Photo by Jens Johnsson on Unsplash
This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm and other platforms.
The following is an introduction to a project I’d like to attempt: an in-depth look at the philosophical implications of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, and in particular their villains. To those of you who may still be attempting to avoid spoilers (and, having not seen Endgame until about six months after its release, I sympathize, though in general with movies I’m interested more in the how than the what), the following and everything in this series will contain many of them, for the entire MCU.
This may initially seem a trivial subject for a philosophical inquiry, but I would disagree with such an assessment. Looked at in terms of any metrics you’d like — financial scope, audience, cultural impact — these are films of remarkable import to contemporary society. So it’s not unreasonable to ask what philosophical statements these films are making, whether or not it was their intent to answer any philosophical questions in the first place. And on that point, I’d argue that they were indeed intended to answer such questions, however obliquely, as these films exist in the broader realm of art, which must necessarily exist in response to questions of aesthetics, just to take an example. And as well, there are political contexts that the writers and producers took into account in the creation of the MCU, contexts that were likely present in the original comic book source material, with which I am less familiar. For example, the original name of Red Skull, the first villain to combat the blatantly nationalistic Captain America against the backdrop of the second World War, was Johann Schmidt, a name which bears a striking similarity to that of Carl Schmitt, the German philosopher who explicated and codified the political philosophy of fascism.
I think villains in film are particularly interesting because they are, by definition, thought experiments and explications created by those involved (writer, actor, director, source material author, et cetera) on the subject of what is morally wrong and what it means to be a bad or evil person, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe features some really interesting case studies in morality in that respect. There’s an interesting etymological correlation between the word “monster,” synonymous with “villain,” and the verb “to demonstrate:” both are rooted in the Latin verb morare, which means “to warn.” Monsters (and villains) are warnings. I’ll be delving into the particulars in individual stories here and in the future, but I’ll start by looking at how the MCU and its villains function as objects of philosophical study in general.
To begin with, I have to clarify the position on ethics from which I am writing. That’s a subject I’ve covered before in more depth, in the essay “Evil;” I recommend reading that before proceeding, but failing that, I’ll say that I understand morality as being a purely social convention with no objective basis, which we explore and codify through our artistic endeavors, like film. All of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies that have been released have clear and unambiguous primary antagonists, and so the MCU movies are making an ethical statement about individuals. The depiction of an individual as a villain in the first place implies that such people can exist. One might immediately counter that the MCU movies depict fantasy scenarios with no bearing on the real world, and I’d say that they’re half right. Yes, the world is much more nuanced and complex than would be indicated by watching MCU movies, but we all know that going in, and these films would have no meaning for us at all if we didn’t feel that they had some relevance to our own lives in the real world. It’s certainly not the case that we don’t construct villains out of people in real life; the name “Hitler” is now synonymous with such a person, and not without good reason. I’d say the relationship between how we construct villains in art-space and how we construct villains in real-world-space is worth exploring.
To ask the same question another way, why should we have any realist concern for the ethics of film if we don’t have any such concern for the metaphysics of film? After all, you’re not expecting me to do a series on why we should all be concerned about the real-world fate of the infinity stones, because you likely take it for granted that I understand that the infinity stones aren’t real and thus that there is no reason to be at all concerned about where they are or who has them. Why then should we be concerned over what people who don’t exist should or shouldn’t do in a version of the world that isn’t even real?
To answer that by way of a specific example, the MCU features what are called “enhanced individuals” in-universe but who would be called superheroes or supervillains in common parlance. Given the existence of such individuals in the real world, we would have to ask ourselves, what are their moral responsibilities? Should they retain independent control and personal sovereignty or should their powers be considered, to some degree, a public good? If superheroes and supervillains were real, would they have a moral obligation to do battle with each other, literally or metaphorically, over what they each see is right?
But then the obvious response would be that superheroes and supervillains don’t exist, so why consider the implications of their existence? Because the qualities of superheroes and supervillains are certainly present in the real world; they’re not distributed or concentrated the same way or amplified to the same degree, but must nevertheless be reckoned with based on sound moral reasoning, and film is a vehicle for establishing that reasoning in the first place. Power is certainly real, for example. What are the moral obligations of those with power? Many of the MCU’s superheroes did not choose their powers or the remarkable courses that their lives would take, but neither do we choose our own particular talents and capabilities. How are we then obliged to use these capabilities? Technology certainly allows us to approach the world-ending capabilities of many of the MCU’s most powerful villains; how are we obligated to use such technology? Do we have a moral obligation not to create such technology in the first place, or would such a thing depend on other factors, like the balance between a given technology’s capacity for good versus its capacity for destruction and evil?
