The Un-Ethics of Watchmen, Part 1: A Bird’s-Eye View
Editor’s note: With the imminent release of Watchmen, we thought we’d try and get a different perspective. So we asked Alexandra Honigsberg, a professional ethicist and genre author, to read the book for the first time and delve into the ethos of the world created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
If super-hero comics are the literature of ethics, then Watchmen is the literature of un-ethics. It is the template for what not to do and makes Batman look like a Boy Scout, even at his darkest Dark Knight. They make Dirty Harry look clean. There’s a new saying on the street that Bitch is the New Black, it Gets Things Done. Well, these guys and gals are certainly the biatch. But is there any way to redeem their actions so that the ends justify the means? Or, more importantly, that even the most inhumane or inhuman retains some sense of what it means to be human?
The study of ethics is the exploration of the good life and how to live it. Now by the “good life” I don’t mean the bling life. I mean a life that is honourable, virtuous and, on a profound level not shaken by the winds of change, happy. Happiness (or pleasure or joy or The Good). That’s the end, the ultimate goal, or what Aristotle calls “that at which all rational beings aim.” Ari makes a fine distinction between the acts of a man (animal, non-rational) and the acts of a human (rational) or what some of us might term the mensch (gender neutral). One of the biggest invectives that Laurie hurls at Dr. Manhattan/Jon Osterman is that, after working for so long in the lab and being so all-powerful (the man not only to end all wars, but end all worlds), he ceases to be human. Moore emphasizes this with quotes from Nietzsche, who claims that when we become evolved enough we will not need rules, we will have become extra-moral – the superman (not the Nazis’ bastardization thereof) who has no need of ethics as we now know them. But are we still human? Extreme means change the agent and therefore change the end (e.g., The Comedian’s total amorality). Can we still give a damn if we’re all god-like? Or in the midst of so much horror that no human could reasonably be expected to survive unscarred (think of the Holocaust), are we still human? What’s human? What’s life? What’s good and who decides? Who gives authority to whom and why?
Alan Moore, like ancient thinkers before him, sets things in the city because there’s more humanity there, it’s neutron-star dense, more raw material to work with– think of the Bible’s Jerusalem or Aristotle’s Athens. And thus he paints a world that is a horror, and characters that are really hard to like. But finally, about 5 issues from the end, he made me give a damn. I won’t totally spoil the ending, and the movie’s ending is not the book’s. I’m led to understand that the movie will focus on the major premise – who’s killing the masks and why? And therein lies our major ethical dilemma, because all good stories have them – it’s what makes the story human. We, as humans, make ethical decisions every day – judgment, discernment, choosing what’s right and wrong, not just for ourselves, but for all “civilized” people. Universalism. Moore’s society is not civilized. His is Hobbes’ pessimism (give up some personal freedom to protect yourself from the tyranny of fear due to the predatory among us) on steroids – men of reason don’t prevail, but men of un-reason or very different reason (the women, alas, have relatively little say, despite their presence). We’ve won Vietnam, Nixon’s still president in ’85, and WWIII is upon us.
You’ll notice my repeated usage of words such a “reason,” “reasonable,” and “rational.” Ethics is dependent upon thinking things through – whether that thought takes lifetimes or a nanosecond. And thinking is as much a conditioned response as it is a reflexive one. You can’t be ethical if you don’t take the time to contemplate your actions (hence cometh the crime of passion). Certainly the very scientifically minded amongst the masks – Osterman, Veidt, Hollis, Dreiberg – give things a lot of thought. Thought bespeaks voluntariness, which says choice, which then carries with it responsibility (e.g., Peter Parker’s, “With great power comes great responsibility”), praise and blame. We see very little evidence of these guys worrying about praise and blame, even the most thoughtful and brainy of them. Even in thought, they are men and women of passion. And the most brutal, the most amoral among them, the most damaged goods – Kovacs and Blake – display very little thought at all.
