Ethics and Nerd-dom

One of the most famous lines in the history of comics is spoken about Spider-Man in the golden age of Marvel: “In this world, with great power, there must also come great responsibility!” The line, penned by Stan Lee, has resurfaced again and again in the world of comics. It has become the emblem of many of the heroes, the mantra that, at root, separates heroes from villains. For Spider-Man, the line is a reminder of his Uncle Ben, who originally taught him right and wrong; Spider-Man’s ethics are fueled by his intuitive conscience and a desire to make his Uncle proud.

In the golden age of comics, the 1930s – 1950s, simple moral conflicts allow unrelenting absolutist ethics. The bad guys are bad, the good guys are good. For some heroes in the 90s and later, moral conflicts became more complicated, and heroes had to deal with challenges to their traditional morality.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the challenge presented to the heroine’s ethics comes to a head in the episode “Bad Girls” (Episode 14, season 3). A new slayer comes to town, and she is wild, reckless, and determined to shirk responsibility and destiny; she relentlessly tries to prove her own free will. Although Buffy occasionally tires of her responsibility, she hasn’t really questioned her acceptance of determinism before this point. She has accepted her role as protector and defender, and has enacted her moral duties with an assumption that things that are not evil must be good. When the new slayer, Faith, accidentally kills a man, she clings to her ethical egoism. She tries hard to shrug off the guilt she clearly feels, telling herself that she does she wants and accidents happen. She justifies the loss of a mortal life with the deaths of all the vampires she’s killed.

For Buffy, the knowledge that she has been involved in an act so far from her idea of good shakes her to the core. The knowledge that a slayer, a hero, could commit murder, a crime, and admit no remorse ruptures her conceptions of morality. Faith eventually becomes an anti-hero on the show--no longer posing as a good guy, but not entirely bad, either. The issues raised by her moral ambiguity are never entirely resolved. If someone is simultaneously pulled to ethically right and ethically wrong action, how much can be forgiven?

In the real world, these conflicts of ethics manifest in the role of police. Like Buffy and Faith, police are meant to be the defenders and protectors of the innocent. However, like Buffy and Faith, individual ethics can often define whether the stated moral code and intentions of a police force are upheld. With great power comes great responsibility; what recourse is there when power forgets this?