I've seen a lot of arguments about this and information but I still don't know if I buy the premise that pulling the lever makes you the killer of the one which this hinges on entirely. Riddler is already the killer, you just have reduce the harm by steering him to kill the one instead of the five (assuming Batman didn't have a gadget that could have saved everyone blah blah blah).

I keep meaning to dig into analysis of the trolley problem using different ethical frameworks. One of these days.

Superman wouldn’t have this problem

I think this problem fits really well for Batman. How many times has Batman maimed or injured dozens on dozens of henchmen, but refuses to kill Joker, just to satisfy his personal code?

Jason Todd was right about Batman and the Joker. For the graveyards that Joker has filled, and his tendency to keep escaping, Joker should just fucking die.

Problem is, Todd didn't do it. Instead he tried proving a point to Wayne and got his ass kicked.

The extreme of this is Cheng Xin from "Death's End".

"I will sacrifice everything that exists to protect the purity of my conscience. Even betray people doing exactly what I told them acting under my explicit instructions."

Can a narcissist admit to being a narcissist? As in, wouldn't their brain simply prevent them from being able to understand the notion let alone say it.

Related point: Once a therapist asked me if I was a perfectionist and my brain locked up. I have perfectionist tendencies. Perfectionism is generally considered a negative trait. Perfectionism thus prevented me from admitting perfectionist tendencies, but I was required by perfectionism to answer the question perfectly. segfault in brain (core dumped).

Hot take: the instinct to not pull the lever is the entire basis for modern right-libertarianism.

For those who don't know: the idea is that active coercion is bad and unjust, while passively allowing social structures to be coercive is not (or at least isn't relevant to politics). In fact, "unjust" can not be an emergent property of a society - per definition! A society where no individual transactions are coercive, will always be a just society.

The only way I can make sense of that, is to point to that instinct as the only relevant moral intuition.

The real batman would’ve anticipated this and had a plan to save all the people, and arrest the riddler. Psh

But the trolly problem doesn't have a correct answer.

In the trolley problem you need to also know if the trolley has passengers. If not, switch the track while it's on there to make it derail and save both sides.

Alternatively, maybe a derailment is more survival than getting squashed.so derailling is the best solution. But no sources on that

A moral code is something that you adopt because, in calm reflection and rational analysis, you have determined that it's the best approach to producing desirable outcomes. The reason for having a code instead of just evaluating things in the moment is because of the recognition that your judgement can be compromised, by being tempted, by being angry, by not having time in the heat of the moment, etc.

Personally, I'd say that every rule has exceptions and that you should be willing to break a rule in extraordinary circumstances. For a recovering alcoholic, "don't drink" is a good rule to have, but if there's some convoluted hypothetical with a serial killer holding hostages demanding that you take a shot, then you can make an exception. But that exception does not invalidate the rule, which is generally a good thing to follow. And you should be extremely cautious about whether the exception is actually valid, or whether it's just your brain inventing excuses.

I don't think that being too rigid in upholding a code is "narcissistic" or "egotistical." In fact, it's often just the opposite. It may be precisely because Batman is aware of his own flaws that he doesn't trust himself to break the rule, without his judgement becoming compromised.

Batman is a billionaire who dresses up in black leather, drives around in a fancy car, and beats the shit out of impoverished purse snatchers. He's a little more than a narcissist.

How many situations have there been in actual Batman media^[Excluding the ones that ignore the no killing rule, obviously] where Batman refuses to kill someone knowing that doing so will directly cause the imminent deaths of innocent people? Not some theoretical future harm based on an assumption that a criminal will escape and kill again, a situation where subduing a criminal is not enough to prevent them from killing someone and the only way to save a life is by killing the bad guy first.^[The closest I can recall is a cartoon where he and several other heroes had the opportunity to kill Granny Goodness, and then later he had the opportunity to blow up Apokolips and take out Darkseid and all of his minions. The former is a somewhat questionable decision because she can't be arrested and imprisoned, it was a choice between killing her and letting go and the harm she would inflict afterwards is predictable if not immediate. The latter is a more impactful decision, but it's a lot harder to argue that getting everyone out alive and ending the immediate conflict is obviously morally inferior to killing an entire planet full of people (including yourself, your team and the people you came to rescue) just to take out its leaders.]

The argument always seems to be that Batman should kill the Joker instead of capturing him because the Joker will escape again and thus will kill again. Of course, in-universe the Joker's escape is not inevitable. We only know he will always escape because he is a popular villain that the writers will keep bringing back. Batman can't know that. And even with that knowledge the argument falls apart because killing Joker won't stop him anymore than arresting him would.

But beyond that, why is it Batman's job to play judge, jury and executioner? And exactly how do we decide when someone is so evil and dangerous that they should be killed even if they could instead be captured and imprisoned? The whole argument starts looking a lot shakier when we take away the costumes and start applying the same logic to normal people in the real world. I suspect most of us would be uncomfortable with a cop just shooting someone instead of arresting them because they figured they'd end up back on the street at some point, or a paramedic letting an unconscious murder suspect bleed out because they might kill again.

Also, we already have Batman but he kills people. He's called the Punisher. Somehow, despite decades of waging a much more literal war on crime, all those innocent people don't seem to be any safer. Funny how that works.^[Yes, I know, this is applying meta logic again, but that's half the point. No course of action the hero takes will ever succeed if doing so would completely undermine the core concept of an ongoing series. And without being able to rely on some out-of-universe justification to claim that the consequences will be better, it's pretty fucking hard to argue that the Punisher's methods are morally superior from an in-universe perspective.]

Love it. Virtue ethics vs consequentialism, arguing that virtue ethics is about moral superiority and control

What if Bruce Wayne had invested all his money to create social services and help people with mental issues, therefor preventing the joker from becoming a psychopath?

it's not Batman's fault a serial killer isn't given the death penalty, or somehow kept in prison.

If an evil person wants to force you to make a choice, make them take full responsibility by not choosing anything.

Since it was forced on you, it's an artificial decision. If the game is wrong the right thing is to not play.

I too would not do anything. If 5 people are dead that would be an accident and if 1 would die then that would be murder