Daredevil, Born Again: Making the Case for Virtue Ethics

Source: Marvel Comics

**Minor spoilers for Daredevil: Born Again**

In the second episode of the Disney+ series Daredevil: Born Again, Hector Ayala comes upon a man being beaten by two others in a subway station. Ayala rushes to his defense, and in the ensuing fight with the two attackers, one of them stumbles backwards onto the tracks and is hit by a train. The other attacker pulls a gun, announces that he’s a police officer, and arrests Ayala for the murder of his partner.

The next episode finds Matt Murdock defending Ayala in court, and his key witness—the man Ayala saved, who turns out to have been a confidential informant for the police—refuses to testify after he sees the dozens of police officers present. Left with no options, Matt outs Ayala in court as the White Tiger, a street-level hero with a magical amulet that grants him extraordinary strength and speed. He presents copious evidence of the White Tiger’s contributions to the community, including numerous statements from police officers—many of them in the courtroom—who appreciated his help, sometimes to save their own lives. When Matt asks him why he does this, Ayala simply replies, “It was the right thing to do.”

Virtue for the Defense

In his closing statement, Matt asks the jury:

Every night, Hector Ayala goes out, and risks his life to keep his neighborhood, to protect his community. So ask yourselves: Does this sound like the type of man who’d murder a police officer in cold blood?

By using the phrase “the type of man,” Matt invokes the school of moral philosophy known as virtue ethics, which focuses on a person’s fundamental moral qualities. According to virtue ethics, a person possesses a set of character traits that help determine their actions, and traits that contribute to “the good life” for the person or those around them are considered virtues. Using the evidence of Ayala’s heroic behavior, Matt demonstrates his virtues of benevolence, courage, and self-sacrifice, and argues that a person with such virtues would be unlikely to commit cold-blooded murder.¹

The district attorney prosecuting the case argues in response that calling people good or bad is based on “a false premise:"

Good people can do bad things. Bad people can do good things. Humans, all of us, we’re messy, complicated, capable of good, capable of evil. Yes, Hector Ayala might have done some good things. Does that make him incapable of doing a bad thing? Of course not.

Virtue ethicists would agree: The fact that Hector possesses many heroic virtues does not mean he’s “incapable” of acting otherwise. However, the degree to which Hector acts on these character traits, and at significant risk to himself, simply because “it’s the right thing to do”—as he repeatedly says when Matt asks him why he did these things—makes it harder to imagine that he would do such a bad thing as killing someone in cold blood.

Here’s the Situation

The district attorney himself seems to know how weak this line of reasoning is because he quickly moves to an emotional appeal: describing in graphic detail the effect of a moving train on a human body. However, there is a school of thought called situationism that would support the district attorney’s argument, at least in theory.

Situationists maintain that behavior is influenced much less by character traits (or dispositions) and more by particular circumstances of a choice situation. They run experiments where people are shown to be more likely to act altruistically, such as turning in a lost wallet full of cash, if they found a coin in a payphone moments before. We wouldn’t expect to find benevolent action to be so contingent on such minor aspects of life, which situationists use to argue against the existence of character traits, at least at the level of influence that virtue ethics implies.²

There are a couple of reasons to doubt the situationist argument in this case, though. One comes from the story itself: Ayala’s heroic actions as the White Tiger and the unfortunate incident on the subway platform were separated by factors much more significant than finding a coin in a payphone. If anything, the latter situation should have made Ayala less likely to intervene, because he did not have his amulet to give him extra strength (or his mask to protect his identity). The fact that he still stepped up, despite having many reasons not to, suggests that his heroic virtues had more to do with his actions than situationists would claim.

With Great Power…

Also, this is a fictional story about superheroes, most of whom are meant to exemplify heroic virtues, regardless of whether this is realistic. If we ever saw a superhero’s decision whether to save a life or not influenced by an insignificant aspect of the situation at hand, we would doubt their heroism.³

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For example, before he became a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, Peter Parker was bitter about getting stiffed by a promoter for a wrestling match he won—so upset that he refused to stop a thief from stealing the proceeds from the match, and later that evening that same thief killed Peter's Uncle Ben. The exceptional nature of this tragic mistake, especially when compared to the countless examples of heroic behavior on the part of Spider-Man afterward, shows that however realistic the behavior pointed out by situationists is, we expect better from our heroes (costumed or not).

We shouldn’t be surprised to see superheroes in comics, TV shows, and movies display virtuous character traits of heroism, because that’s the ideal. We want to believe that good people have good qualities that generally lead to good behavior, at least most of the time. Even if the situationists are right and character traits do not influence behavior as much as virtue ethicists claim, we can still aspire to cultivate virtues and act on them when we can. As Hector Ayala said, it’s the right thing to do.