Films lack the complexity of real life, but this is an advantage rather than a problem. Like thought experiments, movies simplify the world so that extraneous matters can be temporarily filtered out. With complicating factors out of the way, we can focus on a few key issues at a time, examine the implications, and then draw our conclusions out into the real world and see how they fare. And similarly, taking a concept and pushing it to its extremes — for example, taking the notion of personal power and extrapolating it into godlike superpowers — is an excellent way to suss out conceptual implications that may not be visible when the concept is playing out at a more realistic and subtle level.
Now, while I’m approaching this subject from at least a marginal level of expertise in philosophy, I can claim no such level of expertise in the Marvel universe. I’ve seen all of the films currently released (at the time of this writing, everything through Spider-Man: Far From Home), some of them more than once, but I haven’t seen any of the television shows or read any of the source material. I think that this level of knowledge is perfectly acceptable for what I’m attempting. I’m interested in these films as they exist in popular culture and what they might mean to people in general, and not just to those who are canonical experts, and my level of MCU knowledge might even be an advantage there because I can approach it with an outside eye. I will, of course, approach this subject as any good scholar would and rely on the expertise of others where my own is lacking. As does any fandom, the MCU has its own Wiki, which I’ve referred to extensively and found entirely invaluable.
It would be a shame to introduce this topic without at least getting started on some of the actual work I’m introducing, so let’s examine the MCU’s first villain (at least in terms of cinematic, rather than chronological, order), Obadiah Stane, the Iron Monger, as played by Jeff Bridges in the 2008 film Iron Man.
The central theme of Iron Man is one that recurs throughout the MCU movies: the implications of new, powerful, and potentially dangerous technology. The movie begins with a technological struggle: the advanced weapons technology produced and sold by Stark Industries is being used to devastating effect in the war in Afghanistan. A terrorist organization, the Ten Rings, kidnaps Stark Industries CEO Tony Stark and forces him to build weapons for them, ostensibly to even the odds. Instead, Stark secretly builds a suit of weaponized armor that he then uses to escape, but during his captivity, he finds that the terrorists already have access to Stark weaponry (though not the latest and greatest tech like the Jericho Missile). The weaponry was sold to them, as Stark later discovers, by his friend and fellow Stark Industries executive Obadiah Stane. Stane, who was the interim CEO of Stark Industries after the death of Tony Stark’s father Howard, alludes at times to wanting to secure the best technology (such as Stark’s Iron Man suit) so as to ensure the prosperous future of the United States, but this attitude is contradicted by his having sold Stark weapons to the Ten Rings. In fact, what he seeks is to reclaim the power and notoriety he held as the CEO of a major corporation.
I don’t think that the sale of weapons to terrorists was a very morally ambiguous action, but there are a couple of questions here that I find compelling. First of all, what are the ethics of weapons, and of arms sales in general? And what would be the moral implications if Obadiah had been authentic in his desire to secure his country’s future by possessing, and, as necessary, deploying the most advanced weaponry?
To begin, what is the moral status of weapons technology in the first place? Let’s proceed from the assumption that, all else being equal, the deliberate killing of humans is a moral wrong, something that should be avoided whenever possible. In that light, weapons technology would seem morally problematic, since its primary purpose is the termination of human life, but obviously the situation is more complex than that. To begin with, there is no reason to believe that advanced weaponry is either a necessary or sufficient cause for our killing each other; those with access to such technology don’t always use it, and we’ve been killing each other for longer than we’ve had the technology available to make it easier and more efficient, but those last two adjectives are telling as well: if killing is wrong, then that which makes it easier (and which provides no other tangible benefit) would likely also be wrong, as that which makes something easier also allows for it to be done more quickly and expansively.
And what if weapons technology didn’t exist? To be more specific, what if no technology existed whose primary purpose was the taking of human life? So, knives but no swords, hunting rifles but no pistols or assault weapons, explosives but no bombs. It’s difficult to imagine that the large-scale killing of the 20th century, for example, would have been possible under such conditions (though, admittedly, I may be underestimating human imagination when it comes to effecting atrocity), so it seems at first blush that humanity would be better off without weapons technology. But even if we stop there and assume that we’ve made the correct assessment regarding the moral status of weapons technology in and of itself, we have a major problem: “humanity” is not, nor has it ever been, the entity responsible for making decisions regarding the development or use of such technology.
