After watching Avengers: Infinity War did you leave feeling at least a little sympathetic for the villain? Did you have trouble seeing fault in his logic as he set about killing off half the population of the universe in a weird cloud of confusion and pixels? Are you worried that this in fact makes you a suppressed genocidal criminal? You’re not alone.

Following the most recent instalment in the Avengers series there has been a lot of chatter online about Thanos, the villain that the entire franchise has been building towards. Most people felt at least an understanding for his motives, while some found it downright logical – albeit immoral. Does this mean that people are starting to genuinely wonder whether killing half the world’s population is a good move? No, of course not. But it does evidence the clever use of philosophy within the Marvel cinematic universe, and the popularity of utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism is a branch of philosophy that is geared towards maximising utility. The concept was founded by Jeremy Bentham, who saw utilitarianism as a jurisprudential theory upon which a code of law could be built. The meaning of ‘utility’ is usually synonymous with the ‘good’, meaning utilitarianism is grounded in notions of ‘the greater good’. To put it in its most basic terms, utilitarianism is the philosophy of creating the greatest good for the greatest number, or as Spock might frame it ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.’

Speaking more broadly, utilitarianism is a branch of consequentialism which holds that the consequences of one’s actions should be the basis for judging whether those actions were right or wrong. Along this spectrum, utilitarianism is one of the more positively geared theories, arguing that a good or useful consequence means your actions were good and useful.

There is one strain of utilitarianism that argues almost the opposite definition of popular utilitarianism. Negative utilitarianism reasons that actions should not be geared towards maximising pleasure, but minimising pain, and this is the yardstick against which actions should be measured. This variety does not consider pain and pleasure opposites, but completely different ideas that should not be used as the two ends of a spectrum when making decisions. Minimise pain; pleasure is irrelevant.

So where does Thanos come into all of this? We know that Thanos wants to control all six Infinity Stones because this will give him incredible power – enough power to kill half the population of the universe. Our Avengers spend the length of the film trying to stop him from doing this, because obviously their job is to save lives. The math seems simple: Thanos wants people to die, but the Avengers want people to live. The lines in the sand are clearly drawn with our heroes protecting life and our villain craving the destruction of life.

But it’s not necessarily that simple. Thanos would almost be a cliché villain if not for his unusual motivation.

The reason Thanos wants to kill half the universe is to save the other half. He expresses passionate concern about over-population and the exhaustion of finite resources that will one day lead to the suffering and destruction of all life. He even uses his home planet as an example, which was destroyed by the very evils he fears will befall the rest of the universe. He wants to kill 50% of all living things – indiscriminately, I should add – but it is not out of spite or hatred. Rather, it is to ensure that life can continue.

These motives very clearly align with consequentialism and utilitarianism, specifically negative utilitarianism. Thanos does not view himself as an evil being, but rather as someone who is preserving universal life and minimising future suffering. He isn’t thinking about the billions of beings that will die in the present, he is thinking about the many more generations of life that will occur because of his choices. He was even willing to sacrifice the daughter he truly loved in order to gain access to the soul stone, because he genuinely believed his decision would save the universe. He is focused on the utility and positive consequences of his decisions, rather than the decisions themselves.

Thanos’ concerns are not foreign to us here in 2018. Over-population is a hot topic as the human race continues to swell, and issues such as global warming and environmental sustainability are hugely concerning, particularly for young people who feel a very bleak future lies ahead if there are no urgent changes made today. No, nobody is suggesting that we actually kill off half the people on the planet – that is obviously evil. But we do share similar concerns about the future wellbeing of the world we live in.

This was a very purposeful departure from the comics in order to make Thanos more relatable as a character. In the original Infinity War comics, Thanos only kills half the universe to prove his love of Death, so the change in his motives really stands out as a commentary on our shared societal concerns. How are we going to deal with over-population? What are we going to do when we run out of energy sources? Are people destroying the planet?

Just because you feel you can relate to Thanos does not mean you’re evil. If anything, it means you are a utilitarian at heart and share a communal concern for our planet and the people living on it – much like the purple people eater Thanos, who is undeniably a consequentialist, probably a utilitarian, and maybe even a negative utilitarian.

Featured image: Marvel Studios