Philosophy and the Superhero

Josh Landy
Can comic books reveal deep truths about human nature?

Ray Briggs
What can Marvel’s Miracle Man teach us about metaphysics?

Josh Landy
Should kids really be learning ethics from Batman and Superman?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
… except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from our respective shelters-in-place via the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ray teaches philosophy and I direct the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re thinking about philosophy and the superhero. Can we use superhero comics like a decoder ring to unlock ancient philosophical mysteries?

Josh Landy
No way, Ray. I mean, comics are great fun and everything, but they’re hardly real philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Oh, why not? They set up philosophical thought experiments, don’t they? Like, what if you think you’re observing the world around you but actually, your perceptions are being controlled by an evil genius?

Josh Landy
I mean, that’s a cool thought experiment. But that’s just straight out of Descartes, out of the “Meditations.”

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah. But it’s also the premise of Alan Moore’s “Miracle Man” series. The evil doctor Garganza kidnaps orphans. And while he works his plot, he keeps them locked in a world of dreams.

Josh Landy
Fine. Okay, so Alan Moore ripped off a thought experiment from Descartes. When have comic book artists ever made an original contribution to philosophy?

Ray Briggs
Well, Josh, what about time travel stories? In issue 56 of The Avengers, Captain America travels back in time and tries to rescue his former sidekick Bucky from a fatal plane crash.

Nathaniel Goldberg
Okay, cool story.

Ray Briggs
No, not just a cool story. It raises fundamental questions about the nature of time and causality. Like can we change the past? Or is it fixed forever?

Josh Landy
I mean, I love those questions, Ray, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t think this is a good way of getting at them. Time travel… that’s a conceptual mess. You go back in time to save someone who died. But then if you save them, they didn’t die.

Ray Briggs
Aha—see, we’re having fun arguing about it.

Josh Landy
Well, fun, sure. But I mean, it’s any more than just fun? Time travel is impossible. So comics aren’t helping us solve real world philosophical problems.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but comics are also totally relevant to real life. Like what about the plot from Watchmen, where Ozymandias stages an alien attack on New York?

Josh Landy
Alien Attack? That’s your real world philosophical problem?

Ray Briggs
Yes! The attack kills millions of people, but it prevents the Earth from being destroyed in an all out nuclear war. So should you try for the greatest good for the greatest number, or should you follow the rules?

Josh Landy
Okay, you know, I’ll grant you that is a real philosophical question. But I just don’t know if there’s anything special about the comic book format. I mean, I mean, why not just write an essay? If you write an essay, people are gonna have an easier time understanding your arguments. And then they’re not gonna have to flip through all those pages and pages of pictures.

Ray Briggs
Hey Josh, the pictures communicate ideas in their own right!

Josh Landy
Well, ideas—you can put those in words too!

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but images have a level of detail that words just don’t convey. The layout of comic panels can signal the order of events in time, or it can tell you about relationships of cause and effect. And you can use color and artistic style to communicate a mood.

Josh Landy
You know what, right? These are actually really good points. I’m willing to give comic books a chance.

Ray Briggs
Aha—Yes! Cool. So if you were a superhero, which superhero would you be?

Josh Landy
Oh, Email Man—can answer all messages in 20 minutes.

Ray Briggs
Wouldn’t you rather be Moisture Man?

Josh Landy
Moisture Man, who’s that?

Ray Briggs
We’re about to find out. We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede to ComiCon to investigate larger-than-life do-gooders. She files this report.

Holly McDede
My favorite superhero is Moisture Man. You probably haven’t heard of him. He’s no Clark Kent. But if you read the book, “Third-Class Superhero” by Charles Yu, he might ring a bell. Moisture Man can take two gallons of water from the moisture in the air and shoot it in a stream or a gentle mist. It’s not a very useful superpower. It might not even be a superpower at all. So I recently strolled over to a ComiCon convention in Concord, California to meet more capable heroes. Or at least people dressed up as fictional characters from comic books, TV shows and movies.

ComiCon 1
I’m dressed as Princess Leia today.

ComiCon 2
The one of a kind, innovative, vicious Wolf Beast.

ComiCon 3
Señor Deadpool.

ComiCon 4
Ghostbuster.

Holly McDede
I asked attendees to tell you about heroes that make them think the most.

James Bond
Darling Moneypenny…You know I never even looked at another woman.

Holly McDede
Joe Manio picked James Bond.

Joe Manio
Men love to be James Bond. I would love to be James Bond. Women love to be with James Bond. So you know, yeah.

Holly McDede
He says James Bond represents the good guy.

Joe Manio
Presidents—they always, you know, like Ronald Reagan was a big James Bond fan, John F. Kennedy had “From Russia With Love as his number one book to read, Bill Clinton was a big fan of James Bond.

Holly McDede
In 2019, when President Donald Trump learned a James Bond adaptation was driving an electric car he tweeted, “Sean Connery drove a coal powered Aston Martin full of ready and willing women in the trunk. It was a simpler time.” In any case, a lot of the men I spoke to chose heroes that embody pure righteousness or brutal strength.

