feotakahari

Sometimes I blame Superman for the economic right, or at least the ideas behind Superman.

A common question in Superman comics is why Superman doesn’t or can’t save everyone, and the most common answer is that this would make us need saving more often. If Superman intervened every time people got themselves into bad situations, people would take it for granted that he would always intervene. They would stop doing things to protect, defend, or improve themselves, like children who fail to grow because they’re never exposed to adult responsibilities. By, say, refusing to help migrant laborers push back against the employers who exploit them, he’s encouraging those laborers to develop their own strength and solve their own problems. (I wish that was a hypothetical example. Fuck Elliot S! Maggin with a rusty rake.)

A similar question in politics is why the government doesn’t or can’t save everyone, to which conservatives tend to provide a similar answer. Poor people just need to put in more effort to stop being poor, and they won’t bother to do that if being poor isn’t hellish and unlivable. Black people will lose their self-esteem if they get outside support to fight back against bigotry. Immigrants, if there’s value in immigrants at all, need to stand tall and do everything themselves, because the alternative is an unending drain on everyone else’s resources.

I won’t deny that there’s a type of human scavenger who thinks anything they can claim is theirs. There are people who will scam social services because they think money taken is money earned, just as there are people who will let their corporation go into bankruptcy because they know they’re guaranteed a government bailout. But inherent in this mindset is a belief that you’re an independent person making logical choices in order to gather resources for yourself, and most people don’t have that level of self-delusion. People don’t want to be trapped in a cycle of one-way dependency. People don’t want to live in such a way that they will be unable to continue living if their support dries up. People want to stand under their own power, and if they say they need help, that’s usually because it’s the only thing left that they can do.

(This is also a part of why I hate the Prime Directive, but that’s an even longer rant.)

Superman, in terms of powers, is a character who can solve problems any way he wants. He has the capability to defeat villains without killing them, or the capability to kill everyone who stands in his way. This means that whatever he does or doesn’t do is limited by the decisions he makes and the sort of person he is.

In many continuities, Superman frames himself as everyone’s role model. His job is decide what virtues people should have, then behave in such a way as to inspire people to follow those virtues. He’s universal, even multiversal, inspiring people across the globe, into space, and thousands of years after his death. This means that it’s not enough for him to act according to the situation–he needs to present a model that people can follow all the time. In other words, he needs to act according to maxims that he would will to be universal law!

To the larger world, Superman seems flawless, but his most emotionally powerful scenes tend to involve him connecting to and inspiring flawed human beings. He understands that they can’t always be like him, but they understand that by trying to be like him, they can be better than they currently are. He’s a guidepost, not an endpoint, and his very existence makes the whole world better.

This is the closest I’ve come to respecting Kantian ethics, because it gives me a framework to compare it to my own beliefs. As a Utilitarian, I’ve seen a lot of criticism of how a perfect Utilitarian would need to know everything and accurately predict the outcome of any action. In a similar way, a perfect Kantian would need to be able to do anything and resolve situations while following every virtue. But no one is ever a perfect Utilitarian, and no one is ever a perfect Kantian, either. You simply need to be as good as you can be, with all your flaws and limitations.