Inaugurating a nerd blog with philosophical dissection of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies is like strutting into a karaoke bar and taking a stab at “Sweet Home Alabama.” No, it’s not the most complex or difficult selection of the bunch, but in virtue of the sheer number of times it’s been attempted, what might be considered a sloppy hack version in a divey Nashville Honkey-Tonk would in fact probably be superior to my own take. This guy Dr. Will Brooker (also known as Dr. Batman), has made a career largely out of putting Batman under the academic microscope, and his C.V. could put mine in a chokehold without breaking a sweat. I’ll take a stab at it though; go big or go home, right? Maybe I’ll come back to it when they decide to reboot Batman for a Justice League movie and see if I’ve improved.

Let me anticipate the criticism and get something out of the way: yes, I am over-thinking it. I’m not sure if Christopher Nolan or Bob Kane (Batman’s creator) intended any of the philosophical implications I’m about to drawn for Batman or the Batman films, but since it’s become so fashionable to talk about how the most recent Batman films merit special attention because of the way in which they “challenge our deeply held philosophical assumptions,” and “raise complex moral and philosophical dilemmas,” I feel that I’m more justified in doing so. Also, it’s fun to over-think things like Batman, and that’s really the whole point of this blog.

The Batman trilogy, to me, could be described as an account of one exceptional guy’s struggle to lead a good life. Despite being born into fortunate circumstances, he catches a few tough breaks pretty early on life, including falling into a bat infested well and (more significantly) witnessing the murder of his parents. This gives him an early appreciation of the fact that the wealth and other material good fortunes he was born into will not, ultimately, be able to rescue him from the things that scare the hell out of him, which on the surface include bats and darkness and stuff, but on a deeper level probably include the more serious and inevitable darkness of death and apparent meaninglessness of life in the face of death. And those things should be pretty scary to anyone who thinks about them hard enough. So he decides to go Kerouac on everyone’s ass and hit the road in search of meaning, only instead of doing a crapload of dope he does a crapload of ass-kicking and ends up in Tibet, where he meets Liam Neeson. As it turns out, Liam Neeson is actually Ra’s Al Gul, the head of the League of Shadows.

I’m not a huge comic book guy, but from what I understand from people much more knowledgeable in this area than I (special thanks to my buddy Billy Lane), the League of Shadows is a sort of ancient “go green or go f*%$k yourself” movement believes that humanity is a corrupting influence on the natural world. They repeatedly influence the course of human history in attempts to restore a more natural balance. In the movie, their specific agenda is left ambiguous, but it’s clear that they think that the world is messed up and that it’s their job to restore order. Bruce Wayne is at first impressed by Ra’s Al Gul, and in training with the League he hones his ass whooping skills and also does some hallucinogens (so Kerouac won’t be able to call him out). Just when things are going great and he passes their final exam, they come out of nowhere and ask him to kill Asian Jean Valjean (if I remember right, this guy was in trouble for stealing some bread or something). Batman’s reaction is kind of like this. Of course, being Batman, he can’t do it, and manages to escape back to Gotham, but not without having to first burn down the League’s headquarters and bicep curl Liam Neeson to save him from falling over a cliff.

Batman’s decision not to kill the guy is an important one from a philosophical standpoint. It’s the beginning of his trademark “no killing” rule, but more fundamentally, it’s the first time he recognizes that there are certain absolute moral standards that he is not willing to violate. He mutters some giberrish about the guy deserving a fair trial, but it’s pretty clear that he just can’t bring himself to do it and that this has a lot to do with his sense of injustice at the murder of his parents. As others have pointed out, Batman’s unwillingness to violate certain moral standards no matter the circumstances has Immanuel Kant‘s fingerprints all over it. Kant believed that there were certain moral imperatives that were good in and of themselves and that everyone had a moral obligation to obey. He called these moral duties “categorical imperatives,” and he believed that these all stemmed from a single, fundamental “Categorical Imperative” which can roughly be stated as, “Only act in ways that you would want everyone else to act and which treat other people as ends rather than means.”

Kant’s morality stood in direct opposition to the fashionable moral philosophy of the day, Utilitarianism, which stated that the only absolute moral imperative was to maximize the amount of pleasure in the world and minimize the amount of suffering. More simply put, pleasure = good, and suffering = bad, so if you want to do good try to maximize the net amount of pleasure in the world. Utilitarians often call pleasure “utility,” and speak of maximizing the total “utility” in the world (hence the philosophy’s name). Of course, this is an extreme simplification (utilitarians usually believe in “higher pleasures” that result from living a decent life that trump superficial, material pleasure), but it is the basic foundation of the philosophy. Philosophers who developed Utilitarianism, most notably Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, advocated that certain rights be treated as absolute in political settings because these will, in the end, tend to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering, but these are not strictly absolute. According to Utilitarianism, if a situation arises in which a failure to break or suspend one of these rules could result in a great amount of suffering, one actually has a moral obligation to break them. The League of Shadows, under the guidance of Ra’s Al Gul, takes this reasoning to its fullest extent and concludes that modern human civilization is a cancerous growth that needs to be blotted out. By taking out the heart of civilization, Gotham City, The League of Shadows believes that they’ll be able to restore balance and prevent a great amount of suffering, and they consequently believe that they are not only justified but obligated to kill thousands of people to serve this end. Of course, Batman swoops in just in time to deliver a solid Kantian imperative-beatdown, and lets Ra’s Al Gul ride his own doom train to Hell.

Ra’s Al Gul makes for an interesting villain. He’s not, like your average super-villain, attracted to power or obsessed with doing evil; rather, he believes wholeheartedly that he is doing good. He’s actually much more firm and confident in his convictions than Batman, who seems to be constantly struggling with his moral convictions and is often tormented by their consequences (if he had just let Ra’s Al Gul die on the cliff, after all, he could have saved many lives). The genius thing in Nolan’s portrayal of Ra’s and his League of Shadows is that their evilness stems from this very certainty. Their readiness to accept their own ends as the right ones, paired with their willingness to utilize any means necessary to realize these ends, is what makes them so sinister and dangerous. This is not only a critique of individual moral arrogance, but of utilitarian morality as a whole. Clearly, there are lots of different people with different ideas about what is best for the world, and a philosophy that places no limits on the means that they can use to pursue these ideas is dangerous. Certain utilitarian philosophies might advocate some sort of political”gatekeeper” organization or institution to decide on limits and rules that will, on the whole, maximize the amount of utility in the world, but individuals like Ra’s Al Gul who believe that they have it right will always justify ignoring and overriding these rules in pursuit of what they think is good for the world.

In the spirit of limiting this post to a manageable size, that’s going to have to be all for now. Next time, we’ll get into the Joker and why he likes dynamite and gasoline so much.

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