Bruce Banner
You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

Holly McDede
Andrew Daniel Ramirez admires the Incredible Hulk.

Andrew Daniel Ramirez
The Hulk’s strength increases geometrically. As he grows angrier, he’s able to toss mountains around like their toys. He grows strong that he’s able to throw planets around.

Holly McDede
But then others I spoke with picked characters who show weakness as well as strain, like when Gwen Helt, who picked Harley Quinn from Batman.

Harley Quinn
Hey, guys, I’m back.

Holly McDede
Harley Quinn has a PhD in psychology and she falls in love with the Joker.

Gwen Helt
She was manipulated and gaslit into being the person that she became. So she became Harley Quinn because of the way the Joker treated her and the lies he told her.

Holly McDede
But then, Gwen tells me, they break up and Harley Quinn holds onto parts of herself that the Joker created while attempting to forge her own identity.

Gwen Helt
She knows that she doesn’t want to just do evil for the sake of evil. She wants to do radical and drastic things to change the world.

Holly McDede
Harley kills people in the process. But there are times when she is compassionate and loving.

Gwen Helt
Her idea for the world is that you should be responsible for yourself. You shouldn’t be stupid, and you shouldn’t mess with other people in ways they don’t deserve to be messed with. But if they deserve to be messed with, mess with them,

Holly McDede
Harley Quinn is damaged and obsessive, kind and loyal, good and evil. And that brings me back to my fictional hero, Moisture Man. In the story, Moisture Man is depressed because all he can do is squirt out water. He’s sad because, at the end of the day, he’s just a regular amount of good and a normal amount of evil. In other words, a complicated superhero.

Jerry Seinfeld
Did somebody see you with a car, like, over your head, call your Superman, and you cut out an S and sewed it up on your thing there?

Holly McDede
You know, like the rest of us. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report. Holly. You know, I think I’d probably rather be Harley Quinn but ultimately more like Moisture Man—at best. I’m Josh Landy with me as my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about philosophy and the superhero.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Nathaniel Goldberg, who’s a professor of philosophy at Washington and Lee University. He’s the co-author of “Superhero Thought Experiments: Comic Book Philosophy.” Nathaniel, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Nathaniel Goldberg
Thanks, thanks to both of you. Pleasure to be here.

Josh Landy
So Nathaniel, What first got you interested in superhero comics?

Nathaniel Goldberg
So let me tell you a story. Once upon a time in a far distant galaxy, or rather actually my own philosophy department, I needed to print out an article. It’s a true story. So I went to the printer in lo and behold, it was broken. So I walked downstairs to the English department, and printed out this article I’d written by the on this thought experiment by this philosopher, local to the Bay Area, someone who taught at Berkeley named Donald Davidson. And he had written a paper on this character that he called swamp man. Anyway, when I was there, somebody from the English Department turned out his name was Chris Kavala. He picked it up and said, Hey, you work on Alan Moore, Swamp Thing. And Chris and I eventually started talking. And we realized that there was lots of doubling between philosophical thought experiments and comic books. And we decided to write this book.

Ray Briggs
And I think that’s a great origin story. I had a lot of trouble convincing Josh, that comics are a good way to do philosophy. Could you try convincing him for us?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Sure. So there are a couple things that comics do in a way different from academic philosophy. One is they tend to be much more immersive. So we can all read, philosophers take on imagine that this thing happened. Or imagine that you were dreaming or imagine that there was a trolley in front of you in some tracks, and you had to flip a switch. Usually, when philosophers do that, they just describe things in a couple sentences, you know, a paragraph at most, and then they try to test your intuitions. Now comics, on the other hand, will sometimes dedicate entire issues or maybe even series of issues to explore themes. So they’ll do it slower, and more fleshed out, and also in color in images and graphics.

Josh Landy
So you can get the kind of feeling of being caught up in a story and caring and feeling what the stakes are like. And you can also get that immediate emotional impact from the from the images.

Nathaniel Goldberg
Absolutely. And if I could that too One way that comics are philosophical are a good philosophical tool to start thinking about things. The second way is that comics themselves present philosophical puzzles, like, how do words and images jointly communicate information we normally communicate with each other just using one or the other. But comics do both. And there are other sorts of questions that we might call like philosophy of comics that come directly from the kind of thing that comics are.

Ray Briggs
Oh, cool. So comics create a kind of case study for philosophers to figure out?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And they’re, of course, just one kind of way that we communicate movies, and music, and dance in theater. All these are different ways to communicate. And philosophers should be interested in all of them.

Josh Landy
I totally get that, you know, and I’m a literature person, a fiction person myself, so I’m hardly going to argue strenuously against comic books. I love them. But, um, but here’s a possible pushback, right? I mean, in a philosophy paper, like the Davidson that you mentioned, you know, a philosopher might create a thought experiment, but then, you know, it’s carefully controlled. And then the philosopher would explain what she meant by it, like, what she was trying to do with it, what it what it means, what we should learn, and so on. Whereas in a comic book, well, I don’t know. I mean, that might make for a very weird kind of comic and not necessarily the kind that we might enjoy. So I think there are some drawbacks to using comics to do the same kind of thing as a philosophy paper.

