Batman: Masked Vigilante

According to Batman, Gotham City is the kind of place that needs a masked vigilante to restore law and order. Police officers are openly crooked, while politicians and judges are also in the pocket of mob boss. By the time of The Dark Knight, things have improved in Gotham City. Justice does prevail outside the law in The Dark Night, because Gotham’s legal system and government are corrupt and dysfunctional. Batman and his police contact, Lieutenant Jim Gordon, have dramatic success cleaning up the streets of Gotham. Their success has been paralleled by the emergence of crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent. Dent, known as Gotham’s white knight, is the apparently incorruptible and upright public servant that the city has been lacking.

Justice must be separately defined from law because law can become corrupted. Left to itself, Gotham’s legal system can not arrive at justice on its own. The continuing persistence of injustice within the city leads to the demand for a superhero. After the murder of young Wayne’s parents, he chose to take justice into his own hands, as a masked vigilante. Batman is able to achieve justice because he has personal limits. Early on, Batman realizes that it is not his place to interfere with the punishment of the criminals that he apprehends. He merely seeks criminals and delivers them to justice. Batman does not break the law out of malice, but rather for a greater utilitarian purpose.

Both Batman and the Joker exist outside the law that predominates among the police, the law-abiding citizens, and the criminal underworld in Gotham. Both have the status of an exception because they adhere to a code that goes against their personal incentives and violates any consequentialist morality. Batman tries...

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...hat public officials may act outside of the law, where they deem necessary in an exceptional case, provided that they openly acknowledge their actions and await the consequences. The underlying idea is that although illegal acts may sometimes be needed to preserve the legal order, the necessity of those acts does not render them legal. When the law's inadequacy is evident, the need for the heroic exception becomes ever more pronounced, but the danger of the exception has also never been more apparent. Declarations of exceptionality in the contemporary world, and they allow us to see the negative ramifications that follow from the exception, no matter how heroic its intent. In The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan offers a viable image of heroic exceptionality. As he sees, justice can prevail outside of the law, but at the cost of the heros actions undermining the law.