The Slacker superhero has a pacifist problem.

[Nava]

I realize thinking is tiresome, but Bob ought’a come up with a way to trap the assholes without direct violence (if he’s flying them to a nice, out of the way drop point in a streel buckyball and they get a bit shaken, tuff bananas).

Micah can choose to commit suicide by daisychain if he wants to - but he has no right to make that choice for the kids in the commune.

[MrDibble]

I voted “surely he could find a third option” - Bob should grab all the kids (in a comically oversized mesh bag,) and hightail it out of there, to let the adult Elders take their ideology to its logical conclusion. OK, on rethink, that ends up being the same as option 2 for the adults, so you can think of my vote that way if you like.

To me, pacifism is a personal decision, and the Elders have expressed their personal opinion, but Bob isn’t a pacifist and isn’t constrained by it. I could doubtless think of a few other ways he might arrive at a non-deadly resolution, but I think Skald could come up with a counter for each one, so it’s a little bit of fighting the hypothetical - Bob knows his own powers best.

I’m not particularly enamoured of Utopian communes, and sexist, gerontocratic ones rankle as well. So i don’t exactly have any strong fellow feeling for these guys, just because they’re pacifists. You do a lot more changing of the world if you’re actually in the world, I think. Not that I want them to die, but c’mon. Passive resistance is all very well, but this pacifist says the viable solution is “Run!”

[MrDibble]

@Evil_Captor

The villagers would not be at fault here: they asked Bob not to fight for them. If he chooses to fight, it’s not their moral responsibility, they can no more control Bob than they can control the Purifiers.

But these hypotheticals investigate your own morality - you are in control of Bob. That’s why I always answer as I would for myself, not how I think non-pacifist Bob would act, but how he should act.

There is, of course, a fourth option - the Masada option - Bob could quickly, painlessly take out all 5000 before the Purifiers get there. Then go kick ass.

[Atomic_Alex]

Part of the problem with the ‘non-violent’ solutions are that they’re only really temporary solutions, its specified that they’re a band of raving lunatics and so not really open to reason or negotiation, and not going to give up on their goal. You don’t really have much time to come up with a permenant non-violent solution.

Its like the question if Batman is really morally doing the right thing in the long run by capturing The Joker instead of killing him, he’s just going to be released or break free from jail and go on the rampage, again, and again…and again…

In the real-world of course I’d say ‘let the proper authorities deal with it’ but in ‘comic book world’ snapping The Jokers neck a long time ago would have saved a lot of people a lot of pain and anguish (and probably done The Joker a favour as well).

[kaylasdad99]

Find that third option. In the event of failure, pâté de purifiuer gras can remain on the menu as le spéciale du jour.

Also, cream cheese pound cake and tea with lemon.

[MrDibble]

@Disposable Hero

Part of the problem with the ‘non-violent’ solutions are that they’re only really temporary solutions, its specified that they’re a band of raving lunatics and so not really open to reason or negotiation, and not going to give up on their goal. You don’t really have much time to come up with a permenant non-violent solution.

What’s wrong with prison? Or grabbing them in small groups and dumping them on desert islands?

[Atomic_Alex]

@MrDibble

What’s wrong with prison? Or grabbing them in small groups and dumping them on desert islands?

I’d need a better understanding of what Bob’s abilities are but that doesn’t sound possible given the short time frame he has to work with. And if even one of the psycho’s gets through he (or she, perhaps they’re equal opportinity lunatics) is going to cause havoc among the defenceless pacificists.

[randomface]

If the superhero has no qualms with killing and it’s solely the townspeople, I vote that he destroys the psychos after giving them one last chance to surrender.

Tell the town that they had it coming and that they aren’t the boss of you, so they have no control and no responsibility falls on them. If they feel bad for profiting from that destruction, tell them you did it for the next town over of non-pacifists and your schedule just lined up to save them as coincidence.

[MrDibble]

@Disposable Hero

I’d need a better understanding of what Bob’s abilities are but that doesn’t sound possible given the short time frame he has to work with. And if even one of the psycho’s gets through he (or she, perhaps they’re equal opportinity lunatics) is going to cause havoc among the defenceless pacificists.

Sorry, I misunderstood - I meant a permanent solution to these guys roaming the countryside in general, not to the immediate problem.

