You're still judging Clark/Superman by a moral code which you yourself cannot define and reacting to your feelings about what should or should not happen instead of looking at the facts of the case and how the law applies to the facts.
I feel the need to define my own moral code when it comes to killing others, Terry.
1) It's wrong to kill others when it is not necessary.
2) If you have killed another person even though it was not necessary, you should be punished by the law.
3) When is it necessary to kill another person? If you are a policeman, an upholder of the law and a protector of the public, you may find yourself in a situation when it is necessary for you to kill another person. Similarly, if you seve in the military and find yourself in an actual war, you may very well find it necessary to kill very often.
4) If another person is very seriously and immediately threatening you, your family or even a stranger, you may find it necessary to kill that other person in order to protect yourself, your family or a stranger.
5) If you have killed because you deemed it to be necessary, I think you should be tried at court. Here, you would have to explain why you deemed it necessary to kill, and the jury would have to decide if they agree that it was necessary. If you serve in the military, you should be tried if you have mistakenly killed an ally, or if there is evidence suggesting that you killed people who were not parts of the conflict.
6) If the military court decides that the soldier's mistake was fully excusable, it should publish its reasons for its ruling. If the jury at a non-military court agrees that the killing committed by a non-military person was necessary, then the defendant would be fully acquitted. If the jury decides that the defendant severely misjudged the situation, he or she should receive some sort of punishment. For example, a policeman who killed because he severely misjudged the situation should have to undergo some sort of rehabilitation and pass a test before he was allowed to serve as a policeman again.
7) If a person claims that he killed in self defence, but the circumstances show that the defendant panicked and killed for no good reason, he should definitely receive some sort of punishment. For example, if a home owner claims that he killed an intruder in self defence, but the intruder was found outside the house, unarmed, facing away from the house, lying on his belly on the pathway leading away from the house and shot in the back, then there is no way that this is a legal case of self defence. Or, more precisely, there is no way that a lone unarmed person on his way away from a homeowner's property can constitute a serious, immediate threat to the homeowner, and therefore it can never be necessary for the homeowner to kill the intruder in order to protect himself. Therefore, the law should not accept this killing as self defence. Instead, the home owner should have his weapon confiscated and be sentenced either to psychiatric treatment or to prison.
8) If a society doesn't have a law that allows it to punish a person who killed in red-hot anger, when the killing wasn't necessary to remove an immediate threat to the lives of others, then I think that the law of that society does not take a firm stand on the killing of others. If a person's own (justified) anger is sufficient reason not to punish a person who kills in anger, then that society doesn't take a firm stand on killing.
Perhaps, Terry, you would call this ethics and not morality. All right. I have an underlying belief which is at the root of my ethics. As a non-religious person, I believe that there is no life after death. I believe that this life is the only life we get. I believe that the sum and totality of a person can be summed up as that person's living body, and what that living body has experienced. Destroy that person's living body, and you destroy
everything that is him or her. To me, the killing of another person is the worst crime you can commit. Of course it is worse to kill many persons than to kill just one. And of course it is worse to deliberately try to destroy the survivors' ability to scrape out a living than to "just" kill one person. But, basically, I think that the stealing of a human life is the worst crime you can commit.
So how bad is it to kill someone like Bill Church, then? To me, the question is twofold. How valuable is someone like Bill Church? Not very, because he is a mass murderer. How bad is it to take a human life, any human life? In my opinion, that is always a bad thing. But sometimes it
is necessary. Take the police officers who killed the crazy young gunman in that shopping mall in Salt Lake City recently. To me those officers are heroes, because they stopped that gunman from killing more people. Even so, even so... the fact that they killed at all is, to me,
some sort of blot on their moral characters. Don't get me wrong. They totally
had to kill, and the fact that they saved many others that were in mortal danger is a stronger mark of heroism than their killing of the gunman is a moral blot on their characters. Even so, that moral blot is there, and they will have to carry it for the rest of their lives. But those police officers had no choice, so to me, they are tragic heroes.
Superman, on the other hand, didn't
have to kill. At least I don't think your fic showed me that he had to. Therefore, the moral blot on his character is there, but it is not outweighed by the necessity of the killing.
And personally, I think that Superman's emotional state when he killed Bill Church offers no moral justification for his killing of that arch-criminal. I also think that his emotional state when he killed Bill Church shouldn't be sufficient reason to acquit him of breaking the law.
What about the fact that Superman was tried for second degree murder, but it was found that his killing of Bill Church couldn't be summed up as that particular crime? In my opinion, if he was tried for breaking a law that doesn't fit the nature and description of his killing, then I think the prosecutor, whose job it is to find the law that was challenged when someone committed a specific killing, did a very bad job. If there exists no law which can be used to describe Superman's killing of Bill Church in such a way that it comes out as a crime, then I think that the law itself is insufficient, and it may reflect the morals of a society that doesn't necessarily take a firm stand on killing.
Many years ago, I listened to a radio dramatization of a mid-European play from the 1920s or 30s. In this play, a man discovered his wife in bed with her lover, and he responded by killing her. What was so interesting about the play was the ruling of the court when the man was tried for murder. The court unanimously accepted that because the man had been so justifiably upset, no one could blame him for killing his wife, even though it was technically against the law. It was not possible to fully acquit the man of breaking the law, but it
was possible to rule that the husband's justified anger at his wife's adultery meant that he would receive no punishment at all for killing her.
I don't believe in a society that acquits its angry killers solely because of their anger.
However, Terry, if the court had ruled that Superman's killing of Bill Church was in fact
necessary - because if Superman had just brought Bill Church to court, then the law would have been unable to stop this crime lord by purely legal means - then that would have been another accusation of the shortcomings of the legal system, but Superman's killing would have been something that had to be accepted because it was seen as necessary to stop Bill Church. That way, Superman would become a tragic hero who killed primarily to save others, not someone who killed because he couldn't control his temper.
All right, but for all of his being Kryptonian, Superman is, really, only human. Can't he be pushed beyond his own breaking point? Can't he be put in a situation where his control snaps, and he kills?
And if that happens, can't there be any forgiveness for him?
Yes, that can happen. And yes, there can be forgiveness for Superman, even if it does happen. But to me, that forgiveness has little or nothing to do with Superman being acquitted at court of second degree murder.
Finally, Alcyone. In a previous FDK thread, I mentioned a comic book arc from the 1980s where Superman killed because he himself deemed that it was necessary. Afterwards, he suffered from severe traumas of guilt, and at least a full year - at least twelve consecutive issues of the Superman comic book, in other words - were devoted to exploring how Superman dealt with his own guilt, and how he tried to find a way to forgive himself and find a way to be Superman again.
I would like to see something similar here.
Ann
