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THE JOKER’S WILD: CAN WE HOLD TH E CLOWN PRINCE MORALLY RESPONSIBLE?
Christopher Robichaud
Laugh and the World Laughs with You-or Does It?
The Joker isn’t playing with a full deck. This isn’t news, of course, least of all to the Joker himself. “Don’t get ee-ee-even, get mad!” he cackles in Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke (1988). From poisoning the fish in Gotham Harbor, twisting their faces into a permanent grin just for the sake of copyrighting them,1 to trying to launch some of Gotham’s luminaries into the stratosphere using candle rockets atop a giant birthday cake,2 the Joker’s lunatic schemes have earned him a permanent cell in Arkham Asylum. And while insanity doesn’t distinguish the Joker amongst Batman’s adversaries—Two-Face, for one, often gives him a run for his money on the crazy-as-can-be count—the Clown Prince of Crime’s deranged escapades have certainly earned him the dubious distinction of being the Dark Knight’s chief antagonist and foil.
If it all were just about laughing fish and preposterous birthday celebrations, we might happily leave the Joker to his exploits without further reflection. But as fans of Batman’s adventures are all too painfully aware, the Joker’s deeds are often as ghastly as they are absurd. Beyond the countless lives he’s taken by way of his leave-them-laughing gas, the Joker has beaten Jason Todd, the second incarnation of Robin, to the point of death with a crowbar—in front of Jason’s mother, no less—and then blown him up, taking him way past the point of no return.3 He also shot Barbara Gordon, Commissioner James Gordon’s daughter, and then stripped her naked and took pictures of her. When the Joker subsequently captured Commissioner Gordon, he stripped the commissioner naked as well, and put him on an amusement ride where he was forced to see pictures of his daughter naked, shot, and paralyzed.4 And that, according to the Joker, was done just to prove the point that all it takes is one really bad day to put otherwise good people over the edge.
So the Joker hasn’t just done criminal things, he’s done unimaginably awful things, things of the utmost moral repugnance. But how much blame—moral blame—should we assign to him? Perhaps our first reaction is “Are you kidding me? He’s a villain, an abomination, and he warrants the most severe moral censure.” Perhaps, but then we ought to remind ourselves of the fact we began with: namely, that the Joker really isn’t playing with a full deck. And there is a strong sentiment among us—not universally shared, but not uncommon, either—that genuinely insane people often aren’t morally responsible for what they do, and therefore don’t deserve moral blame for their misdeeds. Maybe, then, the Joker shouldn’t be held morally accountable for his actions.
But if that’s right, we need to ask why. And that’s where philosophy enters the picture. In what follows, we’ll examine some of the things philosophy has to say about this issue, looking in particular at the light it can shed on the relationship between a person acting freely, on the one hand, and a person being morally responsible for what she does, on the other. We’ll focus on this because it seems correct to say that a person is morally responsible only for those actions that she freely performs. So if we want to conclude that the Joker isn’t morally responsible for his actions, we’ll need to argue that his mental state doesn’t allow him to freely do the villainous things he does. Let’s get to it!
Clearing Out Some Bats in the Belfry
Any good philosophical exercise should clarify the relevant background assumptions that are being made, and it should spell out important distinctions that will help in exploring the topic under discussion. We’ll begin, then, by attending to the most glaring assumption of our investigation, which is that the Joker is truly insane.
Admittedly, issues surrounding insanity are complex and multifaceted, and they often fall more comfortably within psychology and psychiatry than philosophy. Nevertheless, some philosophers, like Michel Foucault (1926-1984), have made very interesting contributions to the field by exposing how groups of persons have been marginalized by being labeled as insane.5 Engaging as Foucault’s discussion is, unfortunately it has led some people to question whether insanity actually exists. We won’t go that far; we’ll acknowledge that there are several kinds of mental impairments that rightly justify categorizing persons who suffer from them as insane. And we’ll further assume that the Joker suffers from one or more of these mental conditions, permitting us to accurately refer to him as insane.
