery is now considered one of the greatest evils humanity has ever perpetuated. To respond to it with violence isn’t actually at all controversial. When America eventually caught on that slavery is bad, it had a whole war against itself in order to reject it. To talk about the Haitian Revolution without the context of slavery is just about the most absurd thing anyone could ever do; even the worst student in a high school history class would still include the word “slavery” somewhere in their failing final paper, perhaps even in the title. When we look at the slave revolt, the keyword is already present in the phrasing. To pretend it erupts in an ahistorical vacuum would require significant leaps of racism to ignore.

My parallel is not subtle, and the criticisms are predictable. What the French did, slavery, is objectively wrong, and the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is a false equivalence. Perhaps, but we must look at the context to determine whether or not that is actually true. In the occupied territories of the West Bank (deemed illegal under international law), Israeli settlers are forcibly evicting Palestinians from their homes in order to claim the land for their own, often using violence to do so. In Gaza, one has to wonder how Israel had the power to eliminate access to drinkable water from entering the region after Hamas’s attack, along with other trifles like fuel, food, and medicine. This blockade has been in place since 2007. What do you call it when one group controls the necessities of life of another, removing access to it when they disapprove? It is driving a people into submission, reminding them who has the power over their lives. While there is no forced labour, the comparison to slavery does not feel too outrageous. There is a word that is commonly bandied about though, apartheid, as described by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even the Israeli human rights group B’tselem. What does it mean to use violence against such a state of oppression?

This surrounds Gaza. This is why it’s often compared to an open-air prison with unlivable conditions even at the best of times. What kind of moral equivalence should we attribute to the imprisonment without charge of an entire people?

Which leads me to the second predictable criticism. We’ve grown as a species since the days of colonialism and slavery! We don’t need violence anymore! Even the apartheid in South Africa was resolved through the peaceful actions of the great Nelson Mandela! Violence, in any context, is inherently evil and should never be used as a political tool.

There is an old philosophical adage that states that ought implies can. This is a simple maxim that stipulates that only someone capable of acting ethically is responsible for doing so. If I can’t lift a boulder that’s crushing you to death, I am not responsible for saving you. If I’m Superman and just don’t bother to lift the boulder, then I am acting unethically. It’s fairly straightforward – we can’t perform moral duties that we are unable to perform, therefore we are not obligated to follow them.

Holding people to literally impossible standards?! Something something joke about relationships

Can Palestinians use non-violent means to end the apartheid imposed upon them? I mean they’ve tried. The United States has vetoed every single United Nations Security Council resolution that would hamper Israel’s ability to oppress them. The International Criminal Court has been rendered essentially impotent in their investigations into the matter due to America’s opposition, sanctioning prosecutors. Israel also flatly rejects the jurisdiction of the court, denying any international legitimacy to the complaints of the Palestinians. The Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement that attempts to use similar tactics that ended apartheid in South African is often legally impermissible, or at the very least culturally frowned upon rendering it inconsequential as peaceful protest. When Palestinians protest peacefully locally, they are often shot for their troubles. Journalists covering the situation are also killed with impunity. The list goes on.

What exactly ought the Palestinians to do? When we condemn Hamas, we’re saying they ought not to have done what they did, but the follow-up question becomes: what ought they to do instead? There does not appear to be any effective measure Palestinians can take that will alter their situation in any meaningful way. Are they simply to sit passively by? Allow history to unfold as it will, without their input? Should the Haitians simply have waited for the French to determine on their own that slavery is morally bankrupt? France ended slavery in 1848, 44 years after the Haitian revolution. Would we ask them to endure another couple generations of slavery to avoid any wearisome violence? How long do you think it will be for the Palestinians to wait, or will the historical narrative have them driven out of their homes forever? The idea of forcibly relocating a people out of their homes under threat of death has terrifying precedent.

Don’t you know that patience is a virtue?

The third and final predictable criticism is that I am justifying the terrorism of Hamas; what Hamas did was good actually, and innocent Israeli families deserve to die. Hopefully by now you’ve been able to ascertain the entire point of this article. We cannot justify the acts of Hamas in the same way we cannot condemn them. We cannot say they ought to have committed such atrocities just as much as we can’t offer an alternative. If ought implies can, and Palestine is forbidden any action whatsoever, then there can be no ethical component to their deeds. The October 7th attack can neither be condemned nor justified because it does not exist in the ethical realm. The violence of Palestinians transcend any ethical deliberation because ethics have long been unattainable for them. Hamas acted in what amounts to a state of nature, and people died. We are allowed an emotional reaction to be sure, but not an ethical one. If we want an ethical option for Palestinians to embrace, perhaps we should give them one. We can act.

If I was alive in Haiti in the early 19th century, me and my family likely would have been tortured and killed by dint of nothing more than our racial identity. I certainly wouldn’t have enjoyed it, and I would appreciate people mourning the deaths of me and my loved ones. I’ve long questioned, however, even before October 7th, 2023, the justifications for my survival in that context. What is my life or death in the face of the giant of slavery? How ought I to be treated as an accessory to slavery? What would my own moral obligations be if I survived the slaughter? How does one condemn a slave revolt in a world without ethics?

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Categories Politics
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