You’ve decided to become a costumed crimefighter. Congratulations! You’ve got your outfit, having made the critical decisions regarding colors, mask or cowl, and cape or no cape. You’ve got your secret lair, your cool car (unless you can fly), and all the equipment you need to confront the criminal element and protect the innocent citizens of your fair city.

But wait … that’s just the easy part. What are you going to do now? Are you going to look for muggers and burglars, or tackle corruption in government and business? Are there already supervillains to fight—or will they instead be inspired by you? How far are you willing to go in your crusade for justice? What degree of violence are you comfortable using? Will you break bones, put thugs in the hospital—or will you “cross the line” and end them once and for all?

The questions don’t stop there. Who else will you enlist in your mission? Will you bring in a sidekick, maybe even a young boy or girl to watch your back and train to become a full‐fledged hero someday? Will you cooperate with other masked crimefighters? What relationship will you cultivate with the local authorities? How far will you go to protect your secret identity? How will you balance your superhero life with your personal life, including your love life? Will you let your friends and family know what you’re doing?

It turns out there’s a lot more to being a costumed crimefighter than gearing up and jumping into the fray. As with many things in life, being able to do something is not the same thing as knowing what to do with it or the best way to do it. As a wise sage once said, “with great power must come great responsibility”: deciding what to do with your power is the hard part, and the answer you choose separates the superheroes from the truly dangerous (if not villainous).

Being a superhero, then, opens a green hornet’s nest of ethical conundrums—and if you’re anything like me, you find those moral dilemmas just as interesting as the exciting, cataclysmic battles between good and evil. It turns out that stories about superheroes in comic books, TV shows, and movies are great ways to start discussions about ethics and morality. The difficult ethical spots that superheroes find themselves in may not always look like the ones you and I face, but they can be examined using the same basic schools of ethics that philosophers have developed over the last couple thousand years. Even better, they apply much more to our day‐to‐day moral issues than you might think.

That also happens to be why I wrote this book. But why did I choose Batman as my companion along the way? There are several reasons, but the simplest one is that he’s incredibly cool! And I’m not alone in thinking that. Batman is one of the most popular and enduring superheroes all of time, appearing regularly in the comics since his introduction in 1939, becoming a TV star in the 1960s, and a movie star starting in the 1980s. He has appeared in many different forms, styles, and moods, yet there is an essential quality of “Batman‐ness” that persists through all of them and continues to fascinate us.

One explanation commonly cited for Batman’s enormous popularity is that he is “just” a regular person, a human being like you or me. He’s not an alien visitor from another planet or an Amazon princess with powers granted from the gods, nor was he granted an all‐powerful power ring, an enchanted hammer, or an ouchie from a radioactive spider. He’s “just a guy”—well, a guy with a load of money and free time on his hands, but otherwise, a normal guy. Setting aside those small details, however, Batman stands as an example of what each of us could be if we wanted it badly enough and pushed ourselves hard enough. Ideally, we could hone our bodies to physical perfection, study criminology and forensic science until we’ve mastered it, and devote our entire lives to stamping out crime. In theory, each of us could be Batman—it’s only our resolve (and our resources) that stand in the way.

Because he’s human—despite the enormous wealth—we feel closer to his experiences, his adventures, and his moral struggles, than we do to those of his super friends. Furthermore, the moral struggles he faces as “merely a man” are more interesting because the choices he must make and the burdens he must bear are more familiar to us than those of Superman or Wonder Woman, even as “normal” and down‐to‐earth as comics creators try to make these characters seem. Batman makes bad choices and he pays for them—and even worse, sometimes other people pay for them—and he regularly beats himself up over it. He constantly pushes himself to be better and do more, but there are limits to how much or how well he can do—limits he usually refuses to acknowledge, for reasons both pragmatic and principled.

In this book, we’ll talk about a number of aspects of Batman’s life and mission, his friends and colleagues, and his most dramatic and exciting adventures, and explore the ethics behind each of them. We’ll see that Batman’s moral code is not simple and does not fall neatly into any of the ethical schools we’ll talk about—which is fine, because few of ours do either! Just like the rest of us, Batman’s ethics are complicated and conflicting, different aspects of them being triggered by different circumstances, and Batman’s moral choice in these situations may not be the same as you or I would make. Figuring out why … now that’s the fun part!