And chaos ensues (back to Hobbes – men of reason without rules equals the natural state, but too risky, because someone will always be unreasonable!). 24’s Jack Bauer shows human suffering for the pain he causes in the name of the greater good – he’s lost parts of his humanity and he knows it and he mourns it. But not these guys. They’re not very reflective. If you’re more brutal than the criminals, there we are back to changed agent, even if you’re employed by the so-called “good” guys (our own government). The act of objectifying others via brutality reduces the agent’s humanity until they, too, become an object and then who’s objectifying whom? Certainly the masks all felt used at some point – by their agent, the media, the public, the government, their parents, their lovers, each other. They are instruments, tools, when they renounce reason for mere reaction in any sense – allowing themselves to be used for the sexual high of combat or costumes or all of the above, when they rationalize things away to be able to live with themselves (the Japanese cover this very well in Death Note and Full Metal Alchemist).
In some ways, Osterman is the most used after his accident and loses the most of his humanity and yet, somehow, manages to do some good (though I would argue with his ultimate decision to stay silent in the face of a shocking evil, even with a good intent, at the end). But just when Osterman is about to stay isolated and spectacularly inhuman on Mars, the revelation to him of Laurie’s genesis makes something click for him and the sense of wonder – that sine qua non of all literature of the imagination – allows him to give a damn, to move from indifference to make a difference, and return to help save the Earth and humanity, because it allows him to see what he calls the “thermodynamic miracle”: life! Each uniquely autonomous person, as Kant says, is the ultimate improbability and thus the ultimate miracle of great worth, even to a non-religious scientist (no one has religion in this world).
It is an ethical maxim that you cannot use a moral evil to create a moral good. You cannot use a moral evil to cure a physical evil (e.g., kill someone to get their liver to do a liver transplant to save someone else – every life is equal: back to Kant). The final solution to save the world that the surviving masks come up with has such a great cost that can it really be considered a solution, or just one more massive moral evil? Like Socrates drinking the hemlock rather than compromising the principles he’d taught for 80 years, are some things worth dying for, as a person or as a race, despite our hard-wired survival instinct? No ethicist worth anything would go along with the ending of this story and even the most pragmatic of pragmatists or moral relativists would find it pretty hard to take. The masks have a problem with it but, in the hurried fashion of this ending, seem to accept things as they are, admit defeat in harsh victory. Things can’t be undone, but they can choose their reactions to it and they choose silence – are we back to the Holocaust, where inaction is as damnable as wrong action? They move on, get back to some semblance of a “normal” life, being human, not masks, just folks.
As the blood on the clock illustration that begins each issue starts to obscure time, that much bad can never be washed away by any amount of good. It obliterates everything. Out, Out, damned spot! Is the spot our humanity and, with it, our ethics? Can we ever really have the good life if we jettison our humanity and life itself in order to pursue it? Or does our definition of “the good” and even “life” become so alien that we now, as mere mortals not yet evolved into supermen, could not possibly understand where we will be once we’ve evovled?
In some ways, the Watchmen and Moore seem to say that it is, that the end does justify the means, that if you have to sacrifice and amputate most of a human self, then go ahead, have the cajones to do it, go for the gusto, become Nietzsche’s supermen at all costs. It is your destiny.
Ethics is the science of ideals, a philosophy of seeing what is and striving for what could and should be, at its best – hope. Moore’s is not a hopeful message. And as Harvey Milk said, “Ya gotta give ‘em hope!”
Next week in Part II: Character Sketches – the under-uber-mensches!
Alexandra Honigsberg is an adjunct professor of Ethics at St. John’s University and a corporate Ethics consultant. A lifetime native New Yorker, she is a professional violist, a genre author (see Phil Brucato’s Raven’s in the Library anthology coming out in March), and works internationally on interfaith dialogue between clergy and businesspeople of all faiths, recently returning from a diplomatic mission to Turkey (summer ’08).
Further Reading:
Human Conduct: Problems of Ethics (3rd ed.)