But before moving on entirely, it’s worth defending this position against the objection that it’s groundless or extreme. We can agree that we often call folks crazy when we simply find their behavior odd, without meaning that they really suffer from some serious mental derangement. Such is not the case with the Joker, however. Yes, he often does weird things, no question about that—let’s face it, putting a Cheshire-cat-grin on all the fish in the harbor is really out there—but he also displays some hallmarks of the genuinely disturbed. One example is his attitude toward people: simply put, he often treats them as objects rather than as persons. The Joker didn’t blink at shooting Barbara Gordon through her spine and stripping her bare. He wasn’t “out to get her.” He simply had made up his mind that he wanted to prove a point, and she was a useful object to help him make that point, no more or less meaningful to him than the amusement ride he later used for the same purpose. That’s a classic psychotic attitude.
The Joker also lacks a healthy sense of self-preservation. In the Batman Superman Movie (1998), there’s a wonderful moment when Lex Luthor and the Joker are on a plane together, desperately trying to escape capture by the Dark Knight and the Man of Steel. A box opens, and explosives roll toward Lex and the Joker, about to detonate. Luthor, sanely, cries out in dismay and tries to escape. The Joker simply starts laughing uncontrollably. If these examples aren’t enough, perhaps Alfred Pennyworth puts it best in 2008’s The Dark Knight when he says about the Joker, “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” Clearly, the Joker is insane.
We next need to discuss an important distinction that will help us avoid confusion later, and that’s the difference between causal responsibility and moral responsibility. When we consider causal responsibility, we’re simply asking whether a person’s action is a cause of a particular event. Suppose that the Joker douses an unsuspecting victim with Smilex gas, killing her. Was he causally responsible for her death? Sure, his dousing her with the gas—that action—was clearly part of the chain of events that brought about her death. Moral responsibility concerns itself with the moral praise and blame connected with an act. Let’s say, very roughly, that a person is morally responsible for an action only if she’s the appropriate subject of moral praise or blame for that action.
Now with those ideas in place, we may be tempted to conclude that we’ve already undercut our position: if we grant that the Joker is causally responsible for such things as poisoning people, then it just follows that he’s morally responsible for these actions. But that does not follow, and we can cook up much less controversial cases to see why. Suppose Batman starts the Batmobile to head into the city, and it backfires, disturbing the bats in his cave. The bats fly out into the night and disrupt a driver on a nearby country road, who swerves and drives her car into a ditch. It seems true that Batman is causally responsible for the driver going into the ditch—his starting the Batmobile is part of the chain of events that led to the driver swerving—but it doesn’t seem right to claim that Batman is morally responsible for the driver’s minor accident. He simply couldn’t have reasonably anticipated the sequence of events that ensued. So a person’s being causally responsible for something does not automatically make that person morally responsible for it. And that opens the door to the possibility that the Joker, while quite clearly causally responsible for his villainous deeds, may not always be morally responsible for them.
Putting One More Card on the Table (Don’t Worry, It’s Not a Joker)
There is one more important assumption to defend, which is that we ordinary folk do in fact act freely. The problem is that if this isn’t true—if none of us have a free will—then it seems that no one is morally responsible for what she does. And if that’s the case, it’s rather uninteresting to focus on these issues as they relate to the Joker, since he’s in the same boat as the rest of us.
Fair enough, we might think, but what in the world would lead us to believe that we never act freely? Certainly such a claim runs contrary to our ordinary way of thinking—and feeling! The way things seem from within when we’re deciding what to do is that we face legitimate options all the time and freely choose between them. Why would we ever think that our beliefs and feelings are inaccurate on this count?
The answer lies with determinism: the view that for any moment in time, the state of the world at that time is wholly fixed, or determined, by the prior states of the world (together with the laws of nature that run the whole show). This view is appealing for numerous reasons, one of which is that it seems to conform with a mature scientific understanding of the world. If determinism is true, we are nothing more than a product of events that originated long before we even came into the picture. And facing any apparent choice, it’s already determined which course of action we will follow. That doesn’t leave much room for free will.
One way to respond to this worry, of course, is to reject determinism. That’s an approach that some philosophers happily take, sometimes justifying their position on scientific grounds, by citing facts about the fundamental randomness of quantum mechanics as a reason to believe that the past doesn’t perfectly determine the future. Or sometimes they argue simply that determinism runs riot over our common sense, and that’s enough to warrant our rejecting it.