So let’s walk through the problem again, this time using the common philosophical technique of comparing the status quo to a theoretical state of nature. Weapons technology didn’t always exist; it had to have been invented at some point, either as something intended for the purpose of killing humans or as some other tool that was repurposed. As animals compete intraspecifically for resources, we can assume that intraspecific human conflict (and conflict between different hominid species) existed prior to the development of weapons. So even as the first tools were being developed, we were already at war with each other, and I doubt it required much of a leap to see how tools could be repurposed as weapons. Knowing that humanity has always been tribal and never unified, we can see how weapons technology would emerge among different groups in competition with each other, each reasonably seeking to protect its own interests, such as hunting territories. There’s an interesting prisoners’ dilemma here: given two tribes, they’re both better off if neither one of them has weapons, worse off if both of them do, and each is worse off still if they don’t have weapons but the other side does. Thus, they’re both incentivized to have weapons even though the result is sub-optimal. But given that even language had not emerged at this point, thus making inter-tribal communication difficult, it’s hard to place moral blame on a particular tribe for wanting to get a technological advantage over their enemies and to use such advantages to protect and secure their interests, even at the expense of human life.
This is exactly what we see in Tony Stark’s development of the Iron Man suit. Stark represented one group (himself and his fellow captive Dr. Ho Yinsen) under threat by and at a severe technological disadvantage relative to another group, the Ten Rings, who were holding him captive. Stark had reasonable cause to protect his interests by escaping, likely with the necessity of killing his captors in the process, but in order to do so, he needed a technological edge, which he developed using the resources available to him. Tony Stark being the protagonist, the movie frames this as a morally good action, considered in itself without any moral ambiguity. Not that I think any depictions of ambiguity are warranted here; I, and I think most others, would have done the same under similar circumstances, and besides, the movie’s moral interests lie elsewhere.
As to the film’s central moral concern, Tony Stark has, at this point, built the Iron Man suit, and there’s no putting the weapons-grade toothpaste back in the tube. Perhaps the second person to ever make a spear got the idea from the one that was thrown at him by the first person to ever make a spear, and as soon as the necessary technology for a powerful, weaponized suit of armor was available (that being the miniature arc reactor), it was sought both by the Ten Rings and by Obadiah Stane, and we’ll return to Stane and his motives presently.
Sometime between the development of weapons and the emergence of high-tech weapons manufacturers like Stark Industries, we developed commerce and trade, and at that point weapons technology became not only something that could be used but something that could be bought and sold, complicating the matter significantly. To consider this matter, let’s first simplify it and consider the “sale” of a weapon by a manufacturer to someone within the same community. Returning to the state of nature, let’s imagine a tribal community in which, as we would expect, people have different natural talents. Some people are good at making weapons but not using them, and some people are good at using weapons but not making them. Assume any tribal size and any degree of advancement in areas of trade and commerce, but in this thought experiment we’re still working within a world in which tribal communities are working primarily for their own interests against other tribal communities. If I’m a weapons-maker in your tribe, does it make any sense for me to sell my wares to you, a warrior, as opposed to just giving them to you? If this is a reciprocal transaction, then there’s a condition for me giving you the weapon that I’ve made: you have to reciprocate by giving me something of at least equal value. That’s a condition that may or may not be met, so there are realistically possible scenarios in which I do not give you my weapons. And what then if you proceed to the next battle and lose because you lacked the technological edge that I could have provided? That would almost certainly mean very bad things for me, so it makes much more sense for me to just give you the weapons that I make, and if we have to conceive of it in a transactional sense, what I get in return is that you protect me from all manner of bad things that might befall me if another tribe were to prevail against my own in battle.
Moving on, under what circumstances would one sell a weapon? Historically, society gets very complex very quickly, and immediately we’re dealing with a multitude of agencies manufacturing weapons, a multitude of agencies offering protection from outside threats, and a multitude of different peoples caught in the middle with their own multivariate allegiances. This is a huge mess and we’ll need some heuristics to sort it out. Let’s start by looking at the interests of the three meta-groups (weapons manufacturers, protection agencies, and civilians) individually, all divided between the different civilizations of the world, bearing in mind that this is a simplified model that necessary loses some fidelity over a model that might be more granular but also much more complex.
Starting with weapons manufacturers, the primary interest that we have already established still holds: weapons manufacturers need, as with civilians, the protection provided by protection agencies, and the capability of the protection agencies to provide that protection rests, in part, in the hands of weapons manufacturers. The weapons manufacturers have a mutual interest with the protection agencies in their producing and advancing weapons technology. This interest is necessary to their existence; if other weapons manufacturers supply better weapons to their protection agencies, who then win battles, the weapons manufacturer in question might cease to exist entirely, or might be forced to make weapons for those for whom the weapons manufacturers’ other interests are at odds, which is arguably worse. What other interests are necessary? Well, a weapons manufacturer is still an industry and is subject to those rules as well, which means that profit is also an objective. This means that a given weapons manufacturer must prevail or at least hold its own against others with whom it is competing, and also that there be a continual demand for weapons. Let’s not dance around the matter: war is good for business, though it’s considerably worse for business if the wrong people win.
