What “Batman: The Dark Knight” Can Teach Us About Choosing the Lesser of Two Evils
Batman has so much to teach us, if only we would learn.
Remember that scene in Batman: The Dark Knight, after the Joker has bombed the hospital? Everyone is being evacuated off of the island in ferries. One ferry holds the civilians — families, businessmen, children — and one holds a group of convicts. The crews discover that each ferry has been rigged with explosives, and each ferry has been left with a “gift”: the detonator for the explosives on the other ferry. At midnight, the Joker will set off the explosives on both ferries — unless the group on one ferry decides to blow up the other.
Half of the people can be saved. But only by murdering the other half.
A few months back, my husband was discussing the election with a friend who didn’t like either major party candidate and was trying to choose between them. He did not think that voting third party or abstaining from voting was an option. My husband asked him, if he had the opportunity to vote in an election where Stalin or Hitler were the two major candidates, if he would be willing to vote third party or abstain from voting, or if, knowing how bad each would be, he would help either come to power. He was trying to illustrate, with the most extreme example he could think of, that at some point (whether it be this election or not), there has to be a line. His friend answered that he would vote for Hitler, because Hitler had killed fewer people than Stalin.
The election is over. The question of whether the choices presented to us by the major parties were over the line or not is now irrelevant, but the impact of the wide acceptance of the “lesser of two evils” philosophy is one that, I believe, will bring our society to a very dark place.
Returning to our friends on the ferries: facing down the concrete deadline of the midnight detonation, and the less concrete timeline of how long it will take for the other ferry to decide blow them up, each group has to decide very quickly what their ethics will allow them to do. Eventually, the civilians decide to put it to a vote. Watch this part. Don’t just read my description of it. Watch how the unthinkable becomes thinkable because of panic AND (this is important), a distribution of moral responsibility. No one has to take complete blame for the murder of the passengers on the other ferry (sort of like how I vote for a certain candidate, but WE — America — elect a President).
Many people look at the horrors of the Holocaust and ask, “How could so many people participate in the systematic murder of men, women and even children?” The answer is the same dynamic that the Joker’s “social experiment” illustrated: panic + distribution of moral responsibility= the unthinkable. The Nazis truly thought that they were engaged in a struggle for survival with the Jews. Their propaganda painted it in terms of a battle to the death between the races. And the system used to murder Jews and other “undesirables” in the Holocaust was designed around the idea of distributed moral responsibility. The doctors who chose who would go to the gas chambers were not the ones who turned on the gas. And the ones who turned on the gas were not the ones that chose who would die that day. Each relieved the other of enough moral responsibility that neither felt they were really committing murder.
So what should our friends on the ferries do? What would you do in that situation? If you apply the “lesser of two evils” logic here, obviously the lesser of two evils would be that only half of the people would die — thinking of the choice in terms of lives saved, rather than the more uncomfortable question of lives sacrificed. But which lives to save, and which lives to sacrifice?
The civilian ferry counts their votes. Corporately, they have decided to kill the convicts so that they can live. Meanwhile, the convicts have decided to kill them so that they can live. But no one wants to be the one to actually detonate the bombs because no one wants to “get their hands dirty”. Finally, a businessman on the civilian ferry offers to take the detonator from the Captain and do it himself. On the convict ferry, a huge, rough-looking convict (a “bad hombre”, if you will) steps forward and demands that the detonator be given to him.
“Give it to me and I’ll do what you should’ve did ten minutes ago.”
The other man gives him the detonator, and he does do exactly what should have been done ten minutes ago: he throws it out the window. The businessman in the civilian ferry ultimately cannot bring himself to flip the switch either and puts it back in the box.
I sincerely hope that the people that I have heard advocating this idea that anything, no matter how evil, can be done if it avoids a greater evil, are like the people on the ferry: they theoretically choose to participate in evil in order to prevent a greater evil, but when it comes down to pulling the trigger, they would balk.
There are some moments when history, like the Joker, offers us an opportunity to choose to participate in evil in order to avoid something that seems like a greater evil. When it does, there can only be one answer: we have to say “no” to both evils, and hope that Batman saves us.
