On a scale of 0 through 10 how would you rate the morality of X-Characters

[Wolverine12]

Sorry, I thought we were only counting in-character behavior and ignoring the blatantly OOC chaff.

(Also, that T. rex happened to have eaten her, so...)

I don't know, seems like cherry picking to me tbh. Either way it's an opinion based question so no really wrong answer I suppose.

[Kusanagi]

I didn't see anyone do him so here's the token Deadpool post.

5

Pretty much neutral as morality goes.

He's unquestionably done both great evil and great heroism. Between being a hero and a villain Deadpool tries to tend toward the former while generally failing. I doubt he'll ever score as high as a 6 but by the same token it's hard to see him ever scoring lower than a 4 either.

[Zelena]

I know the purpose of the thread is for fun, but this is one of the bigger things that I don't think can be quantified with ratings. Characters have too much variation on behavior over time, too many nuanced views of whether something is truly moral or not, etc. In a hostage situation, one person might insist everyone gets out alive knowing it's nearly certain one hostage will die - but that there's a one in a million chance they won't. Another person might think killing the hostage taker is the best course, ensuring the hostage doesn't die. Question then becomes whether it's more moral to gamble with an entirely innocent person's life, or end a guilty one's to save the innocent.

I'm not saying either of these two is actually "right" or even that they're equal, for the record. I'm noting that either one could be considered more moral based on POV. Only example characters on the extremes, e.g. Superman, are easily defined in morals.

I agree with this point of vue.
I add that comic writers often like to come up with situations such as:
if the hero doesn't kill this innocent child/his best friend/his fiancé, the villain will kill everyone in a building/everyone in town/wipe out the entire humankind.

Now, the moral thing is to hesitate a little bit… because none of these options are good.
On the another hand, no moral can tell you how to handle this kind of situation… or is it moral to do the maths?

The heroic thing is to do something and to deal with the consequences… (hopefully no one is killed, hero having demonstrated his creativity)

[jmc247]

The real question is which characters accept the logic of utilitarianism which is not super hero logic. Utilitarianism is the sort of logic that would argue super hero ideals don’t matter that stopping social harm to others matters even if it causes some smaller level of social harm doing so.

Here is what I would say in that regards.

Do not accept utilitarian logic normally: Jean, Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, etc.

Accept utilitarian logic normally: Magneto, Emma, Cable, Wolverine, Polaris.

[Huntsman Spider]

I disagree. Doing terrible things for a good cause doesn't change the fact you've done terrible things. Morality isn't just WHY you do things, but HOW you do them. Quoth Mr. Welch: "Killing the orc horde by drowning them all at once is heroic. Killing them by drowning them one at a time is an alignment check."

Or for a more literary reference: The path to Hell is paved with good intentions."

Fair enough, and I actually agree with that. My point, though, is merely to say that the X-Men having failed to live up to their own ideals on more than a few occasions doesn't put them in the same category as the actual villains, or the people/characters who insist on being bystanders while genocide is actively being committed.

[RachelGrey]

Fair enough, and I actually agree with that. My point, though, is merely to say that the X-Men having failed to live up to their own ideals on more than a few occasions doesn't put them in the same category as the actual villains, or the people/characters who insist on being bystanders while genocide is actively being committed.

Yeah, I think that it's hard to really judge the morality of characters who live in a constant state of a violent race war/genocide against them. Unfortunately Xavier's dream has proven to be more and more of a joke as time went by because it only works if humans participate equally in the dream, and there are too many human factions in the comics that want to kill every mutant in existence by any means necessary.

You either stand idly by while your race is rounded up and exterminated or you fight with every tool at your disposal. You can look at the resistance in France and Germany and the rest of Europe and the means by which they had to fight to save people from the Nazi Camps. Using a guerrilla attack to take out some Nazi commanders and assassinate them. Torture a Nazi soldier to find out where they are taking the people they have taken. When you live in a state of pure desperation for the survival of yourself and all the people you love you will often resort to any means necessary to survive in the face of that.

The X-Men have been in this state for years. So many atrocities have been committed against mutants that the horror of it all has just become a statistic. You have the entire population of Genosha exterminate in a blink of an eye. You have Wanda wish away the powers of 99% of all the mutants in the world and 1000's of mutants dying world wide because they were in situations at that moment where they were depending on their powers. You have people hunting down everyone who had powers before the Decimation just in case there is a chance they can get their powers. You have Stryker and the Purifiers destroying busloads of kids because they used to be mutants.