Nathaniel Goldberg
So there are some drawbacks, but there are also some benefits. So the drawbacks, you clearly articulated that when philosophers do thought experiments, they try to do them experimentally, carefully with a control with an eye so they tried to isolate what are the key things we’re looking at. And in a comic, all sorts of things happen with with lots of punches and kicks on top of that. But there’s something else that can be said about ways of philosophy doesn’t always succeed at least academic philosophy. Not only is it not always immersive, but even carefully tuned philosophical thought experiments often smuggle things in. So Daniel Dennett got this term, I’m guessing some of your listeners have heard of it. He calls, thought experiments, intuition pumps, that is that they’re not always honestly doing what they’re meant to do. But they’re sneaking in the conclusion that the philosopher wants you to reach. So even academic, philosophical thought experiments aren’t always up to snuff.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about philosophy and the superhero with Nathaniel Goldberg, co-author of “Superhero Thought experiments.”

Ray Briggs
How would Superman handle real world ethical dilemmas? Would Batman disagree? Should superheroes be serving as moral inspiration for the rest of us?

Josh Landy
Solving tall conundrums in a single bound—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Joey Scarbury
Believe it or not, I’m walkin’ on air / I never thought I could feel so free / Flyin’ away on a wing and a prayer / Who could it be? Believe it or not it’s just me.

Josh Landy
Believe it or not, comic books can be richly philosophical. I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about philosophy in the superhero. Our guest is Nathaniel Goldberg from Washington and Lee University, co-author of “Superhero Thought Experiments.” In the age of COVID, we’re pre recording this episode from the safety of our respective shelters in place. So we can’t take your phone calls. But you can always email us at comments at Philosophy Talk dot ORG, or tweet us—our handle is at Phil talk radio.

Josh Landy
Nathaniel, can you tell us about one of your favorite comic book plot points, something that raises an original philosophical question or sheds a new light on an existing one?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Yeah, it would be my pleasure. So as Chris and I were talking about different philosophical topics, the general area of ethics came up pretty early on. And Chris started telling me that at least in the very first year of their comic run, Superman, the man of steel and Batman The Caped Crusader, in their very first year, they seem to be motivated by very different ethical theories. So Superman, pretty consistently says he wants to write wrongs to make the world a better place to improve humanity to help the helpless Batman, on the other hand, very clearly in I don’t know episode or issue one or two. I don’t remember the the numbers on the philosopher, not the comics guy. But very early on, he says he, he takes a pledge to avenge the death of his parents and he swears an oath. And as Chris and I were talking about this, we realized that Superman pretty much is channeling John Stuart Mill and the idea of utilitarianism, that what’s good is what’s the right thing to do is to maximize the good or make Happiness, and people’s well being the goal of ethics. Batman, on the other hand, commits himself, he obligates himself to fulfill his duty to avenge his parents death. And in practical cases, those often lead to the same results. But sometimes they lead to very different ones.

Ray Briggs
So what’s the case where they give you different advice about what to do?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Sure. So there is a comic line, where a Batman is hunting down the Joker, and he’s trying to do this because the Joker is a bad guy, and he’s taken this oath to try to stop him. At the same time. Batman isn’t at least in the early run of the comics, particularly concerned about innocent bystanders. He’s not out to try to make the world a better place to maximize happiness or well being, he’s just out to fulfilling that really narrow, specific oath. And that’s not the sort of thing Superman has shown is doing. He wants to do them both stop the bad guy and help people because ultimately, for him, stopping the bad guy is helping people.

Ray Briggs
So maybe this is a naive question, but why would anybody want to be like Batman? Like, why not just help as many people as you can?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Right now? That’s a great question. And Batman is can use a word he’s, he said, deontologist, like Immanuel Kant and WD Ross and other philosophers, he thinks that ethics is about fulfilling duties and obligations. It’s just that Batman’s duties are specific, are very narrow, they’re about at least in that first run vengeance, we can have broader duties, like respecting individuals as persons never using people as mere means to an end. That’s Kant’s categorical imperative, at least one of its forms. And that won’t always get us to benefit the greatest number of people, but it will get us at least a few take Kant to be better people and certainly better than Batman himself was, at least in those early issues.

Josh Landy
I you know, Ray, earlier on mentioned, a case where you actually get this battle between deontology and consequentialism. States right that the watchmen were Ozymandias. Thanks. Yeah. You know, kill 3 million people if it saves the world. And Rorschach says, No, you can’t do that. It’s just we have a duty to humanity. Do you read it that way, too.

