On Lawful Good Heroes: Marvel Still Makes Me Mad · 10:46pm Jul 9th, 2018
[Spoilers]
Watching Luke Cage just makes me appreciate The Punisher more. Unfortunately The Punisher is a bit of a fascist icon. Why shouldn't he be? He's a murderous vigilante that kills criminals based only on his own moral compass. The thing is, though, that the Punisher would be repulsed by most of his fans. You think he'd be proud to see a police car with his logo on it? Hell no, that'd disgust him more than anything else.
The Punisher isn't Lawful Good or Evil: He's Lawful-Lawful. He understands he's doing the wrong thing. He will do everything he can to never, ever harm an innocent person. One of the best issues of MAX he just spends helping a lost little girl find her mother on the busy New York streets. But he makes no pretenses of being a good person. And that's important, because Lawful Good is inevitably written as Lawful Stupid.
Other superheroes get far too wrapped up in the aesthetics of goodness. Luke Cage, especially, is playing that up badly right now. He defends a comically evil villain from another villain, and then the villain he protects goes free and... kills a bunch of innocent people. No surprises there. The Punisher would have just killed both villains and then gone home to polish his guns. It's problematic, but these two people obviously needed to die to save a lot of other lives and prevent a lot more suffering. If Luke Cage had been 'less' of a hero and just thrown the first villain to the wolves, dozens of innocent people would not have been dead. There was no other reason not to do this, except the vague notion that allowing her to be killed would be wrong. She had total legal immunity at this point so, it's not even like she was going to be thrown to the mercy of the court.
And the disgusting thing is, I know why the show framed it like this. Because it's Marvel's TV series, and they have to push a narrative of police-worship and anti-justice-system. Think about it: Why else is Daredevil never actually in a courtroom, upholding a legal system he pays so much lipservice to?
The way this has to be played for the purposes of the script makes a mockery of doing the right thing, because the heroes never actually weigh, seriously weigh, the act of doing the 'moral' thing and the consequences of their actions. But these two things can't be divorced from each other, and the audience will make that connection on their own. The message of the Lawful Good hero is made clear: Being Good brings untold pain and suffering to the people who had no say in your decisions. And no amount of finally finishing things "the right way" in the season finale can undo that.
The Punisher has no pretensions that he's good. He judges himself not on his actions, but on their consequences. Because of that, when bad things happen as the result of his actions, he can't hide behind a pretense that it was because it was the right thing to do. He can't justify any action leading to the death of innocents as morally correct.
Neither can the Lawful Good, and you're going to hate having to watch them try.
It always bothers me in shows when you frame being good as a choice between causing horrible suffering by letting someone live, and murdering people to save lives. It's a really stupid trolley problem that always requires six levels deep of contrivance to set up, requires laser focus on the vigilante as sole arbiter of justice, and pushes a narrative of either 1) murder is how we save the world and those who are evil are evil to their core and must dieor 2) OH NO SNAP A DUDE'S NECK TO SAVE THE WORLD WHAT A MORAL DILEMMA!!!11!!
Balancing the stakes of this as a narrative act is stupid and impossible.
The point of a trolley problem is that what you're being asked, by its nature, has no real good answer. No matter what, the outcome is bad, and presuming an outcome isn't bad requires some level of moral jumping-about. It's why when you replace the trolley problem with the surgery problem (One healthy donor, five different people needing transplants, do you kill the donor to save five people) you end up with people making a completely different answer, metrics-wise, than they do when confronted with the standard "one person or five people".
If your characters are in that situation, what you have just wandered into is a situation that will have no satisfying answer. It can't. The story from that point spits in the face of the idea of heroism because the hero will either have to save someone who will murder innocent people because the script will not let them do otherwise - will never let them repent, or be changed by the encounter, or put the hero in a position to strongarm them into not doing so, or do anything but contrive and loop
or they will choose to let someone die when they had the power to save them, which we've been taught since childhood is not what a hero does.
