The Un-Ethics of Watchmen, Part 1: A Bird’s-Eye View
Editor’s note: With the imminent release of Watchmen, we thought we’d try and get a different perspective. So we asked Alexandra Honigsberg, a professional ethicist and genre author, to read the book for the first time and delve into the ethos of the world created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
If super-hero comics are the literature of ethics, then Watchmen is the literature of un-ethics. It is the template for what not to do and makes Batman look like a Boy Scout, even at his darkest Dark Knight. They make Dirty Harry look clean. There’s a new saying on the street that Bitch is the New Black, it Gets Things Done. Well, these guys and gals are certainly the biatch. But is there any way to redeem their actions so that the ends justify the means? Or, more importantly, that even the most inhumane or inhuman retains some sense of what it means to be human?
The study of ethics is the exploration of the good life and how to live it. Now by the “good life” I don’t mean the bling life. I mean a life that is honourable, virtuous and, on a profound level not shaken by the winds of change, happy. Happiness (or pleasure or joy or The Good). That’s the end, the ultimate goal, or what Aristotle calls “that at which all rational beings aim.” Ari makes a fine distinction between the acts of a man (animal, non-rational) and the acts of a human (rational) or what some of us might term the mensch (gender neutral). One of the biggest invectives that Laurie hurls at Dr. Manhattan/Jon Osterman is that, after working for so long in the lab and being so all-powerful (the man not only to end all wars, but end all worlds), he ceases to be human. Moore emphasizes this with quotes from Nietzsche, who claims that when we become evolved enough we will not need rules, we will have become extra-moral – the superman (not the Nazis’ bastardization thereof) who has no need of ethics as we now know them. But are we still human? Extreme means change the agent and therefore change the end (e.g., The Comedian’s total amorality). Can we still give a damn if we’re all god-like? Or in the midst of so much horror that no human could reasonably be expected to survive unscarred (think of the Holocaust), are we still human? What’s human? What’s life? What’s good and who decides? Who gives authority to whom and why?
Today’s list of quick items:
The DC Universe series of animated features got off to a rocky start with the [[[Superman vs. Doomsday]]] offering but has gotten steadily better. [[[New Frontier]]] was pretty amazing and now they offer up [[[Wonder Woman]]], which may be the closest we get to a feature about the Amazon Princess for quite some time.
Timed to make a splash at Oakland’s WonderCon, Warner Home Video announced that Green Lantern will receive his own direct-to-DVD exploit this summer. The long-anticipated project will have a sneak peek during the con but consumers will also be treated to a 10 minute featurette on the Wonder Woman DVD being released on Tuesday.
Say Goodbye to February and Hello to March which will give us STAR TREK:TNG on FAMILY GUY, WONDER WOMAN on DVD, more episodes (and maybe a second season of ISSUES) but no SOUTH PARK on the iPhone and maybe no third season of REAPER. It’s a mixed bag for us and oh yeah, Mike Gold misses comic book racks. 
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We received the following statement from Marvel:
