#code filter | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

glitter-stained · 3 months ago

Text

Damasio, The Trolley Problem and Batman: Under the Hood

Okay so @bestangelofall asked me to elaborate on what I meant by "Damasio's theories on emotions in moral decision-making add another level of depth to the analysis of UTH as a moral dilemma" and I thought this deserved its own post so let's talk about this.

So, idk where everyone is at here (philosophy was mandatory in highschool in my country but apparently that's not the case everywhere so i genuinely have no clue what's common knowledge here, i don't want to like state the obvious but also we should recap some stuff. Also if I'm mentioning a philosopher's or scientist's name without detailing, that means it's just a passing thought/recommendation if you want to read more on the topic.)

First thing first is I've seen said, about jason and the no killing rule, that "killing is always bad that's not up for debate". And I would like to say, that's factually untrue. Like, no matter which side of the debate you are on, there is very much a debate. Historically a big thing even. So if that's not something you're open to hear about, if you're convinced your position is the only correct one and even considering other options is wrong and/or a waste of time... I recommend stopping here, because this only going to make you upset, and you have better stuff to do with your life than getting upset over an essay. In any case please stay civil and remember that this post is not about me debating ethics with the whole bat-tumblr, it's me describing a debate other people have been voicing for a long time, explaining the position Damasio's neuropsychology and philosophy holds in this debate, and analyzing the ethics discussed in Batman: Under the Red Hood in that light. So while I might talk about my personal position in here (because I have an opinion in this debate), this isn't a philosophy post; this is a literature analysis that just so happens to exist within the context of a neuropsychological position on a philosophical debate. Do not try to convince me that my philosophy of ethics is wrong, because that's not the point, that's not what the post is about, I find it very frustrating and you will be blocked. I don't have the energy to defend my personal opinions against everybody who disagrees with me.

Now, let's start with Bruce. Bruce, in Under The Hood and wrt the no kill rule (not necessarily all of his ethics, i'm talking specifically about the no kill rule), is defending a deontological position. Deontology is a philosophy of ethics coined by christian🧷 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. The philosophy of ethics asks this question: what does it mean to do a good action? And deontology answers "it means to do things following a set of principles". Basically Kant describes what are "absolute imperatives" which are rules that hold inherent moral values: some things are fundamentally wrong and others are bad. Batman's no-kill rule is thus a categorical imperative: "Though Shall not Kill"��, it is always wrong to kill. (Note that I am not saying Bruce is kantian just because he has a deontology: Kant explained the concept of deontological ethics, and then went up to theorize his own very specific and odd brand of deontology, which banned anything that if generalized would cause the collapse of society as well as, inexplicably, masturbation. Bruce is not Kantian, he's just, regarding the no kill rule, deontological. Batman is still allowed to wank, don't worry.)

In this debate, deontological ethics are often pit up against teleological ethics, the most famous group of which being consequentialism, the most famous of consequentialisms being utilitarism. As the name indicates, consequentialist theories posit that the intended consequences of your actions determine if those actions were good or not. Utilitarism claims that to do good, your actions should aim to maximise happiness for the most people possible. So Jason, when he says "one should kill the Joker to prevent the thousands of victims he is going to harm if one does not kill him", is holding a utilitarian position.

The debate between deontology and utilitarism has held many forms, some fantastical and some with more realistic approaches to real life like "say you're hiding from soldiers and you're holding a baby that's gonna start crying, alerting the soldiers and getting everyone in your hideout massacred. Do you muffle the baby, knowing it will suffocate and kill it?" or "say there's a plague going on and people are dying and the hospital does not have enough ventilators, do you take the one off of the comatose patient with under 0.01% chance of ever waking up to give it to another patient? What about 1%?", etc, etc. The most famous derivative of this dilemma, of course, being the infamous trolley problem.

This is what is meant when we say "the UTH confrontation is a trolley problem." The final confrontation at the warehouse is a variation, a derivative of the utilitarian dilemma that goes as follows: "if someone was trying to kill someone in front of you, and that murder would prevent the murder of thousands, should you try to stop that murder or let it happen?"

Now, here's a question: why are there so many derivatives of the trolley problem? Why do philosophers spend time pondering different versions of the same question instead of solving it?

