TH [starting at 3:20]: “Somebody said to me, and I genuinely can’t remember where I’ve read this, that every villain is a hero in his own mind. And I think that if you can allow the audience to see that perspective, that there is some kind of flawed but comprehensible logic in the villain’s motivation, that the audience can go, ‘Oh, you know what, he has a point’… and I actually felt like that with Killmonger, with Michael B. Jordan’s performance in Black Panther. You could go, ‘I kind of see his point of view,’ and I think it’s important for the audience, even though they can perhaps see that this is a… it’s going to get you nowhere, like revenge, often it gets you nothing, it’s a fool’s errand, it’s a cul-de-sac, it’s an evacuation of your own anger into the external world, but at least audiences can see that… they can go, ‘Well, I understand why that character is upset or angry.’ So I suppose it’s about access… trying to allow the audience to see that even if the motivations are not perfect, that somehow you can see the point of view. I wonder about Thanos. It’s interesting, it’s a really powerful character, and there’s something nihilistic about his motivation. He just wants to bring death. He wants to destroy half the universe. ‘Why?’ is the question I would ask. And I am sure they have answered it.”
They answered it all right… but it’s a fucking terrible answer. It’s the answer of a freshman boy in a philosophy seminar who read Ayn Rand and talks about it loudly at every opportunity.
“Thanos’s plan is fairly crude utilitarianism, but not so crude that it can be dismissed out of hand.”
Please. Pleeeeeease stop letting white men talk about morality. Please.
They are like migraines on legs
the only moral dilemma presented by iw is HOW much it’s okay to make thanos suffer before obviating his entire existence and undoing all of his deeds. PLEEEEEEAASE.
that’s it folks, that’s the show. the russos tried to elevate Thanos beyond being the Worst Sexual Harrasser in Comic Book History, but the internet neckbeards smelled one of their own and found a way to out him as another pseudo-intellectual fuckboi who lives to make life harder for normal folk just trying to do their jobs. Lady Death been knew!
The discussion of Thanos and scarcity is absurd, but he’s right about the ridiculousness of Steve’s uncompromising Kantianism. Someone who’s not sucked in by Malthusian economics needs to discuss the deontology vs. consequentialism thing. I guess I will at some point. Probably with a lot of clips from “The Good Place.”
A pedantic but also kind of important note about the word “genocide”
As I understand it, part of the meaning of the word is that it’s the attempt to eliminate a specific *kind* of person (either from a certain territory/jurisdiction or from existence in the world as a whole), identified by race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability status, or some similar categorization scheme.
Thanos’s Snap therefore does not count as genocide because it is indiscriminate across such categories, so I prefer to call it “mass murder.” Arguably it is motivated by class-based contempt, but he does not specifically target the poor. His halving of individual populations like that of Gamora’s home planet might rightly be called genocide because he targeted that planet rather than others and was aiming to “cull” that specific population.
Carry on with eviscerating his defenders, though, because they’re appalling.
me: when will the mcu characters recognize how amazing tony is, instead of trash everything he does??
thanos: – tells tony he respects him – talks about how smart tony is – admits that tony is #relatable because he deals with great pressure – pets tony’s hair when he’s injured – genuinely hopes tony not to be forgotten after his death
I don’t doubt that people on both ends of the political spectrum want to disavow a view they see as obviously repugnant and blame it on their opponents. However, it also seems clear to me that the grounds on which people on the Left call Thanos’s worldview pro-capitalist and people on the Right call it socialist are quite different. In short, the leftist critics on Tumblr attribute his factual assumptions to capitalist ideology, while your Rand-supporting father is attributing his normative framework to a socialist mindset.
What people on Tumblr have been saying in various ways is that “overpopulation is a myth”: it is a false causal explanation for the existence and persistence of material scarcity. The idea of overpopulation, this criticism goes, enables rich people to blame poor people for their own poverty. The problem, these rich capitalists say, isn’t the distribution of resources; it isn’t that rich countries overproduce food and throw most of it away, or that rich people hoard money, or that powerful corporations renew patents on life-saving technology to make sure that the products remain scarce and expensive. It’s that those stupid poor people with no self-control just won’t stop making babies. I suspect that this criticism is something of an oversimplification; a growing human population will have more and more energy demands, which may or may not be possible to meet with only renewable energy resources, and will of course require more and more food, which will in turn require that wilderness be cleared for agriculture (unless urban farming and vertical gardens really catch on). On the other hand, population growth rates do slow down as societies become more educated and gender-egalitarian. So I suspect that the gap between the West and the rest of the world (whose labor and resources the West has been exploiting for the past few centuries) is a large part of the apparent problem, and if that gap were allowed to close, there would no longer be any reason to worry about runaway population growth.
What your father seems to be voicing is a general criticism of consequentialist ethics (which operates by maximizing some good outcome): that it aggregates well-being, and therefore has no problem sacrificing the well-being of a few people in order to improve the situation of a large number of people. The most common form of consequentialism is utilitarianism, for which the good to be maximized is pleasure or happiness. A criticism originally voiced by John Rawls and taken up by various other philosophical critics of utilitarianism is that it fails to recognize or respect “the separateness of persons.” It’s perfectly fine for one person to forgo a benefit at one time in order to enjoy a greater benefit at a later time, e.g., by saving and investing money, or by refraining from indulgences in order to preserve one’s health, because the near-term costs are borne by the same person who enjoys the long-term benefits. Utilitarianism makes the same kind of calculation across populations rather than across time, imposing smaller costs in one place in order to reap greater benefits elsewhere; but this is illegitimate (the criticism goes) because the people who bear the costs are not the same as the people who enjoy the benefits. Pretty obviously Thanos is reasoning in a consequentialist/utilitarian way: he’s trying to maximize average happiness by replacing a large number of low-quality lives with a smaller number of high-quality lives. It sucks for the people who die (or maybe not, since he wants to give them a quick, painless death) and for the people who lose loved ones, but in theory, things will be a lot better for the next few generations.
Consequentialism is a kind of collectivist thinking, you might say: the goal is to maximize well-being (however that’s defined) across the entire population of moral patients (creatures who deserve moral consideration, which might be humans, intelligent beings, sentient beings, all living beings…) without regard for how that well-being is distributed among the individuals. As a practical matter, utilitarianism tends to promote egalitarian distribution of resources because of the phenomenon of diminishing marginal utility: each added unit of whatever goods (money, food, etc.) provides more pleasure/happiness to someone with less of it than to someone with more of it, so you’ll tend to maximize happiness as the distribution nears equality – ignoring things like different individuals’ utility functions (i.e., how much pleasure/happiness each person gets from one unit of the good at each level of prior possession). So I can see how someone might think of utilitarianism as a “socialist” style of ethics… except that a lot of socialists hate it, too, and attribute it to capitalism (Bentham’s utilitarianism is one of the foundations of modern economic theory). But then both socialists and capitalists like to accuse each other of regarding human life as expendable, as something you can put a numerical value on, rather than as sacred, inviolable, possessing immeasurable dignity rather than a measurable price.
Loki is the Philosopher King 