Nathaniel Goldberg
Yes. In fact, in the chapter that Chris and I talked about Batman and Superman, we conclude by talking about that particular case. So just to flesh it out a little bit. This is during the height of the Cold War in an alternate, alternate reality of earth, not ours, but the height of the Cold War. And the Soviet Union and United States are on the brink of nuclear annihilation, and Ozymandias, whose superhero devices this plot to pretend that there’s an alien invasion, or in the movie to pretend that this other crimes that this other superhero caused one way or another, that there’d be mass murder across the earth, except the plot goes so far is actually to cause it. So he does cause millions to die. But as a result, there’s peace, World War Three never happens. And in this climactic scene, Russia, who represents not the utilitarian but the deontologist, he pretty much channels Kant and has the belief that you should never lie to people, no matter the consequences, because we’ve got a duty Oh, is to be honest. So he wants to tell the world that all this was just a ploy to try to avert world war three, even though by telling them that he could cause world war three, but that doesn’t matter to him. The truth is what matters.

Josh Landy
I mean, I gotta say, I feel like I’m with Ray on this right? Well, why would you do that? But I’m curious about I wonder whether there’s some kind of I don’t know enough about comics. But is there some kind of evolution here, because you’ve got what you described as the early situation where you had a Batman and a Superman, you had a deontologist and a consequentialist. And then later on, you get the watchmen. And that’s the kind of drama where the two things are, the two forces are fighting it out against each other, right, Ozymandias versus Russia. And then there’s I guess, I think, I think The Killing Joke is the comic book that the Dark Knight movie was based on. And there it seems to me, you’ve got the the struggle being the war being waged internally, where Batman himself seems torn between duty and consequences, right? On the one hand, he’s got his set of rules. Wait, I should do it properly. Rules. He’s got his rules, right? But on the other hand, he’s willing to beat a confession out of somebody, which doesn’t sound very Kantian. So do you see it that way? That there’s an evolution where it’s like, you know, the, the battle is being waged in different comic strips, and now then it’s being waged within one, and then it’s actually gone inside the soul of a single character.

Nathaniel Goldberg
Yes. So I think this is a way that comics mirror human psychology better than philosophical thought experiments do. Because all of us, or at least many of us have these battles when we decide what to do. Of course, thank goodness, our decisions don’t usually involve averting World War Three or beating up people. But they do involve making hard choices sometimes loved ones who aren’t well, or limited money and having to decide what to do with it. And we often at least I certainly do sometimes think about, well, which we get the better results. And then I think well, but what am I obligated to do based upon my promises? So yeah, there is a kind of evolution within comics, but I think that’s because it mirrors human psychology, too.

Ray Briggs
So I want to know, like, does forgive the awful pun, just different men have like a dark night of the soul to where it’s only Batman? And like, Is there is there a way to criticize Superman the way that we’ve been criticizing Batman?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Sure, well, first, let me say I’m actually, maybe not exactly on Batman’s deontological side, but I am persuaded by a lot of deontology. So I don’t I don’t think that utilitarianism isn’t necessarily the right view, not just because of Ozymandias his extreme case, but just in general, it doesn’t seem fair, at least some of the time. But to your specific question. Yeah. So Chris, and I were very careful to narrow our scope, because Batman and Superman were characters created in the 1930s. And they’ve been rebooted and retcon. Since then, more times than I can count. So there are versions, I’m sure of Batman, where he does try to get the greatest good for the greatest number. And there are versions of Superman where maybe he is more rule bound and doesn’t worry about consequences. But we tried to be focused for that reason.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. So if I can pivot a little I, I’m worried a little bit about sort of the the realism thing that you brought up earlier. So we are like Superman, and Batman, in some ways. So like Superman and Batman, like we face moral dilemmas where it’s not obvious what to do. But they don’t operate by the same rules as real human beings. And so you might worry that like a moral conclusion that I draw for a superhero doesn’t apply to a moral, a moral situation, where the person in question doesn’t have superpowers. So like, how good are the thought experiments were running in terms of their external validity?

Nathaniel Goldberg
No, that’s a great question. So I think it’s Jonathan dancy once he’s a an ethicist, who was on a public talk show at some point. And the host asked him, so what do you tell your students to do in situation X, Y, or Z? And he said, I don’t tell them to do anything. I just teach them the ethical theories. And I guess I want to say it can be the same kind of move here that I’m not encouraging anybody to act like Superman or like that man. Rather, it’s to think through the thought experiments how these characters in their peculiar isolated fictional lives, make decisions, because maybe there are lessons to be drawn. And philosophical thought experiments like the trolley problem and problems like that. They don’t really arise in everyday life either. And they often have characters who famous violinists who have people hooked up to them when they’re sleeping. That’s not the sort of thing. It’s a jerbs Thompson thought experiment about abortion. That’s the sort of thing that doesn’t happen either. So yeah, they have their limitations. I just don’t know if they’re as limited as maybe the two of you are suggesting.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about superhero comics and philosophy with Nathaniel Goldberg from Washington and Lee University. Nathaniel, you were just mentioning the violinists thought experiment in philosophy. And it made me think of a thought experiment. I wonder if it’s maybe the oldest superhero thought experiment, we know the ring of guy, geez, in Plato’s Republic, right? Imagine that you had a ring that could make you invisible. And, you know, if you if you grant that that is a superhero thought experiment, I wonder if it works kind of the way you were just describing because Socrates asks, well, you know, what would people do? What would somebody do if they had a ring like that? And Glaucon says, they’d steal stuff. And Socrates says, No, they wouldn’t. And so that’s a nice, you know, one of the first cases maybe the first case we know, and it seems to be working the way you say that it, it kind of leaves it a little bit open. I mean, I know of course, Socrates doesn’t think it’s open. He thinks he can use it to prove something about morals. But, you know, Glaucon his immediate intuition is, yeah, give me that ring. I’m gonna I’m gonna nick everything.