My opinion (and the one of much, much smarter people whose name i forgot oops) is that both systems fail at giving us a satisfying, clean-cut reply. Now, most people have a clean-cut answer to the trolley problem as presented here: me personally, I lean more towards utilitarianism, and I found it logical to pull the lever. But altering the exact situation makes me change my answer, and there is very often a point where people, no matter their deontological or utilitarian velleities, change their answer. And that's interesting to examine.

So let's talk about deontology. Now my first gripe with deontology it's that it posits a set of rules as absolute and I find that often quite arbitrary. 🧷 Like, it feels a little like mathematical axioms, you know? We build a whole worldview on the assumption that these rules are inherently correct and the best configuration because it feels like it makes sense, and accidentally close our mind to the world of non-euclidian ethics. In practice, here are some situations in which a deontologist might change their mind: self-defense killing, for example, is often cited as "an exception to the rule", making that rule de facto non-universal; and disqualifying it as an absolute imperative. Strangely enough, people will often try to solve the trolley problem by deciding to kill themselves by jumping on the tracks 🧷 which is actually a utilitarian solution: whether you're pulling the lever or you're jumping on the tracks, you are choosing to kill one person to stop the people from being run over. Why does it matter if it's you or someone else you're killing? You're still killing someone. Another situation where people may change their answer would be, like "what if you needed to save your children but to do so you had to kill the ceo of united healthcare?" Note that these are only examples for killing, but the biggest issue is that deontology preaches actions are always either good or wrong, and the issue with that lack of nuance is best illustrated with the kantian problem regarding the morality of lying: let's say it's the holocaust and a family of jews is hiding in your house. Let's say a nazi knocks on your door and asks if there are people hiding in your house. You know if you tell the truth, the jews in your house will be deported. In that situation, is it morally correct to lie? Now, Kant lived before the Holocaust, but in his time there was a similar version of this problem that had been verbalised (this formulation is the best-known derivative of this problem btw, I didn't invent it) and Kant's answer, I kid you not, was still "no it is not morally acceptable to lie in that situation".

And of course, there are variations of that problem that play with the definition of killing- what defines the act of killing and can the other circumstances (like if there's a person you need to save) alter that definition? => Conclusion: there is a lot more nuance to moral actions than what a purely deontological frame claims, and pushing deontology to its limits leads to situations that would feel absurd to us.

Now let's take utilitarianism to its own limits. Say you live in a world where healthcare has never been better. Now say this system is so because there is a whole small caste of people who have been cloned and genetically optimized and conditioned since birth so that their organs could be harvested at any given moment to heal someone. Let's say this system is so performant it has optimised this world's humanity's general well-being and health, leading to an undeniable, unparalleled positive net-worth for humanity. Here's the question: is this world a utopia or a dystopia? Aka, is raising a caste of people as organ cattle morally acceptable in that situation? (Note: Because people's limits on utilitarianism vary greatly from one person to another, I chose the most extreme example I could remember, but of course there are far more nuanced ones. Again, I wasn't the one to come up with this example. If you're looking for examples of this in fiction, i think the limits of utilitarianism are explored pretty interestingly in the videogame The Last of Us).

=> Conclusion: there is a lot more nuance to moral actions than what a purely utilitarian frame claims, and pushing utilitarism to its limits leads to situations that would feel absurd to us.

This leads us back to Under the Hood. Now because UTH includes a scathing criticism of Batman's no kill rule deontology, but Jason is also presented as a villain in this one, my analysis of the whole comic is based on the confrontation between both of these philosophies and their failures, culminating in a trolley dilemma type situation. So this is why it makes sense to have Bruce get mad at Jason for killing Captain Nazi in self-defense: rejecting self-defense, even against nazis, is the logical absurd conclusion of deontology. Winick is simply taking Bruce's no-kill rule to the limit.