Popular conceptions of moral philosophers have us knowing “the truth” about right and wrong and having “the answer” to any moral question. That is, frankly, ridiculous—neither part is accurate. What we moral philosophers do instead, especially when we teach, is highlight and explore different approaches to ethics, not to declare one of them “right” or the “best,” but to emphasize different aspects of everyday moral thinking. (It would be very difficult to declare one approach to ethics “the best,” anyway, because how you define “the best” depends on what ethical approach you take, and then you’re assuming your answer, or what philosophers call “begging the question.”) Sometimes people try to bring about the greatest amount of happiness; sometimes they try to follow rules and do the “right thing”; and sometimes they try to be the best people they can be. These three approaches correspond to the schools of moral philosophy known as utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics, which we’ll talk more about in the pages to come (especially the first two).

Often, those three approaches to ethics point in the same direction. For example, all three would say that, in general, lying is unethical and helping others is ethical, although they might provide different reasons with different bits of nuance. Most of the “big” moral issues are like this: killing, stealing, and poisoning the Gotham City water supply with Joker venom are all forbidden by all major schools of ethics. (Whew.)

However, in other cases the three schools do come into conflict—especially utilitarianism and deontology—especially when doing “good” and doing “right” point to different actions. You want to surprise your best friend on her birthday by taking her out to a show, but you promised another friend you’d watch his dog while he’s away. Perhaps you have a chance to get a great job with health benefits to take care of your sick child, but you have to lie about your qualifications to get it. Or maybe you have a chance to stop your homicidal arch‐nemesis from killing more innocent people, but only if you kill him, which you swore not to do.

The last case may not crop up in your life very often, but it is a recurring theme in Batman’s stories and a constant question in every fan’s mind: Why doesn’t Batman kill the Joker? The Joker, easily the most deadly of Batman’s colorful rogues’ gallery, has killed countless citizens of Gotham City and elsewhere. He has also directly affected the Dark Knight himself: he killed Jason Todd, the second Robin; he shot and paralyzed Barbara Gordon, the original Batgirl and adopted daughter of his close friend, Jim Gordon; and he killed Sarah Essen, a Gotham City Police Department detective and commissioner (and wife of Jim Gordon). As we’ll see later in this book, it’s not only fans who wonder why Batman doesn’t put a permanent end to the Joker’s killing spree—many people in the DC Universe have confronted Batman about this, including Barbara Gordon and Jason Todd himself (after returning from the dead).

Here we see all three ethical approaches at play and in conflict. If Batman only wanted to do good, to save lives and protect innocent people, he likely would have killed the Joker a long time ago. But he also wants to do the right thing, and he feels strongly that killing is always wrong, even if it would save more deaths in the future. Finally, Batman does not want to be a killer; he does not want to become like the criminals he opposes and holds himself to a higher standard of character. The last two approaches speak to why he won’t kill the Joker, reinforcing each other by emphasizing the lines Batman won’t cross in his mission to protect the people of Gotham City, but that refusal to kill limits the success of that mission itself.

Does Batman make the right choice? We may assume he feels it’s the right choice, but we may have our own opinion on the matter. The type of choice Batman finds himself in here is what philosophers call a tragic dilemma, a choice from which one cannot escape “with clean hands.” Either Batman kills the Joker, sacrificing his moral principles and who he strives to be, or he accepts that the Joker will kill more innocent people, compromising Batman’s core mission. He can’t do both, but he must make a choice. Is there truly a “right” choice in such circumstances? What would you do, and why?

In the end, it comes down to judgment, which we use all the time to settle conflicts between important moral goals and principles. Most of us don’t often encounter life‐or‐death conflicts like Batman does—unless you’re a doctor or nurse, a police officer or firefighter, or in the military—but we can still appreciate the need for moral judgment to settle disputes between the good and the right, or even different types of one or the other. You want to donate money to a charity, but which one and how much? You accidentally make promises to different people and can’t possibly keep them all, so which do you break? You have a chance to move to a better school district to give one child access to a better music program, while tearing your other child away from his friends—do you move?

None of these are clear‐cut decisions that you can easily make with rules or formulae. These tools can help you clarify various aspects of an issue, but at the end these options are not easy to weigh against each other. It’s not like comparing prices for an identical product, like a specific model of a new car or a washing machine—it’s more like comparing different prices for different makes and models of cars of different ages with different features. You can analyze and compare and make lists until you’re blue in the face, but at the end of the day you have to make a choice that feels right to you, and all you have at your disposal to make that choice is your judgment. Call it intuition, call it your gut, call it whatever you want—it’s you, the real you, the person that has to make a choice that reflects and reinforces who you are.

