Spidey's choice: Peter Parker meets Peter Singer

When I recently made my way to the first action-adventure blockbuster of the summer movie season, I was looking forward to a two-hour break from my intellectual labors. Little did I expect that Columbia Pictures would be offering, in addition to the usual mélange of digital explosions and old-fashioned fisticuffs, a convincing rebuttal of Princeton University's most prominent ethicist. But when it comes to anti-utilitarian moral theory, that "Spider-Man" really is pretty amazing.

The rebuttal to Peter Singer comes just as the film reaches its climax, when our hero confronts his arch-enemy, the nefarious Green Goblin, on the top of the Queensboro Bridge. In one hand, the Goblin holds Spider-Man's true love, the fiery-tressed girl-next-door Mary Jane Watson, leaving her dangling over the East River far below. In his other hand, the super-strong super-villain holds a cable car, filled with schoolchildren on what appears to be a late-night class trip to Roosevelt Island. The implication is that either M.J. or the 30-odd kids will soon be meeting a watery doom, for how could Spidey possibly save both?

"That's what's so tough about being a superhero," the Green Goblin taunts his arachnid enemy. "You never know when some lunatic will come along with a sinister choice!" He then begins to laugh maniacally, cackling with the characteristic joy that only the most fiendish super-villainy can bring.

For those of you yet to experience "Spider-Man" in all its surround-sound glory, I will refrain from revealing how our hero solves his moral dilemma. What's important here, however, is that, according to Peter Singer's utilitarian theory of ethics, this isn't a particularly difficult dilemma at all. According to Singer, no single person may count for more in one's ethical calculus than can any other. There are thirty or so people in the Goblin's right hand, and only one in his left. Spidey should save the thirty, for a net gain of about twenty-nine lives; it's a matter of basic arithmetic.

The fact that the love of his life will die as a result of Peter Parker's choice is, according to Singer, morally irrelevant. Heck, it wouldn't even matter if the cable car was filled with 30 chimpanzees; they count as "persons" as surely as does the lovely Mary Jane. And if the utilitarian calculus isn't in her favor, Singer would tell Spider-Man, the kids (or chimps, or dolphins, or whatever) will live to see another day, while your girlfriend sleeps with the fishes.

Now, I'm not saying that Singer is wrong in the solution he gives to this dilemma; I'm not sure what I would advise Spidey to do, and reasonable people can disagree about this sort of thing. But no reasonable person can deny that, because of his love for her, Spider-Man has a special bond with M.J., a bond which he simply doesn't have with the kids in the cable car. Letting a stranger die, or even thirty strangers, just isn't the same as letting a loved one die, and love must be allowed to "count" in our moral life as much as sheer numbers do. But giving anyone's welfare more weight than anyone else's is strictly forbidden by utilitarian ethics.

"What's so special about Mary Jane Watson?" Singer might ask. "Rationally and objectively, her life isn't worth more than that of any single one of those thirty kids. And, when it comes to ethics, it's objective reason which must have the final say."

But this is precisely where Spidey and Singer disagree. For Spider-Man, like for most of us, morality is as much a matter of the heart as it is one of the head. After all, Spidey only became the superhero that he is when a carjacker killed his beloved uncle, and he came to feel the suffering of all those who are victimized by the villains of the world. It wasn't reason that taught the young Peter Parker good from evil; it was feeling. And it is our feelings — pangs of conscience, stirrings of compassion, and sometimes even the call of true love — which almost always determine our actual moral decision-making.

There's an age-old dispute between philosophers as to whether ethics is basically a matter of reason or one of sentiment. Bentham, Kant and Peter Singer are on one side of the debate; Hume, Schopenhauer and Adam Smith are on the other. Only Hume's position, however, has both common sense and Spider-Sense on its side. Michael Frazer is a graduate student in the Politics Department. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.