One of Nietzsches more fundamental criticisms of morality is that it is immoral.

One of the
things he means by this is that historically moralities have implemented themselves by resorting to the
same sorts of abuses that they explicitly claim to curb and destroy. Specifically the most formal,
idealized, and absolutist moralities which allow the least deviations from a strict rule of conduct
dominate people using tactics that break their own rules.
If we imagine morality to be about autonomy, then the ways that moralities use lies, fear, brute
force, and other forms of manipulation to ingrain themselves in peoples minds and to enforce
themselves make morality a deeply hypocritical thing. Looked at this way, moralities are especially
insidious forms of immoral coerciveness because they wrap themselves in a self-righteous sanctimony
that allows those who ruthlessly enforce them to indulge in all their worst instincts with a clear
conscience. They are also, among systems of domination, potentially the most oppressive because of
the leverage their halo gives them.
I dont think that this means we should do away with moralities altogether but Nietzsches
criticisms are worth keeping in mind when dealing with morality. Moralities cannot occur outside of, or
somehow above, power relationships. All relationships are implicitly constituted by power dynamics.
There is no escaping, denouncing, or demonizing power, in my view, but only accepting the
responsibility to develop our own power in the most constructive way possible. Ultimately our own
maximal flourishing is in our ability to empower people and institutions beyond ourselves.
The Dark Knight trilogy deals with these themes in intricate ways. In Batman Begins, Bruce
Wayne, like his magnanimously generous father Thomas before him, wants to be a great force of
empowerment in Gotham City. Thomas Wayne used his personal fortune strategically to
singlehandedly try to counter the economic devastation that had been brought on through systemic
(deliberately fostered) governmental corruption. He also hoped his exemplary priorities would inspire
other wealthy people to do the same. Where the violently moralistic and self-righteous League of

Shadows was trying to purify Gotham by exacerbating and accelerating its corruption so that the people
would suffer their just consequences, Thomas Wayne was trying to role model the aspiration to nobility.
Bruce Wayne sets out to inspire people similarly. But his goal is to not be simply an inspiring
human. He thinks he can be an even greater force for good if he can create himself into incorruptible
and everlasting symbol. He thinks, essentially, that the people of Gotham need more than good human
role models - they need the myth of an eternal and omnibenevolent god. The League of Shadows
embody and explicitly embrace all that is evil about the way moralities function. They represent
morality as mercilessly vindictive vengefulness, the sort of violence and ruthlessness that Nietzsche
warned us about. And they trained Bruce Wayne to embrace fear, deception, and mythic theatricality as
his means of combatting evil. They taught him to think of improving people as a process of
manipulating them, by exploiting what was worst in them and catering to what was weakest in them.
Bruce Wayne returned to Gotham and created the Batman without a goal of reforming criminals
but rather of terrorizing them and breaking their spirit. He explicitly wanted to turn their own ability to
inspire fear against them. In doing so, he embraced what they were and what they represented and tried
to use it to his own advantage with a good conscience. And though he wanted to inspire the average
person he did not respect their intelligence to deal straight with them. In fact, throughout the three
films, he repeatedly fails to trust the people of Gotham with the truth or with power. He condescends
to them by giving them noble lies to have faith in, instead of trying to convince them to believe in
justice while knowing the truth.
Things get especially mythic and dialectical in this regard in The Dark Knight. As Batman
begins to establish order and justice only by terrorizing the criminal underworld, this practically
summons into being his dialectical antithesis - the fearless agent of chaos, the Joker. The Joker
represents the inevitable pushback against the tyranny of orderliness. He represents the irremovable
element of untamable chaos in the world. He represents the pushback of primeval instincts when they