[Larry_Borgia]

As others have said, no matter what Bob does, he’s not interfering with the villagers right of self determination at all. If he were Professor X rather than Superman, and mentally forced the villagers to defend themselves, that would be bad, but he’s not doing that. The villagers were pacifists before, are pacifists now, and will be pacifists in the future. They won’t act against their beliefs. Bob is acting independently, stopping the purifiers as he sees fit. If he can do it with minimal loss of life, great. But if that’s fighting the hypothetical, then kill them before they kill more innocents.

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@Loach

I’ll follow you anywhere. As long as there is pound cake.

Sometimes there’s cheesecake. Or double chocolate cake. Or pineapple upside-down cake. Or some variety of cupcake.

[Atomic_Alex]

@MrDibble

Sorry, I misunderstood - I meant a permanent solution to these guys roaming the countryside in general, not to the immediate problem.

Ah OK! I was wondering, I don’t think even Superman could do that in time!

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@MrDibble

I voted “surely he could find a third option” - Bob should grab all the kids (in a comically oversized mesh bag,) and hightail it out of there, to let the adult Elders take their ideology to its logical conclusion. OK, on rethink, that ends up being the same as option 2 for the adults, so you can think of my vote that way if you like.

To me, pacifism is a personal decision, and the Elders have expressed their personal opinion, but Bob isn’t a pacifist and isn’t constrained by it. I could doubtless think of a few other ways he might arrive at a non-deadly resolution, but I think Skald could come up with a counter for each one, so it’s a little bit of fighting the hypothetical - Bob knows his own powers best.

Writing as OP rather than poster:
I won’t deny that Bob, given time to reflect, might be able to come up with a non-violent solution. But he doesn’t have that time; the Purifiers are at the gate. And, just as he isn’t Superman, he isn’t an X-Man either; he hasn’t been training in a holosuite for years against exotic possible threats. He simply doesn’t have the skill to do some things. For instance, someone asked me in email why Bob doesn’t just zap the bullets with heat vision, and the answer is that his aim isn’t precise enough to reliably vaporize tiny bits of metal flying faster than sound.

I’m not particularly enamoured of Utopian communes, and sexist, gerontocratic ones rankle as well.

I’m glad you noted the sexist bit, but where do you see evidence of gerontocraticism?. The OP says nothing about the age of Micah and his followers, and while I intentionally made them all male (I thought about having them be Jains so my point would be clearer, then decided that was dickish), I gave no thought whatsoever to their ages. They could as easily be 30somethings as oldsters.

So i don’t exactly have any strong fellow feeling for these guys, just because they’re pacifists. You do a lot more changing of the world if you’re actually in the world, I think. Not that I want them to die, but c’mon. Passive resistance is all very well, but this pacifist says the viable solution is “Run!”

Writing as poster rather than OP:
Because of the children in the commune, I think Bob is morally obliged to bring the pain to the Purifiers. But–and this may surprise you–if the commune were all adults, and Bob knew they all were willing to die rather than see violence done on their behalf, I’d say he was morally obliged to respect their wishes. Bob may well be a god, but he’s not the God. If the Sons’ belief system values their blood innocence over their lives, and Bob can’t think of a non-killing way to save them, then he should respect that. And I write that completely without irony or my usual mocking of pacifists.

@MrDibble

What’s wrong with prison? Or grabbing them in small groups and dumping them on desert islands?

I imagine Bob did something similar to the last group of Purifiers her encountered. The OP does say he recognized them on sight and felt he was too merciful last time, so clearly he didn’t stomp the entire organization out of existence.

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@Not_Carlson

So we’ve got a half-arsed demigod stuck between a commune of zealots with no sense of self-preservation and an army of depraved monsters.
Why aren’t you screen-writing for Hollywood?

Just in case you’re thinking no community has ever been suicidally pacifistic before, I’ll repost a link from the OP, this time with an embedded quote from the Wikipedia article:
[

Taranaki Māori living at Port Nicolson (modern Wellington) had been meeting for some time to decide on a place to invade. A mass invasion of Samoa or Norfolk Island was considered at a meeting in early 1835 but an invasion of the Chathams was decided on as it was so close and the invaders had details of the Moriori pacifist attitudes from Māori who had visited and returned to New Zealand. In 1835 some Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama people, Māori from the Taranaki region of the North Island of New Zealand, but living in Wellington, invaded the Chathams. On 19 November 1835, the brig Lord Rodney, a hijacked[11] European ship, arrived carrying 500 Māori armed with guns, clubs and axes, and loaded with 78 tonnes of seed potatoes, followed by another ship with 400 more Māori on 5 December 1835. While the second shipment of invaders were waiting, the invaders killed a 12-year-old girl and hung her flesh on posts.[12] They proceeded to enslave some Moriori and kill and cannibalise others. “Parties of warriors armed with muskets, clubs and tomahawks, led by their chiefs, walked through Moriori tribal territories and settlements without warning, permission or greeting. If the districts were wanted by the invaders, they curtly informed the inhabitants that their land had been taken and the Moriori living there were now vassals.”[13]