John Hospers
Thomson/Wadsworth
ISBN# 0-15-501959-7
Right and Reason: Ethics in Theory and Practice (2nd ed.)
Austin Fagothey (2000)
Tan Books
ISBN# 0-89555-668-5
Nicomachean Ethics (2nd ed.)
Aristotle (Terence Irwin, trans.)
Hackett Publishing Company
ISBN# 0-87220-464-2
Western Philosophy: An Anthology (2nd ed.)
John Cottingham, ed.
Blackwell Publishing
ISBN# 1405124784
www.philosophypages.com
www.iep.utm.edu
www.epistemelinks.com
Hmm, I always thought Moore was critical of the ends justifies the means philosophy espoused by some of his characters and implicit in the final action in Watchmen. He counts on his readers to be able to handle the ethical dilemmas without his narrative spoon feeding you like in the Superman television show. As in much of modern literature, Moore's narrators are often untrustworthy, like Randy Newman's, for example, who doesn't hate short people.
Good article. Makes me think. And I can't say that I fully understand the concepts. But I will reread this. And the links to other books are cool, especially the little Amazon Widgets. Will those Amazon Widgets be a new feature of ComicMix articles or was that innovation just Ms. Honigsberg's?
Mr. Tebbel — I tend to be a very literal person and am not familiar with Moore's other work, so I read this cold, at face value, as-is. You may well be right that Moore's using unreliable narrators and hyperbole to make his point, the total opposite of what's presented. Or he may be a misanthrope. Both are valid points of view and points of departure for discussion. When I heard Randy Newman's "Short People," it was so tongue-in-cheek that there was no doubt that he was lampooing prejudice. Here, like the noir of his world, Moore's purpose is not so obvious, at least not to me. YMMV. Thanks for your thoughtful comments. You and other readers make me think and keep me honest. –Alexandra
It seems to me that Moore is examing the essential fascism of the superhero – that all super heros, essentially embody the "end justifies the means" concept.Another British author, J.T.Edson, whose Westerns i used to enjoy greatly and still can read with some pleasure, presents his heros as The Good Guys, protecting weaker people from The Bad Guys. But the main difference between THH and TBG is that The Good Guys have faster guns, harder fists and Edson likes them; they can and are as dismissive and casually sadistic to those weaker than themselves as some of his villains.Superman and any given John Wayne character are heros and we can enjoy their adventures because they are always right and we know they wll be; either of them, operating as they do in their fictional milieus but without that auctorial gurantee of rectitude would be the type of character Moore presents in Watchmen, and i think that that was Moore's point.
I believe the story ultimately weighs down on the "ends do NOT justify means" side of the scale, not because of unreliable narrators or hyperbole, but by the events of the very ending. Note that I do not wish to say your reading is invalid or misinformed; quite the opposite, I find it most insightful and intriguing. However, my own interpretation of the final message is thus…Veidt's plan succeeds in bringing the Nations of the World together, and that means to expose his falsehood after the fact would bring about even MORE death. After all, once the world learned that the "Alien" was in fact the Master Plan of an American super hero, international tensions would likely explode into violence, and the fact that it was all an elaborate deception would do little to help America plead its innocence. That is why Rorschach, who cannot bring himself to brook the kind of compromise necessary to keep Veidt's actions secret, chooses suicide in the end: because his two great goals are to protect the innocent and to expose evil wherever it lies, but in this case, the two goals have been brought to violent collision, because to fulfill the latter would be to directly jeaopardize the former, and yet to maintain the former would mean to betray the latter. Dreiberg and Juspecyzk seem to have their own doubts about Veidt's actions, but as has been constantly shown throughtout the book, they lack Rorschach's sheer, almost psychotic conviction, and so they choose to ulitmately value the goal of protecting the innocent, and themselves, over exposing Veidt's plan. Manhattan too chooses to let Veidt be, but, and this is one of the most critical moments of the book in terms of how I read its final message, he informs Veidt before leaving that "nothing ever ends", in response to Veidt asking if he truly did the right thing. The