Pip: If free will is an illusion, is Batman just a very expensive weather event?
Mara: That's the territory surtymind is mapping — using comic book mythology to press on real questions about moral responsibility, contingency, and whether holding anyone accountable ever makes sense under naturalism. Let's start with Batman, the Joker, and what happens when a hero inhales the wrong neurotoxin.
The Batman who Laughs, Freedom, and What We Owe Each Other
Mara: The core tension here is whether the kind of person you become — hero, villain, or something worse — is ever really yours to claim, or whether it's just the downstream product of accidents you never chose.
Pip: The post opens with Richard Rorty, and the quote sets the stakes plainly: "To be a person is to speak a particular language, one which enables us to discuss particular beliefs and desires with particular sorts of people. It is a historical contingency whether we are socialized by Neanderthals, ancient Chinese, Eton, Summerhill, or the Ministry of Truth."
Mara: So the upshot is that selfhood is not discovered — it's assembled by circumstance. Batman's sense of justice, his wealth, even his capacity to become a hero, all trace back to accidents he had no hand in arranging.
Pip: And that framing is exactly what The Batman Who Laughs makes visceral. In that story, Batman kills the Joker — a choice you might want to judge — but the Joker had laced himself with a neurotoxin that slowly rewires Batman's personality into something monstrous. The tragedy is that we know who he was before.
Mara: The post works through whether that original killing was even a real choice. Batman was driven to it by savage torture, and the neurotoxin could have been released without the murder anyway. The causal chain keeps reaching back past the moment we want to call a decision.
Pip: The Joker gets the same treatment — no origin story, but presumably some genetic markers and a history that shaped him. The apparent glee is real, but it doesn't mean he authored it.
Mara: Which seems to close the door on moral judgment entirely. But then comes the levels-of-explanation move, borrowed from Daniel Dennett. Colour doesn't exist in basic physics, yet we still ticket people for running red lights.
Pip: Right — and free will might be exactly like colour: not part of the fundamental furniture of the universe, but load-bearing in every practical system we have for coordinating with each other.
Mara: The post cites Vols and Schooler's study showing that subjects primed to disbelieve in free will cheated more on subsequent tasks. It's careful to note the study hasn't been replicated, but the direction of the finding matters: what we believe about agency shapes how we act.
Pip: So the conclusion isn't that Batman and the Joker are morally equivalent to their victims — it's that the grounds for judgment shift. Both are treated as criminally insane, to be contained rather than condemned. The pre-transformation Batman who killed the Joker gets a more complicated verdict: culpable, but for pragmatic reasons, not metaphysical ones.
Mara: The question of what grounds moral judgment — metaphysics or consequences — is exactly where naturalism keeps pushing us next.
Pip: Contingency all the way down, and yet we still need traffic lights.
Mara: That's the live wire — naturalism keeps dissolving the foundations, and pragmatism keeps rebuilding them. Worth following where that tension leads.