I was talking about dialectics recently; here’s the place to apply it: weapons manufacturers have contradictory interests. If the enemy prevails, the weapons manufacturer ceases to exist, and if the enemy ceases to exist, the weapons manufacturer ceases to exist. Only by holding the two in tension can a weapons manufacturer hope to prevail in the world of warfare and commerce. Granted, this is not necessarily a symmetrical tension, which is to say, the two existential threats to a given weapons manufacturer are not necessarily equally likely or equally present at any given time and place.
Protection agencies are next. Protection agencies include all of the militaries and militias of all the nations of the world, all of the police forces, all of the organized crime syndicates, all of the organizations that provide protection to a people against outside threats. In addition to their defensive role, they may also be used offensively as agents advancing the interests of the different peoples and different civilizations of the world. What are their interests? Well, as with the weapons manufacturers, they want to continue existing. What are the conditions necessary for them to do that? There need to be threats, whether offensive or defensive, and the protection agencies need to be able to meet those threats without being overcome, which means that they need enemies, and need weapons to fight those enemies, but also need to always have the best weapons so that they always win (or at least enough of the time to come out ahead). So the interests of protection agencies and weapons manufacturers are very much in alignment, and contain the same contradiction: fall to the enemy, and the enemy will eliminate old protection agencies that might compete with it; eliminate the enemy, and the need for the protection agency will no longer exist, and either one spells the end of the protection agency in question. So the two must be held in tension, though, again, this tension is not necessarily symmetrical in any given case.
And what about civilians, the people whom protection agencies are protecting and who may or may not work for either a protection agency or a weapons manufacturer (or both)? What are their interests? I’ve been in two of those positions myself: I’ve never developed weapons, but I did indeed work for a protection agency, so I’ll take myself as an example. I have a lot of interests, but if we start by talking about my interests with regards to weapons manufacturers and protection agencies… I think less and less of myself as an American and more and more as a Westerner, identifying with my civilization as it stands alongside and opposed to other civilizations. I do indeed have mortal enemies — maybe a person here or there who wants to kill me on an individual level but more often those who are a part of other civilizations who just want to kill Westerners, or at least turn the world towards their own interests and against mine. So I do indeed believe that there are enemies from whom I would reasonably desire to be protected. But there is a significant asymmetry between my interests and those of the weapons manufacturers and protection agencies: I might continue to exist without there being a threat to my existence. If the enemies I mentioned were to be defeated, or if they were to cease to be enemies for some reason, there’s no reason that that would prevent me from just going about my life. A lot of things in my life might change, depending on how its architecture is interwoven with the military-industrial complex I’ve outlined above, but there’s no reason at all that such a scenario would, in itself, end my existence. That said, that scenario doesn’t seem at all immanent.
But there’s another problem for me as well, and that’s that I don’t trust that the protection agencies that have been assigned to me as a consequence of my geography align with me in terms of my other interests. In the United States, weapons manufacturers and protection agencies tend to be funded by the politically conservative, and I’m a political progressive, a Democratic party voter, and, in opposition to American Christian hegemony, a Satanist to boot. So the weapons manufacturers and protection agencies are being funded by those whose interests are opposed to mine, and indeed those who are opposed to me directly.
I was talking recently about Joel Osteen and megachurch pastors — there’s another megachurch pastor, Robert Jeffress, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, who has recently accused Democratic party supporters of worshiping the Canaanite god Moloch, who was associated with child sacrifice. This is a clear case of what is known in philosophical circles as Othering: the social construction of a demographic as alien and subordinate, perhaps even as a malevolent enemy; in this case, an enemy which is constituted in part by me. United States President Donald Trump signs the budget that funds the weapons manufacturers, and he is also the commander in chief of the United States Armed Forces, the most powerful protection agency in the history of the world, and also the executive authority behind the numerous local protection agencies who protect me from local threats. He and his supporters have also framed my political demographic as Other and as enemies of the people, so I have good reason to at least wonder whether my protection agencies are out to protect me at all. America’s wars over the last two decades (at the least) certainly belie that such would be the case with regards to the U.S. military. It must be said, though, that my protection agencies certainly perform their function at least in a nominal sense — I have good reason to believe that I am indeed largely protected from various real threats — but I don’t have full confidence in their motivations for doing so or that they will continue to do so, and suspect that their continued protection may in some cases be a secondary result of their pursuing other interests which may not align with my own.