last we see of the World's Smartest Man is him, alone, silent, and with a deeply troubled expression on his face. Then comes the final page of the book, which reveals that Rorschach's journal, which he maintained up to the point where he had begun to suspect Veidt's plans, is in the possession of a Newspaper publisher eager for new material to print.To me, what the ending says is that the Ultimate Good, the end of all violence and destruction and war, is impossible. We humans are nasty, violent creatures, and nothing can ever truly change that, least of all more violence. Veidt succeeds in uniting the world under a common enemy, yes, but his Ideal World is built on foundations so rotten and uncertain that the slightest push could cause it to fall apart. Once that journal gets published, odds are good people will start asking questions. And once people start asking questions, odds are even better that conclusions will start being drawn. And once conclusions start being drawn, it all becomes a Domino Effect that ends with the very War Veidt tried to prevent. Nothing ever endsm, and the cycle starts all over again. His actions may have succeeded in the short term, but in the long, they're only a stall, and the sacrifice he made is nowhere near worth a mere stall.I freely admit this is my own reading, of course, and Moore's final message may well be very different. Hell, there may not truly BE a final message for all I know. I also admit that there's likely an extent to which I've romanticized some of the events in the book, but the reasons for that are worthy of their own discssion.Suffice it to say, you got me very excited about recalling my own time with "Watchmen", so thank you for that. :)
Mr. Rogers — I listed the books for further reading, which have been included in my classes for years. Mr. Hauman added the widgets, but Amazon does seem to have the lowest prices on these standard texts brand new and the Look Inside function is very helpful, but they also tend to take the longest for delivery, in my students' experiences. Keep readin' and thinkin'! –Alexandra
Mr. Weber — again, you may be correct in your assessment, as I'd said to Mr. Tebbel, though I don't believe that all superheroes are essentially fascists, whether they be of the white or grey hat variety. They are all Other, in some way, so may necessarily embody some extremes, for good or ill. But does an extreme make you a fascist? I wouldn't say so. And an extreme does not necessarily point at an ends-justifies-the-means ethic (note that, in combat situations, some boundaries and rules change — see Medics, EMTs, and triage…but even the most veteran of that arena will rebel against rules of triage, from time to time, and go for the improbable Save All scenario with all their strength and skill, knowing it might be futile and they might even lose more, in the process — but they choose a 3rd option and're driven by human empathy to TRY!). I am an appreciator of the comics and Western genres, but I don't know everything nor Moore, personally, in any way, so I can't speak for him and wouldn't, even if I did. As I've said, I could see it both ways — either he's pushing the extra-moral that we can't understand 'til we get to that stage in our evolution, or he's using stark hyperbole to speak out against any such notion, or presenting both sides of the argument so as to provoke thought and that discussion might ensue (thus prompting relationship, which is, of itself, an ethical venture because it helps to perfect the person). –Alexandra
That is why Rorschach, who cannot bring himself to brook the kind of compromise necessary to keep Veidt's actions secret, chooses suicide in the endRorscharah doesn't commit sucide, Dr. Manhattan kills Rorscharah to silence him.
Mr. Back — suicide is a relative term, here, of course. Yes, the doc kills him, ultimately (and you could argue self-defense or defense of the weak, there…this whole argument may be more Rossian than Kantian to handle the competing prima facie duties, but no one brings up the 20th C. update of the 18th C. pinnacle of deontology in any of the articles I've read since I posted my first), but Rorschach knows he's walking away to certain death and says so, himself, so…you'll see in my more detailed character analyses in the next installment how I view that. –Alexandra
"then go ahead, have the cajones to do it"I guess the word you were looking for is 'cojones' which means like balls and not 'cajones' which means drawers
Well…nice to know that someone with keen eyes has spotted a typo in my article nearly 2 years after it was first published. My thanks.