This is why I like superhero shows targeted at kids more than those targeted at adults. In a kid's show when a hero saves the villain, it's an act of radical forgiveness and grace. Sometimes it even results in the villain realizing how much of a jerk they were and reforming because they've been confronted with a radical kind of goodness, heroism, and friendship they can't handle. Sometimes they self-destruct in the face of that, Javert-style.
But they never once pretend that what the hero does is some kind of moral mandate. It's not a good or evil scenario. What's good about it is that the hero is the kind of person who would want to do that, not that they were morally obligated to make bad decisions.
They key part of "lawful stupid" is the "stupid". Lawful good doesn't have to be a retard. Defending the bad from injustice doesn't mean letting the bad get away with its crimes.
What you do is, you drop the bad guy on a deserted island in the middle of the pacific. Some place that's just barely survivable, well outside the shipping lanes and unlikely to be visited by anyone. You don't murder them - sorry, engage in extra-judicial capital punishment - because you're good, but you prevent them from harming others because you're lawful. Escape is unlikely, but if they do escape - and I suppose it's inevitable that they will, because this is comic books we're dealing with here - they'll be so weakened by starvation and so divorced from their former networks and such that they'll have a hard time restoring their former evilness. They might even have learned a lesson about humility.
Oh wait... did I just invent Australia?
4898151
Fun fact; Heath Ledger wasn't acting when he played the Joker. They just picked an Australian who didn't mind cameras being pointed at him.
...Isn't that what Lawful Neutral is?
A sense of law, or a code of some such, but not beholden to the ideals of either good or evil.
See, now I'm even more glad I decided to skip the second season of Luke Cage. Nothing in the first episode pointed to any sort of unique factor to set it apart from the first season. It's just more of the same drug lords in Harlem, and Luke doing the same stuff to stop them. Daredevil and Jessica Jones had significantly different plots, themes, and antagonists for their second outings.
I kinda disagree. While the "killing is always wrong" narrative is a bit over the top (as most things in superhero genre are), if you are not at least somewhat unnerved by an idea of an unstoppable, unkillable guy playing judge, jury and executioner, with zero oversight... Well, that is a very strange position to have.
I knew of good NSFW CYOA I found while ago in which, first page is about the lawfull stuff and such in a lewd way but it easy to understand , if I could post without get into trouble I would,
https://imgur.com/r/nsfwcyoa/SX5io
Also, the Punisher's actions are, by definition, unlawful. Isn't his whole thing that he knows that he's legally wrong, but morally right?
4898171
Of course it's unnerving. He's an anti-hero for a reason. The difference is, while the audience is meant to be sympathetic to Frank Castle, we're not supposed to find him desirable or reasonable to emulate. That conflict between him being extremely unethical, but highly moral makes him a compelling character. You never need to buy into the notion that he's 'good'.
With the Lawful Goods, that's not the case. We're meant to want to emulate them, even though for very contrived reasons we're constantly shown their morality having devestating consequences, which makes the notion that they're 'good' feel absurd.
4898149
Which is why if you've written such a scenario, the very next thing you should write is a scene of your character reaching through the fourth wall, grabbing you by your face, and slamming it into your writing desk. Then frame it as a reminder, delete the preceding scene, and write something else.
This is the only response to the kind of cruel person who sets up trolley problems.
4898149
I don't know. All it requires is a polity that refuses to execute condemned criminals no matter how heinous their crimes and how likely is recidivism, and a class of criminal so good at escaping prison that sending them to prison for a long sentence is tantamount to sending them to prison for a short sentence. In other words, the conditions pertaining in most comic book universes.
Now, the reason for this is rather simple. In most comic book universes, the main villains are interesting characters with a lot of previous issues devoted to their development, whose appearance attracts readership to any issue they are in. They have abilities which make it possible that they should be able to escape prison. Consequently, they will not be executed, and they will escape prison. Which is good, because when they escape prison, they can appear in new issues of the series.