Nathaniel Goldberg
Right. When I, and I, I teach a class actually, at my university has this special compressed term at the end of the year where we do special topics, classes, and I do one on philosophy and science fiction, not comics, per se, but we read the Republic closely, and if I don’t know if either of you have ever taught it or if any of your listeners have read it recently, but it reads really well really vividly. And yes, students are not sure what they would do. And quite frankly, depending on how you read the dialogue, I don’t Don’t know whether it’s so clear that Plato ever makes his case that we shouldn’t, Nick things if we have the ring.

Josh Landy
Yeah. And that, actually, that I wanted to ask you something about that, like, you could think, you know, we could think of thought experiments in philosophical essays as trying to prove a point. And we could think of thought experiments in superhero comics, as making us think and trying to figure out where we stand. I also wonder, you know, I wonder if, like, we were saying earlier that maybe a disadvantage of the comic book thought experiment is that it isn’t controlled, and there isn’t like an argument around it. But maybe there’s a strength of that, what if they can be heuristic devices? Like you just let your imagination run free? And you say, Well, what if it was like this, and you just make the world and you don’t know where you’re going? But precisely because you don’t know where you’re going? All kinds of great things could come on?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I mean, a criticism of I just want to jump in and say criticism of non comic book thought experiments is that they’re not sufficiently randomized.

Josh Landy
Interesting. So comic ones are randomized, and that gives them a kind of additional strength.

Ray Briggs
Right? So that seems like an advantage of comics that’s not shared by philosophy papers, and maybe like something philosophers could learn from, do you think they could learn from it?

Josh Landy
And so yeah, an open ended, right, that’s, uh, you know, you try something out as a comic book writer, and you don’t know where it’s going.

Nathaniel Goldberg
Right? Right. So of course, comic book writers other than Alan Moore, who is on record as having read philosophy, but most of them haven’t. So these aren’t the sorts of things they’re intentionally doing. And no matter how much I might like comparing comic books to academic philosophy, comics still aren’t philosophical as a goal. So they’re ultimately trying to tell interesting stories, which is why they’ve been picked up by by movie studios and why they make billions and billions of dollars, because of the stories. The stories also get you to think that there are, they are randomized, they do flesh things out. But Let’s also not forget that that’s not the goal of the creators, it might happen. And it might, it might require a philosophy professor to talk about them philosophically. But that’s okay. Because I happen to be a philosophy professor, so I don’t mind.

Josh Landy
On that note, could I ask you about something that I think is a really interesting feature of comic books, which you mentioned a little bit ago about reboots, you often have a reboot, where the same set of characters more or less, is involved. But the story sort of starts again, with a slightly changed starting position. And one variant of that I find fascinating is where somebody of a different race or gender takes over for a superhero. So Captain Marvel warmachine, Green Lantern, and I wonder, you know, as a philosopher, could you say something about that? Do you think that’s raising questions about identity? Like, what is it that makes a person who they are? What can be changed? What has to remain the same? Do you feel that that’s something that comes out of these reboots?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Oh, absolutely. So Chris, and I have a chapter trying to explain the difference between reboots and retcons. And we tried to do it. Explain the difference using some philosophy of language. But so we’re this is on our mind, but I didn’t so much think about the identity of individuals through reboots. So Captain Marvel is, I guess, a man in the comics and a woman in movies, but I can talk about that directly. Yeah, it gets us thinking about metaphysics. In particular, I’m sorry.

Ray Briggs
Oh, no, I just wanted to hear more about this.

Nathaniel Goldberg
Oh, sure. So it gets us thinking about what it is just as, just as Josh was suggesting, what it is to be the same person. Are there features about us that are just accidental to who we are? So, you know, I could dye my hair a different color. I’m still the same Nathaniel. We can ask the question, Captain Marvel if Jen if their gender changes? Is it the same character and the Marvel Cinematic Universe studios? I think one has to think it is or at least it’s close enough that we can identify similarities. But as we know from fan reaction, sometimes misguided sometimes prejudicial, sometimes not. This gets people excited, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a heated negative way, but it at least gets them thinking. What is it about us that makes us who we are? Yeah. And through all these reboots and read cons, we can ask that question each time.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about superhero comics and philosophy with Nathaniel Goldberg from Washington and Lee University, co-author of “Superhero Thought Experiments.”

