A Harvard Professor Explains What the Avengers Can Teach Us About Philosophy

[dramatic music]

This weekend, as any Marvel fan will tell you,

is all about the Endgame.

Avengers Endgame will wrap up the massive cliffhanger

from last year's Infinity War.

And a warning, we won't be spoiling Endgame,

but we will be discussing

a number of Marvel's movies up to this point.

Now this isn't just about whether Cap, Iron Man

and the rest of the team will be able to bring back

their fallen comrades.

Because over 21 movies, the Marvel Cinematic Universe

has actually raised a number of thorny questions,

teaching us about ethics, leadership,

and even moral philosophy.

Even if there's a small chance that we can undo this,

I mean we owe it to everyone who's not in this room to try.

And that's where Chris Robichaud comes in.

I'm a senior lecturer in Ethics and Public Policy

here at the Harvard Kennedy School,

and I'm also a lifelong fan of superheroes

and comic books and comic book stories.

So let's get right to it then with the Avengers.

What makes them interesting?

One of the things I really love about the Avengers

that we've seen now over multiple movies is,

believe it or not, their dysfunction.

And by this I mean individually

here are these amazing superheroes.

And we've seen their stories,

their individual stories

and then Nick Fury early on says,

hey I've got this idea of bringing together an ensemble

of extraordinary people to do extraordinary things.

The idea was to perceive

if they could become something more.

See if they could work together when we needed them to,

to fight the battles that we never could.

They don't often succeed at what they do

and I think that's important.

I think it's important for us to see that

just because you've got a lot of power

doesn't mean that it's automatically going to

succeed in staving off the bad.

By the time we get to Infinity War,

I mean they're all over the place.

They're not communicating with each other,

they're literally not talking to each other

or they're going offline,

where this huge threat is coming,

and not just a threat to the earth but to the universe.

So what's at the root of this dysfunction?

Is this difference in leadership

or is this something more fundamental?

Is this a different moral outlook?

Part of it is who actually is leading the Avengers?

So they're sort of vying for the leadership.

This doesn't have to end in a fight, Tony.

You just started a war.

You know we've seen over the course of these movies

they're really starting to approach their mission

in fundamentally different ways.

I was wrong about you.

The whole world was wrong about you.

There's this amazing scene in Captain America Civil War

where they're considering the idea

of being watched by the UN.

And we see them torn apart

and part for philosophical reasons.

So Tony Stark, Iron Man,

who is almost always full of himself and his ego

and convinced that he's got the righteous path,

he's the one that's like you know

maybe we oughta have some oversight.

We have no decision making procedure in this team.

We need to be put in check,

whatever form that takes, I'm game.

If we can't accept limitations,

we're boundary-less, we're no better than the bad guys.

Similarly, Captain America, it's the guy

who's supposed to stand for democracy who's like,

I don't know if we should hand our authority

over to a deliberative body.

If we sign this, we surrender our right to choose.

What if this panel sends us somewhere

we don't think we should go?

What if there's somewhere we need to go

and they don't let us?

We may not be perfect

but the safest hands are still our own.

If we don't do this now,

it's gonna be done to us later.

That to me makes them a very interesting team to watch.

They have not yet assembled.

It feels like that has such ready comparison

to so many real world conversations in that vein.

What do you find the easiest parallels with?

It's not that Steve and Tony are disagreeing,

and one of them is a lunatic

and the one is the voice of reason, right?

Both of them have reasonable positions on things.

That's something I see show up a lot

in the American context and elsewhere.

Our disagreements at times,

we're terrible at treating our opponents

we disagree with, respectfully.

Sit down, final warning.

I can do this all day.

But often the disagreement is a reasonable one.

People just prioritize different things.

You know they emphasize liberty more,

they emphasize equality more.

The entire Marvel Cinematic Universe

is very much a post-911 universe.

And one of its central questions is to what extent

should safety and security trump individual privacy.

And part of that conversation is

to what extent should democratic institutions

make these decisions versus behind closed doors,

government agents or private organizations.

I'm not looking for forgiveness

and I'm way past asking permission.

Earth just lost her best defender.

So we're here to fight.

And if you wanna stand in our way, we'll fight you too.

So let's jump from what are usually our earthbound heroes,

the Avengers, out into space to another team,

to the Guardians.

[Chris] The Guardians.

What's the difference here?

They seem to run very very differently.

The Avengers are a team,

and they're struggling to become a functional team.

The Guardians of the Galaxy are a family,

but it's a chosen family, or they've chosen each other,

but we can see the idea of them being a family,

and sort of putting up with each others'

flaws and insecurities.

Groot is the baby,

turned teenager by the time we have Infinity War.

Groot.

I am Groot.

Whoa. Whoa language.

Hey. Wow.

They work together I think

because they have a kind of family relationship.

This is a man,

a handsome muscular man.

I'm muscular.

Like who you kidding, Quill?

You're one sandwich away from fat.

Yeah, right.

It's true, you have put on weight.

What?

I'm just loving Infinity War, you know,

they're responding to this crisis signal

in the midst of trying to figure out

what the heck's going on,

there's all of this back and forth.