Of course, these are mostly Doylist reasons. From a Watsonian point of view, the last thing any sane society would want to do would be to encourage multiple supervillains to repeatedly attack itself, resulting in the deaths of large numbers of innocent citizens. Indeed, any situation in which this was occurring would be likely to lead to the fall of the regime, in a dictatorship, or a new and hardline government being voted into power in a democracy.
That's why someone like The Punisher makes sense.
In the real world, we don't run things so insanely. We flat-out killed Osama Bin Laden, even though we could have captured him, and when we did capture Charles Manson, we made darn sure that he did not get out of prison until he was dying anyway.
I can point to a few exceptions to this rule, mostly Barack Obama's fault, but for the most part this is true. Super villain level criminals are generally either killed or kept in prison forever.
4898149
Often in fiction, and sometimes even in real life, there's a Third Option.
Thougj in real life it's rare one sees the Third Option at the last moment, which is very common in fiction for the obvious dramatic reasons.
4898171
I agree. The problem in real life is that you don't get Mack Bolan or Frank Castle, you get a lunatic who simply kills those he perceives as evil, which may not be the same thing as those were actually evil. Think Duterte of the Philippines.
4898196
How would you judge Mack Bolan, the character on whom Frank Castle was based?
4898197
Yet, sometimes Trolley Problems appear in real life. I can list historical examples of them.
4898149
Want to see a real historical example of people choosing the nice option rather than the nasty option and in consequence getting a lot of people killed? One which is historically distant enough that it probably won't upset you?
The Norman and Angevin Kings of England frequently had too many heirs to the throne. These heirs would frequently rebel against their fathers.
Now technically this rebellion was treason and could have been dealt with by putting the rebellious heir to death after he lost the war. But the one thing that these Kings were sentimental about were their own sons. So they kept forgiving them, and they kept revolting, and each time they revolted an awful lot of common folk got killed. But then the common folk didn't really matter. Not to the Kings.
Now, think about the recent Steven Universe episodes with that in mind. How many Gems did Pink Diamond get shattered?
Look! It's a trolley problem. And the Gems don't even use wheels ...
4898149
Choice matters. In the trolley problem, an outsider is faced with a split-second decision: one or five. Meanwhile, five people dying in a hospital do not require someone to ambush an innocent person and slaughter them for their organs. One person can volunteer, and that is an act of moral goodness on their part.
There is a point when someone's choice does not matter, and it becomes purely a numbers problem. Do we sacrifice one person to save the world? Yes. That's unquestionably morally good. What about two? A hundred? A thousand? All yes.
I haven't worked out the exact ratio needed before scale outweighs choice. Some things need to be a numbers problem; bureaucracy is the trolley problem writ large, with layers of abstraction. Tax the middle class to provide potable water for the poor and there will be a number of people unable to afford life-saving surgeries. That's roughly one life for a hundred if you remove that abstraction and get down to the bare consequences.
Alas, “killing is never correct” only makes sense when you can effectively deal with criminals in a “moral” but still permanent fashion, whatever “moral” happens to mean.
You would think that Mr Fantastic would’ve cooked something up by now,
4898149
Kids need role models. Adults want fantasy from their boring and decision-less lives.
That's deliberate. This is because scripts are written by humanities majors, and the humanities are all descended from Classical Studies, and Classics scholars are all rationalists.
Classical Studies is the study of the art, literature, rhetoric, and philosophy of classical Greece and Rome. This is a funny thing to do, because it skips Hellenistic Greece, which came between classical Greece and classical Rome. Hellenistic Greek philosophy is the ancestor of modern science.
Philosophically, the key difference between Classical and Hellenistic Greece is that in Classical Greek philosophy (eg., Plato, Aristotle), philosophers seek absolute certainty about eternal truths. This meant they were specifically not interested in variability--things that differed from day to day. Things you could measure. Instead, they were rationalists.