no longer have anything to lose. Against someone trying to stifle the human spirit in a shortsighted and
destructive attempt to save it, the desire for liberation would choose no rules at all rather than continue
to be so tyrannized.
And hence the Joker, Batmans perfect antithesis emerges as a mythical representation of all
this. Whereas we saw Batman painstakingly create himself and got intricate explanations about how he
pulled off all his stunts, the Joker appears fully formed like a force of nature and all his plans are
carried out with unbelievable precision and no explanation. Wheras Nolan spent the majority of
Batman Begins in a lengthy explanation in the origins and motivations of the Batman, with the Joker
we never get any reliable information on his origins. All we have are stories told about or by the Joker
in an effort to terrify people. We get a backstage pass to how Batmans theatrics, so we are in on how
the magic is done. With the Joker, Nolan just wants us to be dazzled by the illusions and marvel at
them.
He counters Batmans stifling seriousness with a defiant mockery. Where Batman tries to
coddle and cower people in a fragile attempt to keep them in order, the Joker constantly is trying to
push them to their breaking points. In his boat game, for example, he is trying to expose the selfish
limits of the ordinary persons virtues. He is trying to exacerbate the ways that moralities are rooted
ultimately in self-interest. He wants to prove that moral principles are ultimately matters of self-serving
convenience and will be abandoned when the social contract fails and people return to Hobbess state
of nature.
Whereas the League of Shadows ostensibly wants to send purging fire from which a more just
society might emerge, to the Joker the fire is the justice. Fire represents flux. Fire is not a fixed thing. It
is constantly changing its shape and its constituent molecules. It is symbolic of change. When
Heraclitus talked of fire as the most basic element of reality, he was talking about change as the
essential reality. This view, that all things are always fundamentally changing in all respects, sees all

universals and all permanence as impossible.

There are no fixed eternal ideal beings in total opposition to each other. There is no absolute
Good which is not on a scale with the evil, with which it is in dialectical tension and in mutual
interdependence at all times. Rather, as heat and cold are on the same scale of temperature, all
opposites are of the same basic reality, just in dialectical tension with each other. It is never
fundamentally a matter of morality vs. power: Morality is one kind of power in dialectical tension
with immorality as another. Only power can create good and only exercises of power can destroy it.
To the amoral nihilist who embraces the chaos as all there is and who denies all universals and
all ideals for how nature would better be transformed, might makes right is the eternal principle of
fairness. The sheer ability to ascend and dominate earns a being the right to dominate. The fairness in
this is that should any other being seek to displace that being there is nothing in moral principle
standing in its way of forcefully displacing that other being. The eternal, natural contest of beings,
including human beings, is fair: all may struggle for victory with no restraints and to the victors go the
spoils.
The Joker embodies this ideal. Numerous times he psyches himself up in the face of death and
other forms of pain. Its all fair to him. Its all good to him. All the chaos is good. Chaos is generative
of greatness. The petty selfishness and low aspirations of the ordinary civilian and the ordinary criminal
alike, so controlled by fear and desire, is what bores and disgusts him. He embraces the Batman as
someone at least willing to impose himself and his ideals on others, as someone willing to fight and
sacrifice and commit to something. He delights in having Batman to serve as his dialectical opposite in
tension with him. He recognizes that order and chaos are ultimately degrees on the same scale, in
constant dialectical tension with each other. In the grand tug of war of things, he needs the Batman to
pull the rope towards order so his tugging towards chaos has the resistance to make it meaningful.
Jokers affirmation of chaos and might makes right allows him to affirm his enemy in a way that

Batman cannot. It allows him to fearlessly embrace what he sees as true in a way that the order
creating, lying, fear-reliant Batman cannot. And the Joker wins the soul of Harvey Dent by
disillusioning his belief in a morally just world - one where every coin flip can be rigged to come up
heads as one wants.
Nietzsche is often superficially read as encouraging a Jokeresque sort of nihilistic submersion in
complete chaos and indulgence, whereas I think the most constructive reading of Nietzsche has him
encouraging us to avoid dualistic oppositions and think about how to embrace what is chaotic and
untamed and generative of new possibilities that are not easily boxed in into something constructive,
rather than to extirpate it as inevitably the stuff only of decay.
This is why the Joker appeals to us so viscerally even as we disapprove of his actions so
unequivocally. There is something about his spirit which is exciting and worth preserving. Nietzsche
forces us to face the hard question of how to harness what is admirable in someone like him without the
heinous consequences.
Bruce Wayne had invested his hopes in Harvey Dent as Gothams White Knight before the
Joker broke Dents belief in morality. He was hoping that if the people could see the justice system
working properly, there would be no need for him to circumvent it and hypocritically impose
lawfulness through his lawlessness. A reformer from within the system could represent the resiliency of
the system. Wayne seemed to understand that his fear-based terrorizing was limited in its abilities to
inspire confidence in the virtues of the system, of the law itself. Wayne wanted to believe that theatrics
and manipulation and brute force could be put aside and that an honest system could deliver fairness
without all these immoral compromises.
But even when Wayne was still believing in Harvey Dents possibility to save Gotham within
the rules, Dent was still corruptible. Wayne caught Dent using coercive tactics on a suspect who he
believed had information that could save his girlfriend. Wayne nonetheless wanted to preserve the

