Ethics for Superheroes

Raven
May 7
5 min read

When it comes to superheroes, ethics is a topic that starts to regularly come up. In the RLSH community it will often be a subject of discussion (which is why “Justice & Ethics” is its own category in the forum).

“Ethics is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches include normative ethics, applied ethics, and metaethics.

Normative ethics aims to find general principles that govern how people should act. Applied ethics examines concrete ethical problems in real-life situations, such as abortion, treatment of animals, and business practices. Metaethics explores the underlying assumptions and concepts of ethics. It asks whether there are objective moral facts, how moral knowledge is possible, and how moral judgments motivate people. Influential normative theories are consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. According to consequentialists, an act is right if it leads to the best consequences. Deontologists focus on acts themselves, saying that they must adhere to duties, like telling the truth and keeping promises. Virtue ethics sees the manifestation of virtues, like courage and compassion, as the fundamental principle of morality.

Ethics is closely connected to value theory, which studies the nature and types of value, like the contrast between intrinsic and instrumental value. Moral psychology is a related empirical field and investigates psychological processes involved in morality, such as reasoning and the formation of character. Descriptive ethics describes the dominant moral codes and beliefs in different societies and considers their historical dimension.”

-- “Ethics” on Wikipedia

As RLSH, we want to develop our own code of ethics and it’s going to vary person to person, situation to situation. At our core, we want to help people. It's how we do things and make decisions that encompass ethics.

Ethical choices can vary depending on the information that we are provided with, which leads us to ask: how do we break down situations/issues to make the best ethical choice? Let me provide an example to best illustrate this. There are 5 people (A, B, C, D, E) in an office who are put into a special project team. As the manager, you have to decide how the group is organized.

Brief Details:

A - Female, 30, 5 years experience, Bachelors degree

B - Male, 45, 10 years experience, Bachelors degree

C - Male, 35, 6 years experience, Associate degree

D - Female, 42, 12 years experience, Associate degree

E - Male, 25, 1 year experience, Masters degree

How do you organize them? What if we provided more details? Does your answer change?

The special project is to design new security software for a prison.

A - Female, 30, 5 years experience, Bachelors degree, legally immigrated 10 years prior from Bulgaria, Eastern European

B - Male, 45, 10 years experience, Bachelors degree, going through bad divorce, African American

C - Male, 35, 6 years experience, Associate degree, has a non-violent criminal history from when his late-teens/early-twenties but is reformed, White

D - Female, 42, 12 years experience, Associate degree, has a son in prison for violent crime, Native American

E - Male, 25, 1 year experience, Masters degree, related to the business owner, White

If your decisions on organizing them have altered, ask yourself why. Does the non-work-related information alter how they may perform at work? We start placing values on new pieces of information which can alter our decision making.

We may consider the consequences of each person in a leadership role or who leadership might bring the greatest amount of happiness. In this case B, C, or D may have the greatest amount of happiness derived from a higher leadership position due to age and experience. You could also make the group democratic in nature where everyone has equal power for equal happiness.

Perhaps you strictly base leadership on experience and degree level, which would be more along the lines of deontology where there are strict good and bad or black and white sides to things, no grey or in-between areas. In this case, B or D would be the best candidates for leadership positions.

Another way to look at this is through “virtue ethics” which would run positive traits against negative traits. In this case, you could say that E has no criminal ties, no possible ties to foreign security threats, and is not emotionally compromised.

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I'm hoping you have an idea of how we can approach ethical questions and how there can be multiple answers with a variety of different reasoning. Overall, none is totally correct or incorrect. This is why the subject (Philosophy) is interesting.

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In the real world, there are some scenarios that we may come across that will have us filtering through our ethical perspective.

Scenario #1: You are out on patrol and witness a person rob a shop at gunpoint. Unfortunately, two shots are fired and one person takes a bullet to the torso, requiring immediate first aid. What do you do?

Scenario #2: While on patrol, some regulars on your route, who you know to be jerks who partake in regular drug and alcohol use, are on a footbridge over a river goofing around. One of them falls over the railing into the river below. You are alerted by their worried shouts. What do you do?

Scenario #3: You are out on patrol during a protest, which have been seeing an increase in numbers. There are some online rumors of threat coming from the other political side and you are concerned about the safety of the protesters. You notice extra police in the area, obviously rumors have spread. During your patrol you notice a few people trying to start disrupting the protest through negative means. What do you do?

Scenario #4: While out on patrol you notice some people break into an abandoned building that has "no trespassing" signs posted. Their intentions seem to lean towards vandalism. What do you do?

Scenario #5: As an RLSH, you find that you go out more often than you originally planned because you enjoy it. Eventually, you find yourself asking if your hero persona is a more true reflection of your identity than your daytime self. How do you determine your true self identity? (This is often asked in comics: Batman, Superman, Iron Man, etc.)

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Ethics for Superheroes

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