Others, though, challenge the idea that determinism is incompatible with the idea of free will. Let’s consider an example based on a famous paper by philosopher Harry Frankfurt (b. 1929).6 Suppose the Joker has devoted huge quantities of money to the construction of a strange machine that tracks Batman’s actions and, more interestingly, his thoughts. Moreover, it’s able to “control” what Batman does. The Joker’s ultimate aim is to use this machine to force Batman to do terrible things, but at present, he just wants Gotham cleansed of all other supervillains. So right now, let’s say the machine is tracking Batman as he faces off against Poison Ivy, and the situation is one where a well-placed Bat-a-rang will trip Ivy up enough to allow Batman to capture her.
Here’s where things get interesting. If Batman chooses to throw the Bat-a-rang—if he makes that mental decision—then the Joker’s machine will not stop him by sending out the appropriate mind-rays (or whatever) to interrupt that course of action (because the Joker wants Ivy taken out of commission). But if the Dark Knight—for whatever reason—chooses not to throw the Bat-a-rang, the machine will intercede and force him to do so. Let’s suppose that Batman does choose to throw the Bat-a-rang and in fact does so. We would normally think that in doing so, Batman exercised his free will—he made a free choice and acted accordingly—even though, unbeknownst to him, he had no alternative but to throw the Bat-a-rang. In other words, what he did in this case was actually determined.
So even if determinism is true and what we do is determined by past states of affairs and the laws of nature, there’s still room to exercise free will. And as long as there’s room to exercise free will, there’s room for moral responsibility. Of course, there’s much that can be said in response to this line of reasoning. Here’s just one concern: it seems that moral evaluation is going to face a certain epistemological problem, a problem concerning whether we can ever know whether praise or blame is appropriate to attribute to a person. To see why, let’s stick with the example sketched above. In order for us to know that Batman deserves praise for his actions, we can’t simply attend to what he did, for that was already determined; he was going to do it regardless of whether he intended to or not. We’d have to get inside his head, as it were, and see what choice he made. And crazy Joker-machines aside, getting inside people’s heads isn’t the easiest thing to do. So we might worry that free will and the moral responsibility that comes with it have been saved only at the cost of making it virtually impossible for us to ever attribute praise or blame, and that cost is too high.
There are responses to this worry, but we must move on. Let’s assume, then, that we do have, and can exercise, free will, whether that’s compatible with determinism or not. We now turn to the issue of whether there’s something wrong with the Joker in particular that prohibits him from exercising free will, and as such, whether this exempts him from moral responsibility for his actions.
Taking the Plunge: The Fall from Freedom
So far we’ve talked loosely about exercising our free will in terms of making choices. But clearly there’s more involved in the performance of free actions than that. Many philosophers believe that exercising free will—and the moral responsibility that comes from it—crucially involves a person being able to think about what motivates her and then using this ability to change her motivations, at least sometimes. The core idea, espoused in various forms by Harry Frankfurt among others, is that one of the things that distinguishes us from other animals is our ability to form desires about our desires: second-order desires.7 We can take a stance on our first-order desires—the things that drive other animals directly to action—and in this sense, we aren’t merely passive in where our wants take us, as it were. Our free will is constituted by our ability to form desires about our desires, to reflect upon and evaluate them, and to change our motivations accordingly.
For example, Batman may find himself so totally exhausted one evening after having spent numerous nights thumping on the Joker’s goons that he has a very strong first-order desire to stay in bed and sleep rather than continue to pursue his foe. But Batman also has the desire to bring justice to Gotham, and this is also a first-order desire (though more abstract). Let’s suppose it is strongly held, but not as strongly as the first-order desire to stay in bed. What makes Batman free, so the thought goes, is his ability to recognize these two desires in himself and to form a second-order desire that in some sense weights his desire to pursue justice more highly than his desire to stay in bed.
This is a very rough sketch of how free will works and it is not uncontroversial. But it is already enough to help us explain why we think that some persons “aren’t in control” in certain matters; that is, why we think they aren’t able to exercise their free will. Classic examples involve addicts. We often speak as though people addicted to heroin, say, aren’t entirely exercising their free will when they continue to get fixes long after any benefits of the rush have passed, all the time admittedly well aware that they are destroying their lives. The idea, based on what we’ve sketched above, is that the drug addiction has inhibited their ability to form second-order desires about their desires. One of the influences of the drug, in other words, is that once taken, a person’s wanting the drug cannot be trumped by a second-order desire to weight one’s desire to be healthy over the desire for the drug.