There's the jealousy of Star Lord,

there's Drax saying, oh you know you've put on some weight.

It's like what would happen in a family.

You're in the presence of a god

and meanwhile they're talking about

whether there's been a weight gain or not.

I'm gonna commit.

I'm gonna get some dumbbells.

With Infinity War,

we're talking about a threat on an entirely different scale.

Thanos wants to eradicate half the universe.

But he's also rationalized this to himself

as a good thing.

Too many mouths, not enough to go around.

And when we faced extinction, I offered a solution.

Genocide?

But random, dispassionate, fair to rich and poor alike.

So what makes this different

then just straight up genocide?

So if I could frame this in philosophical terms,

Thanos is sort of a pure consequentialist.

He will sacrifice any individual

including his beloved daughter for the sake

of pursuing the greatest good. This isn't love.

I ignored my destiny once.

I cannot do that again,

even

for you.

I think that there's something deep here

because Thanos sees himself as being quite rational.

Many people think that consequentialism,

if taken to its logical conclusion,

can be quite horrific.

Because it fails to take into account the individual.

A lot of our heroes are, fancy-term coming, deontologists.

They believe that the greatest good is not always

the thing that we should keep in mind.

We should cherish relationships and individuals.

The heroes regularly do not put

the greatest good above an individual,

Captain America has that great line.

Thanos threatens half the universe,

one life cannot stand in the way of defeating him.

But it should.

We don't trade lives, Vision.

So let me ask you,

what happened to the nihilist villain?

What happened to the bad guy

that just wanted to watch the world burn?

Everyone has to have these grand aspirations

and these reasons for doing these horrific things, why?

Nihilism I think is a hard thing for us to wrap our heads

around at times because we always think,

we always think that there's gotta be reasons

other than to watch the world burn.

But it is more helpful

I think for us to sort of sympathize

sympathize with characters.

If we can get our heads around an agenda

that they have that at least seems reasonable,

it's just more interesting to engage a villain

who isn't just a cardboard cut-out.

I view this all as a warning to us.

Thanos in a sense says look here's my reasoning.

His reasoning is seductive.

Your planet was on the brink of collapse.

I'm the one who stopped that.

Do you know what's happened since then?

The children born have known nothing

but full bellies and clear skies, it's a paradise.

Because you murdered half the planet.

A small price to pay for salvation.

You're insane.

And it's an invitation for us to say,

look there's something in what Thanos says

but we don't wanna end up like Thanos.

So where do we stop ourselves?

So it makes for a great personal reflection too, I think.

And as you said, that insistence,

that this is all for a greater good,

tends to blur the line between good and evil in characters

that we have previously placed on one side of that divide.

And you named Loki and Nebula,

those are two great examples.

What does that tell us,

and the fan reaction to characters like this,

about the way we prize that moral ambiguity,

that finding good in the bad,

or finding bad in the good?

Yeah I think that you know Marvel superhero stories

on cinema have given us an opportunity

to recognize that heroism does not come

in the sense of you're always righteous

and perfect at making the right choice.

It's an invitation for us to look inward and realize

look, a lot of this is gray.

People that we care about

who are aiming at the good sometimes fail.

I feel like this is empowering

in its own way because it's telling us

you don't have to have it all figured out.

A lot of the world doesn't come in black and white

but that doesn't mean you should stop

aiming at doing good things.

And even our heroes are not perfect

and do fail and have disagreements

when they're still trying to bring about good in the world.

And even our villains,

there's something to what they're saying

even though they've clearly gone around the bend.

Let's go to Captain Marvel for a second,

the movie, not the character.

Because that was kind of

a different sort of conflict at its heart,

this is a generational struggle between two alien races.

Prove you're not a skrull.

[low sonic blasting]

What does the Kree Skrull war tell us about power?

One thing it invites us to do

is to not assume that we have figured out

who the good people are and the bad people are,

based on the initial framing of things.

Early on in Captain Marvel,

the Kree are good,

the Skrull are bad.

And you know the Skrull perfectly fit the bad paradigm

because they're shifty, literally.

They're shape shifters, you know.

But I think the movie in part is saying to us

not everything is what it seems.

And indeed so much of Captain Marvel

is about not everything's not what it seems

and maybe you should get to know

the supposed enemy a little bit more

before passing judgements about them.

[explosive blastings]

I don't hear Captain Marvel as giving us some lame story

where everyone's really good at the end.

That's not the case.

It's more complicated.

And I think that that's an important lesson.

And Captain Marvel herself, the character, not the movie,

is immensely powerful.

Perhaps more powerful than any hero we've seen so far.

She and Thanos wield their power so differently.

And what does having that much power mean?

One of the things I love about superhero stories is

they're stories of empowerment.

And the Captain Marvel story that we got in this movie

is a classic example about this.

For a good chunk of the movie,

she doesn't remember exactly who she is.

I don't remember my past.

And she's got all these people telling her who she is,

and she's like all right, all right.