You might think that rationalists are the sort of people who talk about the trolley problem and counting the consequences, but that is exactly wrong. The trolley problem is only interesting because rationalists get the wrong answer on it. They say it is immoral to cause 1 person to die to save 5, because morality is a judgement associated with an act without regard to context or circumstance--because morality is based in eternal, timeless truths. Killing someone is wrong. That's an eternal truth. If you start adding "...but there's this trolley car", you're talking about a specific, temporary situation, not an eternal truth, so that's not morality to them. If you add up numbers and say "It's okay to kill 3 people to save 4, but not to kill 4 people to save 3", they would say you were a relativist and utterly immoral.
The only thing you're allowed to do in rationalist ethics is to rank different consequences, so that some always have priority over others--but always regardless of the numbers involved. So you can say that killing is allowable if your state is in a just war, or if you are purging your society of unbelievers who resist your rational program--and this is regardless of the numbers killed. That's why rationalist revolutionaries are always cool with massacring their political enemies. If it's okay to kill one, it's okay to kill a million.
Rationalists always have been fiercely opposed to utilitarian and consequentialist ethics. This is why, as I noted in my post "Why you should read Fallout: Equestria even if you hate it", stories that use consequentialist ethics are forbidden in Western literature, and always have been. The only place you may find them is in hard science fiction, or fan-fiction.
4898369
If you haven't seen it, I actually wrote one of the highest rated SCP tales of last year, which you might like. Goes into that a fair bit.
I hate this so much in D&D.
Been in dozens of groups over the years, played all kinds of alignments, played all kinds of classes, and inevitably I'm going to get in an argument with someone over what to do with prisoners.
The answer that leaves the least room for compromise is Lawful Good, or more played like you said, Lawful Stupid. Their answer is inevitably, turn them into the rightful authorities. Doesn't matter if said authorities will inevitably be bought off or perfectly normal, doesn't matter if the prisoner is a mass murdering psychopath or some poor kid roped into something he didn't understand or even coerced against his will. To the authorities they go.
I've gotten into literal shouting matches over this. I usually play Chaotic Good. Generally speaking I follow all laws and regulations because it's simple and convenient, but if they go against my beliefs I'll fight against them if necessary.
And that's pretty much the big one that I'll fight against my own party for. You empirically create more good in the world by simply removing an evil threat, or granting salvation to an innocent. It's a wonderful thing if you can do so within the bounds of society. But because of the gray area of crime and punishment, the fallibility of humans (or in D&D's case, humanoids), specifically the corruptibility of humans, especially in a medieval setting, it's impossible to tell if the justice system will dole out justice of any real definition.
If you're going to be a damn vigilante, go all the fucking way. Take the law into your own hands, that's literally how you're defined! The reason it's such a great power-fantasy/justice-boner all in one is because everyone knows there's no such thing as a perfect justice system, and every country on Earth is a far throw away from one, so it's awesome to see someone beat he shit out of/straight up murder cartoonishly Evil people with a capital E.
Even if you're anti death penalty, you have to know that killing someone like Hitler (#Godwin-would-be-proud) would be a more righteous decision than letting him live, and that's what cartoon villains are supposed to be for. They torture children, kick puppies, murder by the thousand, so that you cheer the hero on as they give the finger to the justice system and just go and fucking put the bastards in the ground.
And like you said, a lot of these Marvel TV shows have been giving some serious justice-blue balls. And it weakens their characters so much for it.
4898398
Oh, I did read that earlier, and liked it. But do note that's the sort of story you're allowed to write--one that presents consequentialist ethics as problematic. You're not allowed, though, to write a story that presents consequentialist ethics as correct and non-problematic--although it is routine to present context-free virtue ethics, deontological ethics, or rule-based ethics as correct and non-problematic, despite their worse typical consequences in practice. Validation of deontological or virtue ethics is one of the distinguishing characteristics of 18th? to mid 20th-century fantasy.
4898398
Dude, Strauss is the man.
I mean, that's kind of self-serving to say because Strauss is basically saying exactly what I would be, but you made him say it really well and with about as good of an attitude as one could expect in that situation
That was really interesting to read, and I usually don't get into SCP extended canon stuff (I get stuck in the SCP-Foundation black hole just reading/rereading favorite SCPs as it is).
