Slight hijack, but Captain America once explicitly made that point – upon killing a crook, because he’s Captain Freakin’ America and so will of course promptly turn himself in to face a trial by jury.
A dog’s not a person. A dog’s not endowed with constitutional rights, a dog isn’t entitled to the protection of the law, and, as a society, we’ve never experienced the horrors that come from extrajudicial killing of dogs.
The Joker is not some ordinary, grubby little murderer. Hell, he isn’t even a serial killer. He’s a mass murdering monster who has the blood of, I expect, hundreds (or even thousands) on his hands. Batsy refusing to off him is exactly like refusing to zorch Josef Mengele, while he was experimenting, because it would be “wrong.”
Yep. Of course, IRL, someone that evil would either be 1)hiding in a foreign country and labelled a terrorist or b)on death row.
The writers of the Batman comic books have twisted willing suspension of disbelief well past the breaking point with the Joker.
Nitpick: The Joker from “The Dark Knight” was keenly empathetic. He understands the thoughts and feelings of his underlings, Batman, Harvey Dent et al unerringly. He simply uses his empathy for evil.
Part of the problem is that the Joker is, when all is said and done, just a man. Men can be jailed. Now, we know that every time the Joker is incarcerated, he will escape at the time and place of his choosing. But Bats doesn’t know that. He knows that the Joker has escaped before - but one assumes that, at every re-incarcertation, Arkham Asylam says (and probably quite persuasively) that they have implemented reforms/hired new staff/etc to ensure the Joker does not again escape.
So, once the Joker is incarcerated, the moral analysis is just like that involved in the conventional death penalty - do we kill someone who’s already been effectively prevented from further offending? Bats says no - and so do I, for that matter.
Most people with constitutional rights don’t run around nerve gassing people for their own amusement; most people can actually be at least contained by a prison.
Frankly, the judicial system in this case is a worse failure than if it justified, required, and obligated Batman to return escaped slaves to their masters; or round up racial undesirables for internment so they wouldn’t pollute any bloodlines. At least those would technically be functioning laws.
As it is, allowing the Joker to live turns the law into a suicide pact for it’s own sake. As bad as if it ordered his victims to be arbitrarily killed.
But that’s just ridiculous, frankly. If a mass murdering psychotic terrorist had escaped over and over from every jail he’d been sent to for years, it’s INSANITY to think that THIS TIME you can hold him. Which is why not only Batman, but the whole judicial system in Gotham, their state and the country would have to be insane to believe it. But the truth is, the writers are just lazy.
This is true, but I wasn’t even thinking of the Bats-sparing-J’s-life thing when I started the thread. It was more the efficacy of, say, using half of the billion-dollar-batmobile budget to help the GCPD hire more patrolmen and cut down on the random muggings, rapes, & murders.
This is why the Joker of Batman: The Animated Series and The Dark Knight is better. In The Animated Series, he’s a thief with a funny bone and rarely goes for the kill (what with it being a children’s cartoon at heart).
And in The Dark Knight, the few people he kills are almost all mobsters and criminals just as bad (or worse) than he is. He probably killed a few cops with the cell phone bomb, but they were corrupt cops.
I had forgotten about Solomon Grundy, but yes, that’s right. Or almost. Supes dumped one on the moon and the second on a nameless asteroid. He exterminated several dozen when they popped up at once, but I’m willing to call that special circumstances.
They’re both inherently insane. Batman is exactly that. Bruce Wayne is the mask that Batman wears to keep them money and resources he needs to keep flowing and this has been stated in the comics, and even in that one cartoon series where Batman is old and some kid has put on the costume. And he doesn’t kill simply due to morality, a man who breaks a petty criminal’s back doesn’t have moral delimmas, it’s just the killing repulses him because of witnessing his parents’ deaths. Batman is insane with all the potential to some day snap and go on his own killing spree lurking within him.