Ray Briggs
Could a comic book universe shed light on reality? Do superhero stories raised questions about the nature of thought and language? Could they even teach us to tell right from wrong?

Josh Landy
Heroes, villains, and the meaning of life—when Philosophy Talk continues.

R.E.M.
I am, I am, I am Superman, and I can do anything.

Josh Landy
Is it consequentialism? Is it deontology? No, it’s Superman. I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. And our guest is Nathaniel Goldberg from Washington and Lee University. We’re thinking about philosophy and the superhero.

Josh Landy
So Nathaniel, we were just talking before the break about what the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been doing lately, and exploring identity questions and things like that. Do you have thoughts about where it’d be good to go next? Like what what philosophical idea you think comic book writers should, should tackle in the future?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Yeah, there are some really interesting metaphysical ideas, big picture ideas, that as far as I know, comics haven’t addressed. So in your discussion, when the two of you were talking before you introduced me, you did talk about the Fantastic Four and time travel, and that gets good exploration. But the related issues like have that cause and effect, is it possible for a cause to come after its effect? This is called backwards causality. And as far as I know, comics don’t talk about that. But that would be something germane for them to tell I wouldn’t do it. Yeah. All right. Well, maybe it did it now. And because it did it now it will have done it in the past.

Ray Briggs
So would you see room for more crossover projects between philosophers and comic book artists? Like is your book crossover project? And what would more of those look like?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Yes, so the book is it is a crossover project. But it’s also it was an attempt to popularize philosophy. Because just like Philosophy Talk, Chris. And I think that it’s really good to have philosophy part of the conversation, not just in the academy. But to your general question. Other sorts of crossovers. Yeah, something that we looked about that we looked at and would like to explore more is how do images and words work together in comics? In the images in comics, unlike in movies, don’t move aren’t they’re not movies, they’re still images? So can we have a theory of meaning that applies to static images, where they’re also words on top of them. And we tried to give something like one, but philosophers can explore that further, and they can talk to comic book writers too. And maybe we’ll have another Alan Moore who read some more philosophy.

Ray Briggs
So at the beginning of the show, I was arguing with Josh and saying that the images can do things that words just can’t do. Who do you side with?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Oh, right. I think that images and words do different things. So sure images can do things that words can’t do. That’s absolutely right. But I think words can do things that images can’t do. So I guess I’m, I guess I’m Switzerland, between Josh and Ray today.

Josh Landy
Very diplomatic. And but that seems that seems exactly right. And some of the things that sometimes people talk about in relation to comics, there’s the simplification of the image is one thing. There’s there’s the immediate emotional impacts from like scary images or beautiful images or things like that. But then there’s also what’s what they call the gutter, right? That the gap between two frames on a page, where often there’s a big what we would call in cinema Jumpcut, there’s a big gap between one image and the other and the reader has worked to do. Do you see that as connecting with the kind of thing that you’ve been talking about? Because in a thought experiment, you’ve also got work to do? As a listener with arcs member or reader? You got to figure out what what to think about it? Do you see that as connecting and comic books with the kind of work you have to do to get from one image to the other?

Nathaniel Goldberg
I do. So there’s a particular case that I’m, I’m not, it’s not coming to mind right now. But there’s a comic where in one scene, there’s a character who shone near some things, some ceramic vases, and then in the next, the next frame, the vases are broken. And we as readers are supposed to process what happened and the intuitive thing I guess, is to say that the the character knock them down, but we don’t know. And in a way, the comic book writer and artist and illustrator that the team that together produce the comic, are trying to get us to have particular thoughts without spelling them out. And you’re exactly right, Josh, that’s the nature of comics. It’s to have these gutters between the images, where people have to think.

Ray Briggs
Are there gutters in written language and sort of verbal language too?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Yes, I was just thinking that as you asked the question, yes, there must be but I don’t know whether they’re necessarily as punctuated as they are in comics, I mean, they are punctuated because there are periods and punctuation marks where one thought stops and the other starts. But in comics, it’s like music in this way. It’s got a rhythm where it’s every every couple centimeters, however big or inches, however big the pages, there’ll be A break. And sometimes a lot will happen during the break. And sometimes a lot won’t. And it requires imagination and inference drawing and dare I say philosophizing, to string them all together into a coherent story.

Josh Landy
So I’ve been doing philosophy since I was five.

Nathaniel Goldberg
Yes, if not before.

Josh Landy
Excellent here. It’s this. I wonder about like, one thing I love in some comic books is the richness of the drawings, obviously, is great variation. But some of them it’s or they’re almost like works of art in their own right. And I feel I don’t know if it feels this way to both of you. But as though a kind of mood or feeling emotional reaction is being generated even by the background of the image and not just the foreground.

Nathaniel Goldberg
Yes. So I think that’s that exactly, if you’ll pardon the pun illustrates the way that academic thought experiments just aren’t as rich or immersive or emotive. And a lot of philosophers take issue with academic thought experiments, just because they are emotive because they’re supposed to pump your intuition. So it’s not always a good thing. This happens. But those philosophers who like thought experiments, I guess I’m suggesting, have reason to like comic books also. Great.