But if such addicts aren’t able to exercise their free will when it comes to future decisions to consume the drug, must we conclude that they aren’t morally responsible for these future actions? Simply put, no, and that’s because, at least in many cases, it is reasonable to presume that a free choice was made to start taking the drug. Before a person chose to start taking heroin, she possessed the capacity to rank her first-order desires. Possessing that capacity means that her decision not to rank her desire to stay healthy over her desire to get high was a decision freely made. She’s morally responsible for the action that ensued, and that moral responsibility carries over to future actions that aren’t free.
However, it might look like this line of reasoning opens the door for us to conclude that the Joker is morally responsible for his actions. Let’s suppose that his current insanity is best understood as an inability to form second-order desires to quell his first-order homicidal tendencies. So we can agree that once he went mad, all the Joker’s further actions were not performed freely. But according to at least one origin story (from The Killing Joke), the Joker was first a husband and father who chose to enter a life of petty crime—as the Red Hood—to help make ends meet. A confrontation with Batman resulted in his plunging into a vat of chemicals, forever burning his face into the monstrously clownish visage it now is. That’s what sent him over the edge (literally). But he entered a life of crime freely—and if so, it seems that the moral responsibility for that action carries over to his present actions, given that his free choice led him to where it did.
Not so fast, though. We need to spell out in more detail why we think that the heroin addict is morally responsible for her future drug-related actions that aren’t done freely. And part of that story, it seems right to say, is that we believe that her initial choice to take the drug was not only done freely, but it was done in complete awareness of the likely consequences of her action. One has to go out of one’s way to remain ignorant of the effects of heroin. Forget health classes and after-school specials—the novels and the respective movies Requiem for a Dream and Trainspotting alone make it pretty darn obvious what can happen. We should test our intuitions: if the heroin addict was truly ignorant of the effects of heroin and freely chose to take it, would we be as willing to saddle her with moral responsibility for that and future actions? I don’t think we would.
If that’s right, we need to ask whether the Joker acted in ignorance upon taking the job as the Red Hood. And here it seems correct to say that while he surely had to be aware of many of the dangers and the ramifications of his actions, it would not be reasonable to expect him to have foreseen that becoming the Red Hood ran him the risk of turning into a homicidal maniac. Notice that that’s true even if he somehow could have foreseen that he would take a plunge into a vat of chemicals. He would have to have known a lot more about his psychological makeup to conclude that from the possibility of that chemical plunge, madness would likely ensue. After all, had we made similar choices and had the same thing happened to us, it seems unlikely we would’ve become the Joker. Unluckily for Batman and for Gotham’s citizens, the circumstances that led to his “birth” were one in a million.
Who Has the Last Laugh?
With that objection aside, we can defend our belief that someone as mad as the Joker isn’t morally responsible for his actions. The core idea is that the Joker is not morally responsible because he doesn’t perform his actions freely. His craziness has inhibited his ability to form second-order desires about his first-order desires, desires that include very lunatic impulses.
So there we have it. The Joker is crazy, and his craziness, because it inhibits his free will, relieves him of any moral responsibility for his actions. This is a satisfying analysis, but as is often the case, our philosophical investigation has resolved some issues only to allow room for others to arise. For given the Joker’s insanity, there remain important questions surrounding what obligations Batman and the city of Gotham have toward the Joker. And there are no easy moral answers to the question of how to deal with a genuinely insane person who performs the most vile of deeds. Pity him? Hate him? Institutionalize him? Let him die, if the opportunity arises? The Joker is Batman’s nemesis not only because of what he does, but because of what he is. And if the Clown Prince of Crime is able to entertain that thought, there’s no doubt he finds it very, very funny.
NOTES
1 Detective Comics #475 (February 1978).
2 Batman #321 (March 1980).
3 A Death in the Family (1988).
4 The Killing Joke (1988).
5 See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (New York: Vintage Books, 1988).
6 See Harry Frankfurt, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy Vol. 66, No. 23 (1969): 829-39; this essay is also available in Frankfurt’s collection The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988).
7 See Frankfurt’s “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy Vol. 68, No. 1 (1971): 5-20; also reprinted in The Importance of What We Care About.