A la Node

Many thoughts, in fact. I’ve been buried in school work and other obligations, but the ideas I have been trying to illuminate have been bubbling away for the last few months, and maybe I can tie this together a bit now.

Julie hits the nail on the head with this reply to my previous post:

” Your questions walk a very slippery slope. Is it right to do what you can for the good of humanity? Yes. Is it right to force what you think is right and good upon humanity “for their own good”?? No.”

To which I have to say What is the difference?

Ah, superheros are the perfect vehicle for these kinds of questions. They are morality written in large print, simplified and easy to read. Superheros are just pop culture trying to answer the very question I asked at the beginning - what are the rights and responsibilities of power?

Someone asked why there should be any obligation at all connected with power, but consider Spiderman - who, having witnessed the robbery of someone he has reason to dislike, lets the robber go despite being quite capable of stopping him. There is a concept of negligence in the common law of most societies, an idea that if you have the power to prevent harm, you know harm will occur if you do nothing, and you don’t do anything, you have some culpability for that harm. Now an average citizen in the U.S. would not be expected to take on a robber (in fact is discouraged from such confrontation due to the potential for said citizen to get his ass whipped - the police like to handle these things themselves) but should a superhero be held to a higher standard? After all, he could have stopped the guy with minimal danger and effort.

A less clear cut example - you know that people in Oregon go hungry and suffer poor health and death due to lack of food (you do know that, right?). You know that you have enough food laying around to keep someone from dying probably for weeks. Are you negligent if you don’t contribute food to those who need it? Is this criminal, unethical, just plain wrong?
I don’t want to get bogged down in details, but it seems to me that it is one of the core priniciples in law and ethics for the idea that if you have the power to prevent harm, you have some kind of obligation to do so. Not having super powers, it’s easy to feel that: A) you don’t really have the power to do much, so you are excused from trying to affect big changes, and B) there’s no good way to really know what harm is going on, or what the unintended consequences might be if you try, in your less than super-heroic way, to save the world. Stan Lee said “With great power comes great responsibility”, so maybe with minuscule power comes minuscule responsibility.

Now Superman, with his near-infinite powers, could in principle prevent practically any crime with no danger to himself. Just by existing, isn’t he negligent if he doesn’t act on his knowledge of the crimes going on everywhere?

Stan Lee also said, through the X-Men, “We must learn to use our power to benefit humanity, and not become tyrants over our fellow man.” (More or less. I am sure someone can correct me on the exact quote.) Which seems to suggest that perhaps those with the greatest power have not only great responsibility, but that power should be used sparingly and carefully, as it can easily result in tyranny of those less powerful. After all, what really is the difference between using your power to do what you see as right, and imposing your will on others? Either way, people who have no choice live with the consequences of what you do. Some of them are not going to agree that what you did was “right”. (Perhaps those with no power should be the most proactive in our world, rather than the least.)

I said before that the question of right and wrong can be answered by examinign the effects on society, and hence moral relativity shouldn’t be the governing principle of our investigation. I meant this somewhat sarcastically - as Arashi pointed out, measuring long-range impacts on society isn’t exactly a cinch. So what is the deal, can we decide by real measures what is right and wrong, or does it all depend on your viewpoint? Tricky. Lets look at this a bit closer.

Lets say that Superman, in his wisdom, sees that what is best for society, what will make the most the happiest for the longest, is to implement a Matrix-like (isn’t it great how pop culture has given us simplified, easy-to-use handles for all the ancient and deeply complex philosophical questions of the ages?) system of virtual reality pods where we can all be locked up in simulations perfectly calculated to keep us content but stimulated. Ok, so now Superman can truly measure the happiness of all of society. He can see to it that everyone lives a happy and productive (virtual, but we can’t tell the difference) life, that culture is alive and well (in our simulated world), the real environment outside is not destroyed, and no one has to really die, they can just be rebooted into a different reality when they get hit by a bus in one. As a bonus, he can use us to power the heating in his ice palace. He has clearcut measurable criteria by which to judge his actions, he can prove with charts and graphs that this is absolutely right thing to do for all of humanity. Right?