And that's part of what gets me about Jason killing goons (aside from the willis todd thing that should definitely have been addressed in such a plot point.) It's that it feels to me like Jason's philosophy is presented as wrong because it leads to unacceptable decisions, but killing goons is not the logical absurd conclusion of utilitarianism. It's a. a side-effect of Jason's plot against Bruce and/or, depending on how charitable you are to either Jason's intelligence or his morals, b. a miscalculation. Assuming Jason's actions in killing goons are a reflection of his moral code (which is already a great assumption, because people not following their own morals is actually the norm, we are not paragons of virtue), then this means that 1) he has calculated that those goons dying would induce an increase in general global human happiness and thus 2) based on this premise, he follows the utilitarian framework and thus believes it's moral to kill the goons. It's the association of (1) and (2) that leads to an absurd and blatantly immoral consequence, but since the premise (1) is a clear miscalculation, the fact that (1) & (2) leads to something wrong does not count as a valid criticism of (2): to put it differently, since the premise is wrong, the conclusion being wrong does not give me any additional info on the value of the reasoning. This is a little like saying "Since 1+ 3= 5 and 2+2=4, then 1+3+2+2 = 9". The conclusion is wrong, but because the first part (1+3=5) is false, the conclusion being wrong does not mean that the second part (2+2 =4) is wrong. So that's what frustrates me so much when people bring up Jason killing goons as a gotcha for criticizing his utilitarian philosophy, because it is not!! It looks like it from afar but it isn't, which is so frustrating because, as stated previously, there are indeed real limits to utilitarianism that could have been explored instead to truly level the moral playing field between Jason and Bruce.

Now that all of this is said and done, let's talk about what in utilitarianism and deontology makes them flawed and, you guessed it, talk some about neuropsychology (and how that leads to what's imo maybe the most interesting thing about the philosophy in Under the Hood.)

In Green Arrow (2001), in an arc also written by Judd Winick, Mia Dearden meets a tortured man who begs her to kill him to save Star City (which is being massacred), and she kills him, then starts to cry and begs Ollie for confirmation that this was the right thing to do. Does this make Mia a utilitarian? If so, then why did she doubt and cry? Is she instead a deontologist, who made a mistake?

In any case, the reason why Mia's decision was so difficult for her to make and live with, and the reason why all of these trolley-adjacent dilemmas are so hard, is pretty clear. Mia's actions were driven by fear and empathy. It's harder to tolerate sacrificing our own child to avoid killing, it's harder to decide to sacrifice a child than an adult, a world where people are raised to harvest their organs feels horrible because these are real humans we can have empathy towards and putting ourselves in their shoes is terrifying... So we have two "perfectly logical" rational systems toppled by our emotions. But which is wrong: should we try to shut down our empathy and emotions so as to always be righteous? Are they a parasite stopping us from being true moral beings?

Classically, we (at least in my culture in western civilization) have historically separated emotions from cognition (cognition being the domain of thought, reasoning, intelligence, etc.) Descartes, for example, was a philosopher who highlighted a dualist separation of emotion and rationality. For a long time this was the position in psychology, with even nowadays some people who think normal psychologists are for helping with emotions and neuropsychologists are for helping with cognition.(I will fight these people with a stick.) Anyway, that position was the predominant one in psychology up until Damasio (not the famous writer, the neuropsychologist) wrote a book named Descartes' Error. (A fundamental of neuropsychology and a classic that conjugates neurology, psychology and philosophy: what more could you ask for?)

Damasio's book's title speaks for itself: you cannot separate emotion from intelligence. For centuries we have considered emotions to be parasitic towards reasoning, (which even had implications on social themes and constructs through the centuries 📌): you're being emotional, you're letting emotions cloud your judgement, you're emotionally compromised, you're not thinking clearly... (Which is pretty pertinent to consider from the angle of A Death in the Family, because this is literally the reproach Bruce makes to Jason). Damasio based the book on the Damasio couple's (him and his wife) study of Phineas Gage, a very, very famous case of frontal syndrome (damage to the part of the brain just behind the forehead associated with executive functions issues, behavioural issues and emotional regulation). The couple's research on Gage lead Damasio, in his book, to this conclusion: emotions are as much of a part of reasoning and moral decision-making as "cold cognition" (non emotional functioning). Think of it differently: emotional intelligence is a skill. Emotions are tools. On an evolutionary level, it is good that we as people have this skill to try and figure out what others might think and do. That's useful. Of course, that doesn't mean that struggling with empathy makes you immoral, but we people who struggle with empathy have stories of moments where that issue has made us hurt someone's feelings on accident, and it made us sad, because we didn't want to hurt their feelings. On an evolutionary level (and this is where social Darwinism fundamentally fails) humanity has been able to evolve in group and in a transgenerational group (passing knowledge from our ancestors long after their death, belonging to a community spread over a time longer than our lifetime) thanks to social cognition (see Tomasello's position on the evolution of language for more detail on that), and emotions, and "emotional intelligence" is a fundamental part of how that great system works across the ages.