Batman makes this choice every time he refuses to kill the Joker. He knows the arguments for and against doing it, and he sympathizes with those who want him to end the Clown of Crime once and for all. But there is no one right decision—only the one he feels is consistent with his values and the hero he wants to be.

With Batman, however, it’s even more complicated than this, and this complication is the true motivation behind this book. It’s not just that Batman has to make choices between the ethical ideas of doing good, doing right, and being a good person. Every superhero has to do this and, as I said, this is part of what makes superhero stories, whether in the comics, movies, or TV, fascinating as well as entertaining. With Batman more than most superheroes, the problem is that his conception of each of these moral principles is inconsistent. Sometimes his version of doing good is fighting crime and other times it’s saving lives, two clearly good aims that are not the same thing and sometimes conflict. He refuses to kill because it’s wrong, but is often extremely violent and sometimes engages in what can be called torture—again, two clear wrongs but only one of which he steadfastly avoids. In the end, how does he reconcile these inconsistent visions of the good and the right—or does he at all?

You could say that this is another aspect of Batman’s inherent humanity: he is as inconsistently moral as any of us. But while having to balance the good against the right is a part of being a good person—doing it well can even be considered a sign of fine virtue—having conceptions of good and of the right that are inconsistent within themselves is not. It signals a lack of integrity in a formal sense, a sign that one’s moral character is not as settled as it should be in order to be ethical in the world. In other words, Batman could be better, and so could we—and that’s the real message of this book. It’s wonderful to care about ethics and have many different thoughts about how to make the world better and more just while also being a good person, but if you can’t reconcile those thoughts into a consistent code of ethics, your actions will reflect this sense of disorder. You may still be a good person and do ethical things, but not as much as you could or as reliably as you could.

In this book, we’ll take a trip through the ethical landscape where Batman finds the various pieces that make up his moral code and consider the inconsistency in each one as well as how he balances them against each other. My intent is not to criticize him as a person or a hero—despite his imperfections he is a fine example of both. Instead, I use those imperfections to show how he can be better at both, and how we can all learn from his example to be better ourselves. (And talk about a lot of great comics in the process!)

Which Batman?

One question that naturally arises when you write about a massively popular multimedia character such as Batman is: which Batman are you referring to? There have been many versions of Batman over the years, not only in the comics but also on TV, including the campy, beloved live‐action starring Adam West and Burt Ward and the more recent animated series, and in the movies, representing several distinct visions under different directors, screenwriters, and actors. Even if we focus only on the main Batman comics—excluding “imaginary” stories and those from alternate Earths—there have many different versions of him, from the original 1930s gun‐wielding Batman and the goofy 1950s sci‐fi version (Rainbow Batman! Mermaid Batman!), through the Darknight Detective of the 1970s, the even Darker Knight of the 1980s, and beyond.

The brilliance of Batman, however, is that there are certain qualities of Batman‐ness that carry through most all versions and make them identifiably the same character. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein coined the term “family resemblance” to explain how various examples of a vague concept can be identified. For instance, he cited the difficulty with defining what a “game” is—every characteristic of a game you might suggest has a counterexample among something clearly called a game. But, Wittgenstein said, the various things we call games have enough in common, even if not among all games, to link them together, in the same way that blood relatives may share various similarities with other family members: the daughter may have the father’s nose and the mother’s eyes while the son has the father’s mouth and the mother’s hands. In the same way, the various iterations of Batman over the last 80 years share enough qualities with enough of the other versions that they are all recognizable as Batman.

If my purpose is to investigate the inconsistency in Batman’s moral behavior, though, the best way to do that is to focus on one version of the character. It wouldn’t be much to say, for instance, that Adam West’s Batman from the 1960s TV show behaved differently than Ben Affleck’s Batman in the film Batman v Superman, or that the goofy Batman of the 1950s comics behaved differently than the version in Frank Miller’s 1980s classic The Dark Knight Returns, but it would be interesting to point out the same inconsistency in any one of these. Striking a balance between including too broad or narrow a range of material, in this book I will focus on a period in the comics of about 40 years, from the early 1970s through 2011, and will treat this version of Batman as a singular version of the character. Despite being written, drawn, and edited by hundreds of different people over these four decades, I feel Batman was portrayed as consistently during this period as ever—which makes the inconsistencies in his moral behavior that remain all the more apparent.