4898268
The problem with the bureaucracy example is that 'taxing the middle class' isn't the only option available, and it could be argued to be one of the worse ones available.
Killing 1000 people to save the world is only acceptable if there is no other option and you are absolutely certain that it will work, because if it doesn't work you'll have killed 1000 people for nothing and if it does work but another option is discovered (or worse, was available the whole time) then you're going to have a lot of uncomfortable questions to answer.
Bureaucracy doesn't work like that, at least not most of the time. It's about administrating a system in such a way as to reduce costs, I could just as well set up a bureaucratic system for my oppressive regime that systematically disenfranchises anyone who doesn't support my rule and I don't think anyone could argue that it was more moral because I was doing it bureaucratically rather than sending assassins.
What I mean to say is this: bureaucracies don't choose to tax the middle class to help the working class because it was the most moral choice, but because it was the easiest choice that took the least time to implement. A middle-class citizen might complain about higher taxes, but they won'y go hide their savings in the Cayman Islands, they can't afford to.
4898369
But what about "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" in Star Trek?
Though, I guess, they didn't quite practice it as much as just said it and then went for the Third Option.
Also, I don't really think it goes all the way to Aristotle.
The idea behind superheroes, is that it's a story with a moral, more or less geared towards kids and teenagers. Sure, it's less so now, with kidults and gritty heroes for older audiences, but that's still sort of how the genre is perceived, and how the genre was for most of the time.
Delivering the moral is much easier when it comes in concise, clear-cut form, that is unambiguous and easy to repeat: "thou shalt not kill" is easy. "Thou shalt not kill, unless potential consequences of abstaining from action massively outweigh the consequences of killing, and you're reasonably sure you can predict them, and you're also in a unique position where you must take the responsibility solely unto yourself." is not a moral message that is easy to deliver. Nor is it one that's terribly relevant for most people, unless the movie is geared to time-travellers, superheroes and trolley switch operators.
4898515
I'm talking about the specific case of "supervillains" -- persons prone to both easily escaping imprisonment and wreaking tremendous harm when they do. The closest real world analogs are terrorists, royal rebels, and serial killers. If they can neither be kept in prison nor executed, such persons will cause major loss of life again.
They don't need to be executed if they can be kept in prison, and normal criminals, even murderers, don't need to be executed.
4898515
You don't believe in even the theoretical possibility of something like the Ethical Equations? I would argue that Game Theory points the way to a path that may someday lead to an ability to mathematically calculate the solutions to ethical dilemmas, though we are far from actually being able to do so yet.
4898489
It's also the only economically practical choice. Even if you could tax away most of the assets of the rich, all that you would have achieved would be to crash your economy. The rich are the people who create the businesses which provide employment and money for other people. That is, generally, why they are rich. Impoverish the rich, and the next thing that happens is that everybody is poor.
4898268
The reason why the slay the innocent solution to the hospital problem isn't really the best choice, even given a favorable ratio, is because this is an iterated game, and by accepting the morality of unwilling human sacrifice, you are climbing down a very slippery slope indeed.
In contrast, supervillains aren't innocent.
4898548
The rich are in no danger of being beggared by taxes, even if you were to place the largest share of the burden on them that doesn't mean you just stop taxing everyone else.
Furthermore, the rich don't create jobs in the long-term, they create jobs in the short term and the economy keeps things going from there, if your consumers can't afford to buy your products then all of the money you've spent starting that company is lost after all, and if the company is becoming a money sink they sell or close down resulting in some or all of those jobs being lost.
Here's the source I used for that particular comparison:
http://www.businessinsider.com/rich-people-create-jobs-2013-11?IR=T
4898573
They aren't, in an economy which is free enough for them to hide assets, move them off shore, or raise the prices of what they're selling. In practice in an even slightly free economy they deal with higher taxes by all these means, which reduces domestic investment and passes costs on to the consumers.