And it's only towards the end

when she literally takes off the thing

that's been binding her and constraining her

and she embraces her power

that we see Carol Danvers becoming Captain Marvel.

And then she becomes an unbelievable weapon

creating a whole bunch of havoc for the Kree.

We know that power corrupts.

And so we hope that Captain Marvel can not become corrupted.

The thing that's interesting is we don't know.

Hers is going to be a path of wrestling with tremendous

tremendous power.

An ongoing lesson for us that power can corrupt.

And we really haven't seen that yet in the MCU

which is focusing on a hero who is grappling with the effect

of their enormous power on their personal,

not just philosophy, but their morality.

And it would seem that that's a fascinating place

to go in the future for them.

I think it has to go there in the future.

In many ways, we've seen these characters

dealing with their power,

dealing with the perhaps accidental misuse of it

but we really haven't seen too much I think

in the cinematic universe as you said

with the corrupting influence of power.

I guess the MCU can't do everything in a mere 10 years

with a mere 20-some movies. [chuckling]

I'm glad there's stories still to be told, yeah.

Whoo hoo.

What's up, guys?

Yeah, obviously there's the old chestnut

from Spiderman, right?

With great power comes greater responsibility.

What are the responsibilities do the powerful have?

I think that one of the most recent movies

that has explored this in quite interesting ways

is Black Panther.

So Black Panther has this amazing exchange

halfway, two thirds through it,

as Killmonger comes to Wakanda

and he sort of throws down.

There's about 2 billion people

all over the world that looks like us.

But their lives are a lot harder.

Wakanda has the tools to liberate them all.

And what tools are those?

Vibranium.

Your weapons.

Our weapons will not be used to wage war on the world.

It is not our way.

And what the movie challenges us to consider,

and again this is a great idea of the villain is,

you know there's something to that.

Killmonger isn't entirely off.

Is this a responsible use of power?

Is fighting injustice in this way

a good use of the power that you have?

That's an interesting philosophical disagreement.

And so I give to the credit of the Black Panther

and to the Marvel Universe,

at least asking those questions.

What does responsible use of power look like?

There's never one answer to that.

A lot of people find distinction

between the MCU and DC universe, cinematic universe,

even though they don't call it that,

through visual means,

and like what the directorial sensibility is.

But it seems like there's something

much more fundamental at play as well.

How would you mark that distinction

between the ethos of the two universes?

I think Marvel sort of takes it for granted

that there are these existential threats to humanity

and is looking more at how individuals

who have the capacity to do something

should conduct themselves in sort of attending to this.

So there's some overlap there.

But I don't see there to be tremendous tension

in the Marvel universe with what DC's looking at,

as in the relationship with the people.

[dramatic music]

We don't get that.

We get a Superman and Man of Steel

who's like, you know, I don't know

if I should reveal my powers.

His dad in that movie, quite remarkably to many people,

has this conversation with his son

when his son saves a bus of kids, being like,

yeah I don't know if that was the right time to do it.

Young Clark Kent's like, but I can save them.

He said, I don't know if you should save them or not.

What was I supposed to do?

Just let them die?

Maybe.

Wonderwoman, I adore this movie.

Wonderwoman at some point realizes you know

it's not Ares that's causing humanity to fight each other.

It's humanity causing humanity to fight each other.

Ares is dead, they can stop fighting now.

Why are they still fighting?

Because maybe it's them.

Maybe people aren't always good.

And she asks out loud, are you people worth saving?

Is there anything here worth doing?

And so there's this really complicated relationship I see

in the DC universe, at least in those examples I've given,

between the heroes and the people

that they're trying to be heroic for.

I don't see nearly as much as that in Marvel.

And so I think that there's a richness there

in the DC movies despite the fact that often

they do sometimes fail on their own terms

and they're darker than what a lot of people want.

And in Marvel,

not necessarily grappling with those individual questions,

is much more concerned with what?

I think that one of the things

that Marvel does a great job of exploring

is broken people can have power,

flawed people can have power.

Let's look at them wrestle with how to do good

given their power but also their flawed natures.

We're not a team,

we're a time bomb.

Superhero stories in general,

this is a theme that I've often talked about,

have a good side and a bad side.

The good side is they often give us stories

about individuals being empowered and trying to do good.

And they sort of inspire us to do that.

The bad side is that they sometimes create the impression

that if you're just a good person

you will do good things.

And we know that that's not true.

And so I see that in a lot of the movies

that we're looking at, this theme of, well,

what happens if someone with power who's not good,

gets in control, comes again and again?

T'Challa sits on the throne of Wakanda, great.

What do people do when it's Killmonger

who sits on the throne?

Now, I'm the king.

Would we trust Captain America with the Infinity gauntlet?

I bet you a lot of people will be like, yes.

Should you?

I don't know.

It can ruin people.

I think that that theme resonates

very much with our political moment

is that we see that just because you have power

it doesn't mean, one, that you're good.

And even if you are good, having a lot of power means

that you might use it in untoward ways.

And so I see us trying to work this out

in our superhero stories.

Excellent, well have a great day, thanks so much.

Thank you.

[dramatic music]