It is for this reason that I would be very distrustful of Obadiah Stane, at the least, even if I had good reason to believe that he was securing the most advanced weapons technology for the good of America and Western civilization rather than purely for his own personal gain. And yet, as I will explain presently, I would not have him do otherwise.
A fundamental disagreement between Tony Stark and Obadiah Stane was who should benefit from weapons technology, and for what reason. Stane believed that he should be the beneficiary of a system that goes so far as to supply both sides, such being, in his view, necessary to the system that had greatly profited them both. Stark was certainly willing to be the beneficiary of weapons technology — he was repeatedly unwilling to simply cede the technology he invented to other agencies — but understood that the interests of peace trumped those of perpetual war, and for that reason we side with him.
At least initially. The Sokovia Accords complicate things significantly, but that’s a subject for another time.
Where does that leave weapons manufacturers and weapons technology? I’ve already covered the necessity of protection agencies, and they can’t exist and succeed without weapons manufacturers and the technology they manufacture, so they’re not something we can easily do without, even if it were true that everyone would be better off if no one had weapons technology. So then I have to ask, is it necessarily true that weapons manufacturers will inevitably work against my other interests? To what degree are those interests shared by others? And to whose interests should those of weapons manufacturers be made subservient?
As to the first question, we’ve already seen that weapons manufacturers are driven by a dual and contradictory purpose, however asymmetrical: to prevail in war and perhaps thereby end it, and also to perpetuate it. The perpetuation of warfare is certainly at odds with my interests, and I think the interests of most civilians, which answers the second question, at least in part. War means chaos and death, neither of which are good for general human prosperity. And while I don’t think that this is always the case, we have indeed seen the deliberate perpetuation of war for purposes of capital in the recent past, with the Iraq war having been spun off from the more-morally-justified war in Afghanistan on very shaky grounds in an arrangement that was to the great financial benefit of several firms with key people working for the government in positions with a great deal of influence over the authorization and logistics of warfare. So, whether or not they inevitably must run counter to my interests, it is, at the very least, a real risk, so I think that then it must be a moral necessity that weapons manufacturing capabilities be vested in the right hands, the hands that will be responsible for it and use it for the benefit of people in general.
So whose are the right hands?
As we can see clearly from our vantage point in the nuclear age, weapons proliferation is a real threat to human life, and so the right person or agency is the one who gets all civilizations to move towards an overall drawdown of weapons capabilities and inventory, but I don’t see anyone who is aiming for that at the moment. On the best days it seems like a tense stalemate with constant ferment along the fault lines, and that’s without having even touched on weapons ownership by civilians. An omnilateral drawdown would require that many countries and organizations who are presently very hostile to each other come to trust each other, and there would be numerous opportunities for betrayals or misunderstandings to derail the entire process. That being the case, I wonder whether the status quo, where I at least want my side to have the best weapons, is the best we can do for now. Not that I don’t think we can do better regarding when and how weapons are used in general, and to whom we choose to sell weapons; and we’ve had some success in global drawdown with regard to some classes of weapons, but a sea-change in global armament seems untenable. Even disentangling weapons manufacturers from the capitalist mode of production would seem problematic, because, for all its problems, capitalism has historically proven itself in producing the best stuff. And while this may be a profoundly pessimistic thought and certainly a very depressing conclusion, it may very well be the reality regardless of how I feel about it.
This has already run long, but I’ll close with one last thought regarding the intention of this piece. Because this might seem like a personal policy piece, but my objective here, as with everything I do, is that the underlying message I want to convey concerns not the outcome, but the process: this is how I’ve used an aspect of popular culture to think through a political issue and come to a preliminary conclusion. If you walk away from this agreeing with me on policy, well, that’s certainly fine. But if you walk away from this and do your own analysis, that’s even better, even if you come to a completely different conclusion. Philosophy is not a spectator sport. Get off the bench and do some thinking.
Thanks much for reading, and special thanks to my patrons on Patreon, and in particular to my new patron Rich Cottle. Thanks so much for signing up, I’ll have some new exclusive content for you and my other patrons very soon.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and to sign up for my mailing list (form on the sidebar) so you can stay current on my latest work. And if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content. I’ll be publishing new work every Friday evening. I also have a reading list, which contains links to the books I used to research this and all of my other stories. Clicking through and buying books is a great, easy way to support my work.