image of Dent as the White Knight. And in the end, when the White Knight crossed the line into
undeniable lawbreaking to avenge those who treated him unjustly, Wayne judged that a noble lie was
necessary to protect the White Knights reputation. It was (mostly) true that Dent acquired his many
convictions of mob players fairly. It was just that they be locked up. They truly deserved it. But the
system, with its numerous protections for the accused, would allow appeals when Dents violent
criminality was revealed. It might cast a shadow on all his just accomplishments from before his mental
break.
So, Wayne decided to tell a noble lie - a story which is literally false but philosophically true.
Dent, at least before going insane, had done things by the book and the system had worked. The legal
process could acquire justice. The ideal of the White Knight was not pure fiction. There was a truth to
it that the people were entitled to but which would be obscured from them if they knew the literal facts
about Dents descent into brutal madness. And the lie of the Dark Knight as the killer of Dents victims
expressed a philosophical truth too - Batman was a lawless vigilante who was ultimately responsible
for numerous deaths through his recklessness. He did regularly resort to the very coerciveness that he
ostensibly existed to oppose. And so even though he usually adhered scrupulously to a principle against
crossing the line into killing (and becoming barely distinguishable from his foes) which kept him still a
hero, he was nonetheless, in philosophical truth, a Dark Knight and not a hero to be embraced in a
morally uncomplicated way.
Wayne tried to uphold faith in the legal system when he did not in truth believe in its ability to
withstand manipulation should the truth about Harvey Dent come out. So, he decided to make himself
the bad guy if that was the way to be effectively most successful in actually creating good. In this way,
Wayne is deeply noble and deeply committed to a true good. He wants people to actually flourish due
to his actions rather than to get credit for them. He would even go so far as to become demonized if the
result were that in truth he would be effective in doing actual good. He properly keeps his eye on the

goal of genuine achievement rather than glory and honor for their own sakes. When forced to choose
between what he sees as the actual creation of good and getting the credit for it, he is a true role model.
But as admirable as his intentions and priorities are in this respect, he still is paternalistic
towards Gotham and he still does not value the intrinsic value of truth or see any hope in using truth to
inspire people. Like a true, hypocritical moralist, he resorts to noble lies. Initially, he relied on the noble
lie that he was an incorruptible god. He readily switches his mask to be that of the devil. Hell do
whatever gets the job done to keep people believing that there is no devil in God and no god in the
Devil but that they are dualistically separate.
When we come to The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan drastically ups the scale and the stakes and
profoundly murkies the philosophical waters of his trilogy. Nolan did an admirable job of convincing
the audience that the Batmans greatest threat had actually been saved for last, after all. Bane actually
manages to make the Joker seem unserious. In this film Bane is essentially what you would get if you
harnessed the Jokers deadliness with all of Batmans skills and gave him Raas al-Guhls political
ambitions. While not quite what the Joker is in terms of sheer charisma, Bane makes the Jokers chaos
feel like mere games and practical jokes.
And theres a reason for that - mythically the Joker symbolized the principle of chaos in the
world. Bane represents its total and complete despairing annihilation as convincingly as a comic book
film is going to manage. And, on the literal level, the kind of chaos that he creates is the kind a merely
chaotic criminal simply cannot. A criminal can only implicitly undermine order. A tyrant explicitly
destroys the entire moral order. Joker turns out to be a mere criminal. Bane is a tyrant.
Interestingly, the stretched tight tethers to reality that Batman Begins prided itself on are all
gone. The large scale action scenes in this film are almost purely in the realm of sheer comic book
fantasy. There is nothing realistic about Batman when he is strong in this film. There is only truth in his
weakness and in his struggle to overcome weakness and, in particular, in his struggles to match Banes

sheer physical strength. Whenever Batman goes toe to toe with Bane its as exciting, raw, and visceral
as the trilogy gets. The huge Bane fan in me was hugely satisfied.
Just as Platos Republic compellingly defends the ideal of philosopher kings, only to implicitly
indicate that ideals profoundly ironic dark side and to argue that even it is subject to total dialectical
dissolution because of human limitations, I think Nolans defense of the superhuman who changes the
world by abandoning all hope in institutions is also replete with warnings of profoundly ironic dark
sides and of the inevitability of dialectical dissolution as well. And a hopeful ending does not invalidate
any of those warnings for anyone paying attention.