If it's not even slightly free, the rich physically flee. Your country goes Communist, and you wind up at best on a bread line, and at worst in a gulag or a mass grave.
4898276
Exactly. Otherwise, you're just preening while your world burns down.
This is, incidentally, why the real world rare escapes of serious criminals so frighten us.
4898559
Problem: the slippery slope is a fallacy. If you can do something seemingly evil to save a large amount of people, it's worth doing.
Someone said that finding a ratio would make everything break down into oversimplification. I think they're correct. A hundred humans with hours each to live are not worth sacrificing a child for. It depends on the situation.
Bureaucracy is a numbers game. So it shouldn't have to be—I agree. But it is. Taxing a group of people will lead to someone who could afford something lifesaving no longer being able to, assuming current American systems are in place.
4898616
I don't know whether they are tractable problems or not. There is no particular reason to assume that they are completely intractable, though. Remember that solutions need not be perfect to be useful. It is theoretically impossible to calculate pi to the last digit, but we can calculate pi to sufficient precision to use for any plausible real world application.
4898613
It can be a fallacy or it can be a reality. It happens to be true that when you allow a violation of a moral code for one purpose, it becomes easier to allow it for the next purpose, and the next purpose is not always as extreme a situation.
4898644
So you do the calculations each time. Don't slip up and do something because it feels right—always make sure you know.
>>allstar13521
There’s a wonderful scene in ‘A Star Is Born’ where a character is asked why he doesn’t move across the country and take a job that pays a million more a year (in the 20s or 30s). And he says (paraphrased), “Darling, at my income level I’m taxed at almost 90%, and I still have more than I’ll ever need. Why would I leave?”
He was one of the 1%, and at that point in time, it was normal and a given for them to be taxed, because, as one said, “with taxes I buy civilization”.
4898661
Well, yes. I never said that you should never sacrifice anyone to the greater good. I do believe however that the danger of setting a bad precedent should skew your calculations away from sacrificing the innocent without their consent.
The reason is the slippery slope -- you risk creating a society which does not value individual life. Given how many real-world dictatorships in the 20th century merrily jumped off that slippery slope, plummeting all the way to the bottom, this is a serious consideration. Or should be.
4898680
I agree! There should always be a force of ethics making sure dehumanization does not occur. Something like the SCP Foundation's Ethics Committee that Numbers contributed to, where every abhorrent option is discussed and it is clarified again and again how horrible it is that they have to do this, but that they have to do it because the alternative is worse.
There needs to be a balance to it.
4898695
The SCP Foundation stories of course highlight situations where very difficult ethical choices have to be made. For instance, what happens to freedom of speech when there is some dreadful memetic artifact that can literally drive you mad if you read a complete description of it? (and there are lots of these in the SCP vaults!) Obviously, if things like that existed, we would have to modify some aspects of our morality.
4898681
Of course I see the problem. However, you miss the point. These ethical dilemmas present themselves from time to time in the real world, and we must use some heuristic to solve them. We can't just ignore them, because they are often in regards to major issues like if or how to prosecute a war, or how to punish a dangerous criminal.
And you miss the significance of the example I gave. When I say that we do not have a complete solution to the value of pi, but we have an adequate solution, I'm talking about a solution so precise that for a circle with the diameter of the known universe, the probable error for the calculation of the volume would be at the subatomic level.
Just because you don't have a perfect solution to a mathematical problem, does not mean that you cannot have a very good one.
4898547
I don't know the reference, but while I believe that people who agree entirely on values may agree on utility evaluations, I think real life has demonstrated that the US contains at least 5 major vastly different and entirely incompatible value systems (not even counting religions!), and that the people holding those different value systems will, as we should expect, refuse to compromise their values. The neo-liberal approach is to devise a multi-cultural system for reaching compromise policies in a population of different value systems. The radical approach, which attempts to get people to agree on values, historically leads to immediate bloodshed. This is the difference between the American and French revolutions.
