MJ, I kind of wanted some thoughts on exactly what kind of a man Superman would be if he didn't do anything. What kind of a man do you think he would be?
Um--a corpse?
You can't do nothing. The question is not whether you are going to do anything, but what you are going to do.
There are those who suggest that it is possible to do whatever pleases you without hurting anyone else; I doubt that. We sometimes hurt people with our most unselfish acts; it is sometimes necessary to hurt someone to avoid hurting someone else.
When I was in high school, there was a news report of a woman who was raped and, I think, murdered on the streets of New York City, screaming for help. Hundreds of local residents heard her. No one helped her. No one so much as called the police.
Had Superman been there--a man who could not have been hurt by a mortal attacker, who would not have broken a sweat breaking up the assault, who could have ended it all during a commercial break from his favorite television show--and had he done nothing, what would we have thought of him? We thought very poorly of all those people who did not so much as pick up the phone, knowing that had even three or four of them simply stepped outside intending to intervene they would have outnumbered the attacker and probably saved the woman, guessing that they simply figured someone else would make the call and they would not have to be involved (all those questions about what happened and everything, and somehow "I heard screaming so I called the police" hardly seems sufficient). If we knew that there was someone who could have intervened with so little trouble as that, what would we think of his failure to do so?
Does that mean that Superman has an obligation to intervene? Somehow we all inherently think he does. He would be a very bad person if he had all this power and never lifted a finger to help anyone with it, even if he did not use it for any evil purpose, nor even for his own benefit. Somehow we think that Peter Parker trying to make a living as a professional wrestler specializing in cage matches is a waste of his ability, when he could be catching criminals and making the streets safer.
We don't want to say that these super beings are obligated to use their powers for the benefit of others, because the moment we do so we realize that we, too, are obliged to use our powers--whether it is our money or our talents or our skills or training or education or time or whatever we have--to benefit others as well. We try to avoid this by suggesting that what they do costs them so little--Superman does not risk being injured or killed when he attempts to stop the rapist/murderer, and the risk to Spiderman is minimal. So we say that those who have greater abilities have obligations that we do not. Yet it must be rather that all have those obligations, proportionate to our abilities. Either that, or none do, not even the superheroes, and when they, like Eric's Multiversal Man, retreat to a private penthouse and ignore the world below, we have no claim on their assistance or attention. Maybe they just don't want to help. Maybe it's true that we can't fix everything, so why bother trying to fix anything.
But if you believe that it would be wrong for Superman, or even Spiderman, to take his powers and live his own life and let the world consume itself in its own evil, not trying to do anything to help, then you must admit that the same applies to you. You can't do what they can do, but you can do something, and if they have any kind of obligation, moral or otherwise, to act, then you do as well.
--M. J. Young