Ray Briggs
So how, like what would be the best way for philosophers to enrich our thought experiments? I know that there’s one philosopher Helen de Cruz, who’s been drawing pictures of just famous philosophical thought experiments to give them some of the richness and detail that art and literature have. What else should we be doing?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Well, given that yours truly can’t draw to save his life, I have trouble with stick figures. One thing we might do is go outside our departments, not just to art departments. But in general, philosophers might do more interdisciplinary work. And my book is interdisciplinary with comics studies. But there are other ways that philosophers can reach out as well. And I think philosophy is, I want to say uniquely privileged, or at least distinctly privileged to be able to do that, because we talk about No, we question everything except our intelligence, or sometimes like mine, but we don’t question our readers. But that lets us talk to people in other disciplines and comics studies and English and physics and music and history. These are all good places for philosophers to to make friends.

Josh Landy
That makes perfect sense. I want to ask you a devil’s advocate question, because as you know, I’m a fan of all things, fiction and including comics. But what if somebody said that precisely because it gets our emotions going, it clouds the issue, right? You care too much about the character you side with Batman, for example. And that empathetic involvement makes you more predisposed to whatever Batman decides of Batman says, I’m going to take revenge at all costs. You’re like, Yay for revenge? You know it? Could somebody make that argument?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Oh, sure. Somebody could and I think the thought here are two answers. Answer one is, think philosophical thought experiments are already doing that. Maybe just not honestly. That’s Daniel Dennett, intuition pump worry. But here’s the answer to Sure. If you’re reading the Batman comic, and you’re immersed in Batman’s world, the obvious thing to do is then read the Superman comic, and be immersed in his world. And read lots of comics or novels or fiction, watch movies, listen to music, get a general holistic picture from as many sources as makes sense, and then draw your conclusions. And just because one is emotive doesn’t mean that it’s not a good source, maybe it means it needs to be balanced with something else. And comics have decades and decades and decades. And if you go all the way back to Plato is doing thought experiments, then philosophy generally has centuries or millennia to draw on.

Ray Briggs
We’ve been talking a lot about what philosophy can teach us concerning ethics. But Nathaniel, if I’ve read your book, right, you think that the teachings of comics go beyond ethics, and that they have philosophical consequences for metaphysics and philosophy of mind? So how is the fictional universe going to teach me about the nature of the reality I live in, which has different rules are about the nature of the mind that I have, which probably has different rules from fictional minds?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Well, maybe the most vivid example that I have is the one that you mentioned. And I mentioned a bunch of times, it’s fantastic for comic book series, where it seems like every couple of years, the the writers at Marvel when they were designing the Fantastic Four, they’re playing with a different metaphysical view of the nature of time. And I teach metaphysics, and I teach these, I think well written, but students think really dry essays on whether the future exists. The past exists, it doesn’t it does. But yet when you read these comics, you see consequences. I mean, fictional consequences, but still consequences of which view you happen to be illustrating, literally in the comic book.

Ray Briggs
So it sounds like maybe maybe comic books aren’t gonna answer the question, what is time like, but they could answer the question, what could time be like?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Yeah, so I think I’m going to give the same answer I gave with the Jonathan dancy, what do you tell your students how they should act towards one another? I don’t I have them think. So comics get us thinking about things. And there’s one thing in particular, I think that comics do, at least the Fantastic Four comics have done that philosophers don’t. And that is, I don’t know any philosopher who has inconsistent, intentionally bad word who has over decades different views of time that just don’t match up. But the Fantastic Four does, and this may be makes us wonder, as philosophers, Hey, is it possible to have a metaphysical view of time that’s not consistent? And is it possible to change the example to have a view of the mind relates to the body that’s not consistent. philosophers are always worried, or we’d like to be worried about consistency. And there’s that Emerson quote about how consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. comic book artists are not afraid.

Josh Landy
Foolish consistency. So you might be smart consistency is good.

Nathaniel Goldberg
Josh, you didn’t hear the ellipses in my quote.

Ray Briggs
So I was gonna object that like, of course, it’s possible to have inconsistent views because like, oh, the author’s fantastic for having consistent views. But now I’m a little bit worried about who I’m going to be attributing those inconsistent views to. It’s not like there’s necessarily one author who has inconsistent views about the nature of time. Like, is there somebody with inconsistent views?

Nathaniel Goldberg
Right, so a topic of serious interest in academic philosophy right now is called collective intentionality. What does it mean for groups to make decisions like when the government tells people shelter in place, it’s not as if there’s just one person even if there’s a spokesperson, and Chris and I in our book, try to apply Daniel Dennett theory about what makes someone have intentions in the first place. We try to apply that theory to all the writers and artists and illustrators who are involved in a comic. And we try to say that for pragmatic reasons, and therefore kind of for metaphysically real reasons, it does make sense to say that a comic is communicating something even though it was created by lots of different people. It might even make sense to say over time, Marvel Comics changed their view, when over time, there was no one single person at the company whose view changed.