Why do I talk only about the version of Batman in the comics? It’s not because the versions shown in the movies and television are any less valid or meaningful, to be sure. It’s because I believe the comics are where his behavior and thought processes are best illustrated and explained—often they’re stated explicitly, in copious dialogue, thought balloons, and exposition, which don’t occur as often (or at all) in other media. This is not to say that the mainstream comics version of Batman is more legitimate or represents the “real” Batman—each version of Batman is the real Batman to somebody. It’s simply that the ethical aspects of Batman I find most interesting are found in the comics from this period, beginning with the modernization of the character in the early 1970s by writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams, continuing on through the 1980s in the work of creators such as Doug Moench, Mike Barr, Jim Aparo, and of course Frank Miller, into the 1990s with Alan Grant, Norm Breyfogle, and Chuck Dixon, and the 2000s with Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, Scott McDaniel, and Grant Morrison.

(Why stop at 2011? I cut off my look at the comics there because this was the year that DC Comics rebooted their entire universe in the “New 52” initiative, which they only partially reversed in the 2016 with “DC Rebirth.” The character of Batman was among the least affected by this change, and fantastic stories were told afterwards by Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Peter Tomasi, Tom King, and others, but the change was still significant enough to mark a break in continuity that provides a neat and tidy bow on the period I cover.)

I left many names out, of course, and they’re all listed in the references. In most of this book, though, as you’ll notice, I will rarely make reference to any particular creators’ version of Batman. Instead, I treat Batman as one coherent character, as I believe he was for these four decades (and for the most part continues to be). He naturally changed over the years, of course, as we all do; and even during this period he was not entirely consistent in his actions, motivations, or justifications, again just like the rest of us. I talk about him as if he were a real person, which is a useful fiction, but this is not to ignore the fact that who we call the Batman is the creation over many years of hundreds of talented creators, and it is to them that this book is dedicated. I believe that his characterization matured in the early 1970s and stayed fairly constant through the ensuing decades—enough that we can talk about one “Batman” while still exploring the inconsistencies of his ethical behavior and motivations, and use this to consider our own.

The story has been told many times, each as chilling as the last. After seeing a Zorro movie at the movie theater, Thomas and Martha Wayne and their young son Bruce walk down an alley, only to face a mugger who demands money and jewelry. Thomas resists, and the mugger shoots him and then his wife, leaving their son in shock as the killer runs into the night. As Bruce kneels sobbing over his parents’ bodies, he swears an oath to prevent this tragedy from happening to anybody else—and, in many ways, Batman was born that night.

Of course, Bruce was still a young boy then, and the cape and cowl, not to mention the cave and car, were years away. The Waynes’ loyal butler Alfred Pennyworth (with the help of Thomas’ friend and colleague Dr. Leslie Thompkins) raised Bruce to be the man his parents would have wanted him to be, while in solitude he began the intensive training that would prepare him for the role and the life he chose for himself that fateful night—in other words, “the mission.” It is this mission to which Batman dedicates his life, sacrificing his every waking moment, much of his fortune, and any prospect of an independent life with joy or love. It is this mission and Batman’s superhuman resolve to pursue it that inspire admiration among his fellow heroes in the DC Universe and his millions of fans in the real world—while at the same time they question his sanity for pursuing it with such single‐minded devotion. And it is this mission, along with the steps he refuses to take in pursuit of it, that together define who Batman is in ethical terms.

In this part of the book, we’ll explore the nature of that mission. We’ll discuss various aspects of it, both positive and negative, and what each one implies about the priorities Batman puts on different sides of his overall goal. We’ll also see how Batman’s mission can be described in terms of moral philosophy, specifically the school of ethics known as utilitarianism, which is focused on increasing and maximizing the amount of good in the world. We’ll explore how Batman’s mission falls short of the utilitarian ideal in important ways and try to explain why—and find out more about utilitarianism in the process. We’ll even see that certain aspects of his mission are self‐defeating, which shows how complicated ethical questions can be, even in the context of a very simple and straightforward goal. Most important, we’ll discuss how Batman struggles with ethical dilemmas that, other than the cave, car, and cape, resemble ones we face every day, and as much as we can be inspired by his successes, we can learn from his failures. Batman isn’t perfect, and neither are we—but we can all be better. Let’s see how.

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.