The "agree on values" / "purify the people" / "fight it out once and for all" approach might work better in the long run, after you've killed the people who disagree with you. That might be the best solution for Palestine/Israel, who otherwise are going to keep killing each other until they trigger WW3. But I'm not in favor of it. I could argue that exponential time discounting of future utility is logically necessary and will generally exclude that solution. But regardless of that, I'm not generous enough to sacrifice the present generation of my own country for the sake of future ones.
The question of how much of an advantage cultural unity is to a country is a current research question. Unfortunately, most of the research is IMHO bad because it uses race as a proxy for culture, or even assumes that race and culture are synonyms--or that race is more important than culture. This is probably due to the 19th century being obsessed with race. "Culturalist" (as the analog of "racist") isn't even a word.
4898515
I'll agree with that.
4898674
I couldn't agree more.
Just a heads up for in-future, press the double-arrows in the top right of a comment to notify someone when you send them a comment.
4898680 4898681
I see the slippery-slope argument as a rationalist objection to using real numbers to weigh different values. Not that it's always invalid, but the rationalist mindset sees that argument as more persuasive than others do, because rationalists are uncomfortable with instability.
If you have to make a yes/no judgement, and you make it using the function f(x) = yes if x < .5, no if x >= .5, that discontinuity at x=.5 highlights the fact that you're not really making a "right" decision if x = .5. But I would claim that
Four years ago a very similar discussion happened on Bad Horse's blog and I wrote a comment in reply to him I will take the gross liberty of quoting since I think it applies very well to this current situation:
4898260
Gee it's almost like in scenarios like this there is no good option and all result in tragedy or sadness.
(...Pink Diamond's shatter count was zero, incidentally, and blaming her for Blue and Yellow deciding to glass the planet is kinda assigning blame to the wrong party. When your response to a colony revolting is to glass the colony, you're the tyrant. Also the point of that whole arc was kinda to show that Pink Diamond was naive, made impulsive decisions because she believed they were right, and they had pretty far-reaching consequences that she didn't foresee or really plan for. That's kind of a running Thing in Steven Universe.)
Either way, circles back to my larger point: When you use the trolley problem as a metric for morality rather than as an example of a scenario where no answer is a good answer and the best possible answer is a less-bad one and even that's terrible, what you're writing is no longer heroic fiction. It's not necessarily bad fiction, but it's not heroic fiction. A hero is someone who sacrifices themselves first, not decides which others are best to sacrifice.
4898196 I liked the Punisher the series, but what bothers me is the way they strain plausibility specifically to prevent him from causing any collateral damage, which would really tear apart the idea that he's this perfect lawful vigilante. So we see Castle riddle an entire restaurant with bullets killing 20 people, but we later learn he somehow followed and researched every one of those people for months and determined their guilt, and there was no waiter or bartender that happened to be there because of plot contrivance.
Or that time Frank Castle was wildly firing off a shotgun into the middle of a hospital. I don't care how great a shot he is, either something will ricochet and hit someone, or some surgeon will run and hide in a closet at the sound of gunshots and miss his slot in the ER, but that's going to cause collateral damage.
I think it would be a much more interesting exploration of the vigilante if for every ten criminals Frank managed to kill, one genuinely innocent person got caught in the crossfire.
4898797
I remember this post from the time, actually.
I think it's important to say that I agree with all that, but the difference is important between presentation. Namely, that while the ideal of good the Lawful Stupid portrays is desirable for all the reasons you point out, the narrative undermines it heavily, beyond the usual "True character is shown in moments of suffering" thing.
I took the liberty of making an imgur gallery of my least favourite Luke Cage scene to emphasize this.
Clicky clicky
4898800
A friend of mine just came up to me, wide eyed and bouncing on his heels, to tell me that he just realized that Steven Universe is actually a story about the aftermath of a magical girls series where Pink Diamond was the protagonist.
We just get to see the results of a character like that, who is super endearing and beloved by all, from the perspective outside the narrative where she sacrifices herself to ensure a great peace -- Steven being the most cliche ending to a series like that imaginable.