Josh Landy
Well, I wish we could talk about this forever. It has been no pun intended, a super conversation with Daniel, thanks so much for joining us today.

Nathaniel Goldberg
Oh, my pleasure. And I kind of was hoping that pun was intended because puns are fun things too.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Nathaniel Goldberg, professor of philosophy at Washington and Lee University, and co-author of “Superhero Thought Experiments: Comic Book Philosophy.” So Ray, what’s your thinking now?

Ray Briggs
I’m thinking I want to go read some comic books.

Josh Landy
Me too. I want to see a comic about you know, like a philosopher, guy or philosopher person, right? Who doesn’t have that foolish consistency. I love the idea. This conversation continues at philosophers corner at our online community of thinkers were our motto with apologies to Descartes is Cogito ergo Blago, I think, therefore, I blog, and you can become a partner in the community by visiting our website, Philosophy Talk dot orgy.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments at Philosophy Talk dot ORG, and we might feature it on the blog. And now how about a thought experiment at superspeed from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. I turn to Larry Niven’s classic piece of speculation, written way back in 1969, MAN OF STEEL, WOMAN OF KLEENEX. It addresses the difficulty Superman faces when searching for a mate. Should he succeed, and should the relationship turn sexual, Niven writes“…with kryptonian muscles behind it, Kal-El’s semen would emerge with the muzzle velocity of a machine gun bullet.” Also, lest we forget, Kal-El’s semen is indestructible. So even if the sperm are sluggish and slow, peritonitis and death await the earthly Lois Lane or Lana Lang or even Lori Lemaris (the mermaid, remember her, speaking of awkward lovemaking options). Now certainly, Superman’s comic book adventures avoided these morbid yet strangely erotic scenarios. But other limitations of the character soon loomed large. Bullets bounced off his chest. He can stop a locomotive just by standing on the tracks. He can fly into space and somehow, even in a vacuum, find the leverage necessary to stop comets and meteors from flying into earth. The point being, adventures ran out of steam pretty quickly. As Superman’s powers grew, or did not wane, the enemies arrayed against him multiplied. The creators had to turn to supervillains- fellow escapees from Krypton, geniuses like Lex Luthor, or Brainiac, the magical guy from another dimension, Mr. Mix Yez Piddle Ik. You can only get rid of him by making him say his name backwards. You had to have kryptonite, which can weaken Superman, or red kryptonite, which can affect him in weird unpredictable ways, or for other story options you gave him the bottle city of Kandor, a tiny Krypton in a jar, and Krypto the super dog, and Super girl, and her supercat Streaky, and Bizarro World, and the Phantom Zone, and time travel, and interdimensional travel, and multiverses. Jimmy Olson and Lois Lane ultimately got their own comics, which usually involved them getting into scrapes and trying to avoid telling Superman about it, because by golly, they’re fully grown men and women they don’t need help from a man, super or other. Jimmy Olson got turned into a giant turtle man in one adventure. He becomes a voodoo priest in another, in another he’s a genie, commanded by Lex Luthor!. In another he marries Supergirl, or so it claimed on the cover. I doubt it, frankly. Lois Lane, in her turn, is turned into a giant by Red kryptonite. And there was baby Lois, bizarro Lois, of course, Lois Lane fighting a duel for Superman with Lana Lang, Lois marrying Batman, Lois on trial for murdering Lana Lang. Yowie. And Superman helpless to stop it. There’s one of the reasons Superman is hard to make movies about. He’s ultimately a helpless guy. You have to have that bit of vulnerability. You can’t have him kill anybody. He’s too powerful, it would be creepy. And you can have kryptonite, red kryptonite – think of that, pieces from your home town are now TOXIC to you – you can use magic on Superman, you can use science on him, you can trick him into going to a place where his powers don’t work, you make him fall in love, and that’s that for Superman. So he’s not so super after all, just another lug with thick skin. If you want to know the true depiction of a Superman, check out the graphic novel Watchmen. Dr. Manhattan. Disintegrated and then reintegrated as a naked blue guy, Dr. Manhattan eventually becomes so super he can disappear reappear, live on the moon, grow indifferent to the love of a fine woman, and not care that much if a thousand people die if it saves a million, and not even sure if we’re worth the candle of saving. A man truly become as god. He even vaporizes a guy, pretty much on a moral whim. At the end of Watchmen, the comic, his first incarnation, he’s off to find another universe where things aren’t so complicated. Kind of like when I moved to Oakland. Without the dematerializing intergalactic space travel part. But I feel super, thanks for asking. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2020.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Tina Pamintuan.

Josh Landy
The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, and Lauren Schecter.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University. And from the partners that are online community of thinkers.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program did not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, Philosophy Talk dot ORG, where you too can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Jerry Seinfeld
Where’d you come up with that name, Superman, anyway? Why’re you asking? I’m just curious. Ma & Pa Kent didn’t name you that. Did you name yourself Superman?