Notes

“Daredevil nails a crucial difference between utilitarianism and deontology in Daredevil #36″

At the Comics Professor, friend of the Gutter Mark D. White writes about Daredevil Matt Murdock, Reed Richards, utilitarianism and deontology!

“Matt asks a simple question—”What’s right?”—and then draws out the difference between what philosopher W.D. Ross characterized as “the right and the good” (in his book of the same title). Effectively, Matt is contrasting Reed’s utilitarianism, in which he calculates the myriad contributing factors to an issue to arrive at a conclusion regarding the best course of action to take, with Matt’s own deontological approach, which dismisses empirical contingencies in favor of using principle to determine the right thing to do.

Matt drives the point home when he acknowledges Reed’s brilliance, but suggests that it’s distracting him from the simple moral truth.”

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