A hui or council of Moriori elders was convened at the settlement called Te Awapatiki. Despite knowing of the Māori predilection for killing and eating the conquered, and despite the admonition by some of the elder chiefs that the principle of Nunuku was not appropriate now, two chiefs — Tapata and Torea — declared that “the law of Nunuku was not a strategy for survival, to be varied as conditions changed; it was a moral imperative.”[14] A Moriori survivor recalled : “[The Maori] commenced to kill us like sheep… [We] were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed - men, women and children indiscriminately.” A Māori conqueror explained, “We took possession… in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people. Not one escaped…” [15] The invaders ritually killed some 10% of the population, a ritual that included staking out women and children on the beach and leaving them to die in great pain over several days. The Māori invaders forbade the speaking of the Moriori language. They forced Moriori to desecrate their sacred sites by urinating and defecating on them. Moiriori wished they had been colonized by the English and had the protection of the Treaty of Waitangi.[16]

After the invasion, Moriori were forbidden to marry Moriori, or to have children with each other. All became slaves of the Ngati Tama and Ngati Mutunga invaders. Many Moriori women had children by their Māori masters. A small number of Moriori women eventually married either Māori or European men. Some were taken from the Chathams and never returned. In 1842 a small party of Māori and their Moriori slaves migrated to the subantarctic Auckland Islands, surviving for some 20 years on sealing and flax growing.[17] Only 101 Moriori out of a population of about 2,000 were left alive by 1862 (Kopel et al., 2003). Although the last Moriori of unmixed ancestry, Tommy Solomon,[18] died in 1933 there are several thousand mixed ancestry Moriori alive today.

An all-male group of German Moravian missionaries arrived in 1843.[19] When a group of women were sent out to join them three years later, several marriages ensued; a few members of the present-day population can trace their ancestry back to those missionary families.

The Moriori and their invasion by the Māori are described in depth by David Mitchell in his popular novel Cloud Atlas later made into a major motion picture by the Wachowski Siblings.

](Moriori - Wikipedia)

[MrDibble]

@Skald_the_Rhymer

I’m glad you noted the sexist bit, but where do you see evidence of gerontocraticism?.

It was the repeated mention of “elders”

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@MrDibble

It was the repeated mention of “elders”

American idiom. Church elders here aren’t necessarily old. I knew a Pentecostal elder (complete jackass, by the way, wanted to hold a “church trial” for a friend of mine for the crime of breast-feeding while on church property) who was all of 29.

[MrDibble]

@Larry_Borgia

The villagers were pacifists before, are pacifists now, and will be pacifists in the future. They won’t act against their beliefs. Bob is acting independently, stopping the purifiers as he sees fit.

Not if he will only act if the villagers ask him to. Then, he’s a weapon in their hands, sentient or not.

[MrDibble]

@Skald_the_Rhymer

American idiom. Church elders here aren’t necessarily old.

Aaah, I don’t know that one - generally, when someone talks about “the elders” around here, they mean the old folks.

[Heracles]

1. Fly to the nearest city.
2. Snatch several innocent bystanders. Ideally children.
3. Lay out the bystanders in a line 100 meters (or some appropriate distance) ahead of the advancing mechas.
4. Go back to the village and (quickly!) explain to Micah and the elders that there are bystanders that you have to save.
5. Kill off the psychos.
6. Arrange some kind of transportation so the bystanders can go home.

[Johanna]

Sheesh, don’t make it complicated. Just eliminate the threat as quickly and efficiently as possible. The pacifists and Bob alike are off the hook morally. The pacifists for having done as much as they can do to stop violence by speaking out forcefully against it (for what that’s worth); Bob for doing the right thing by preventing harm to innocents. If the pacifists have a problem that they and their children got to live, well that’s their problem, not Bob’s. Maybe it would be a salutary lesson for them that they have no authority to command another person’s conscience.