And that's what makes Batman: Under the Hood brilliant on that regard. If I have to make a hypothesis on the state of Winick's knowledge on that stuff, I would say I'm pretty sure he knew about the utilitarism vs deontology issue; much harder to say about the Damasio part, but whether he's well-read in neuropsychology classics or just followed a similar line of reasoning, this is a phenomenally fun framework to consider UTH under.

Because UTH, and Jason's character for the matter, refuse to disregard emotions. Bruce says "we mustn't let ourselves get clouded by our emotions" and Jason, says "maybe you should." I don't necessarily think he has an ethical philosophy framework for that, I still do believe he's a utilitarian, but he's very emotion-driven and struggling to understand a mindframe that doesn't give the same space to emotions in decision-making. And as such, Jason says "it should matter. If the emotion was there, if you loved me so much, then it should matter in your decision of whether or not to let the Joker die, that it wasn't just a random person that he killed, but that he killed your son."

And Bruce is very much doubling down on this mindset of "I must be stronger than my feelings". He is an emotionally repressed character. He says "You don't understand. I don't think you've ever understood", and it's true, Jason can't seem to understand Bruce's position, there's something very "if that person doesn't show love in my perspective and understanding of what love is then they do not love me" about his character that I really appreciate. But Bruce certainly doesn't understand either, because while Jason is constantly asking Bruce for an explanation, for a "why do you not see things the way I do" that could never satisfy him, Bruce doesn't necessarily try to see things the way Jason does. And that's logical, since Jason is a 16 years old having a mental breakdown, and Bruce is a grown man carrying on the mission he has devoted himself to for years, the foundation he has built his life over. He can't allow himself to doubt, and why would he? He's the adult, he's the hero, he is, honestly, a pretty stubborn and set-in-his-ways character. So, instead of rising to the demand of emotional decision-making, Bruce doubles down on trying to ignore his feelings. And Jason, and the story doesn't let him. Bludheaven explodes. This induces extremely intense feelings in Bruce (his son just got exploded), which Jason didn't allow him to deal with, to handle with action or do anything about; Jason says no you stay right there, with me, with those emotions you're living right now, and you're making a decision. And there's the fact Bruce had a mini-heart attack just before thinking Jason was dead again. And there's the fact he mourned Jason for so long, and Stephanie just died, and Tim, Cass and Oracle all left, and the Joker is right there, and Jason puts a gun in his hands (like the gun that killed his parents)... All of that makes it impossible for Bruce to disregard his emotions. The same way Jason, who was spilling utilitarian rhetoric the whole time, is suddenly not talking about the Joker's mass murder victims but about he himself. The same way Jason acts against his own morals in Lost Days by sparing the Joker so they can have this confrontation later. That's part of why it's so important to me that Jason is crying in that confrontation.

Bruce's action at the end of the story can be understood two ways:

-he decides to maim/kill Jason to stop the insupportable influx of emotions, and him turning around is his refusal to look at his decision (looking away as a symbol of shame): Bruce has lost, in so that he cannot escape the dilemma, he succumbs to his emotions and acts against his morals.

-the batarang slicing Jason's throat is an accident: he is trying to find a way out of the dilemma, a solution that lets him save his principles, but his emotions cloud his judgement (maybe his hand trembles? Maybe his vision is blurry?). In any case, he kills his son, and it being an accident doesn't absolve him: his emotions hold more weight than his decision and he ends up acting against his morals anyway.

It's a very old story: a deontologist and a utilitarian try to solve the trolley problem, and everyone still loses. And who's laughing? The nihilist, of course. To him, nothing has sense, and so nothing matters. He's wrong though, always has been. That's the lesson I'm taking from Damasio's work. That's the prism through which I'm comparing empathy to ethics in Levinas' work and agape in Compté-Sponsville's intro to philosophy through.

It should matter. It's so essential that it matters. Love, emotions, empathy: those are fundamental in moral evaluation and decision making. They are a feature, not a bug. And the tragedy is when we try to force ourselves to make them not matter.

Anyway so that was my analysis of why Damasio's position on ethics is so fun to take in account when analysing UTH, hope you found this fun!