What can you do in the face of all that. I just read a comic where Emma Frost was put through extreme torture for around 2 weeks until she broke. She was in a hot-room/hotbox with the lights at 200% so she couldn't sleep, dehydrated, malnourished, and probably delirious at the end. By the time she broke she could barely speak coherently. They had a power suppression / discipline collar around her neck the entire time to keep her from resisting and probably to keep her from trying to commit suicide. These were the same people who arranged for the New Mutants to be infected with the transmode virus and then turned them into Sentinels. The worst part is that the people who are committing these atrocities are agents of the US Government and fully sanctioned. They executed Vanisher in the middle of the street just to show Emma that she had no escape from their control. They tortured and beat up Marrow to punish Emma for not telling them about Scott's return.

There are going to be people who think Emma should just put a bullet in her own head now that she is away from the O.N.E. and pretty much trapped into working for them. But from Emma's perspective she has to live to try and undo the damage of the cure she herself released because it is always better to live to fight another day. Emma has been compromising her own morals just to keep Scott and the New Mutants alive and to keep Callahan from rounding them all up.

Let's look at what would probably have happened if Emma tried to keep resisting.
1. They would have kept torturing her till she broke and if she couldn't give them information because her mind was gone they could still use her as a pet telepath and install her in a Sentinel. They weren't going to let her kill herself they wanted to break her.
2. If she did kill herself as soon as she was free, then who was going to fight to stop the cure? Would Scott and Logan be dead? Would the New Mutants all still be Sentinels?

This is why the questions of morality for the X-Men characters is hard to fit into any mold, they are in a state of absolute desperation and a state of war that never ends. They are always the victims of racial genocide doing whatever they can to survive and to protect their fellow mutants.

[Tycon]

Man. Remember when people were on here saying that the X-Men were wrong for wanting to get rid of a cloud that was killing them?

[PsychoEFrost]

Man. Remember when people were on here saying that the X-Men were wrong for wanting to get rid of a cloud that was killing them?

I wish I was on this site during the IvX days. Or not. The sheer stupidity of that plot would cause me to go off the rails and probably get banned.

[AHRNIHAL]

Man. Remember when people were on here saying that the X-Men were wrong for wanting to get rid of a cloud that was killing them?

Which people???People here who hated the revolutionary team or a people from marvel forum?

[Tycon]

Great post, RachelGrey! Without Emma, there’d be no team for Rosenberg to write cause Callahan would’ve killed them all or turned them into Sentinels.

I wish I was on this site during the IvX days. Or not. The sheer stupidity of that plot would cause me to go off the rails and probably get banned.

It was surreal looking back on it. Even the promotion Marvel did was so wild. Like at least AvX and Schism has merit but IvX was literally “should muties shut up and die or should those monsters try and save themselves/destroy a gas cloud/leave earth?” I’m so glad writers can freely talk about how stupid the Inhumans in that event now.

Which people???People here who hated the revolutionary team or a people from marvel forum?

There were threads both here and on the Marvel forum iirc

[RachelGrey]

Great post, RachelGrey! Without Emma, there’d be no team for Rosenberg to write cause Callahan would’ve killed them all or turned them into Sentinels.



It was surreal looking back on it. Even the promotion Marvel did was so wild. Like at least AvX and Schism has merit but IvX was literally “should muties shut up and die or should those monsters try and save themselves/destroy a gas cloud/leave earth?” I’m so glad writers can freely talk about how stupid the Inhumans in that event now.



There were threads both here and on the Marvel forum iirc

<sigh> my favorite time was the Extinction Team before Phoenix Five, and then them getting back together after Phoenix Five to rescue all of the new mutants who were being persecuted everywhere. I loved their base in Canada. Haha, if I was an X-man I would have joined Scott and Emma's team that day they showed up at the Jean Grey School to recruit people.

[PsychoEFrost]

<sigh> my favorite time was the Extinction Team before Phoenix Five, and then them getting back together after Phoenix Five to rescue all of the new mutants who were being persecuted everywhere. I loved their base in Canada. Haha, if I was an X-man I would have joined Scott and Emma's team that day they showed up at the Jean Grey School to recruit people.

Ditto. They were the ones actually going out and helping while the team at the school mostly moped or planned a way to make Scott kill himself.

[Killerbee911]

My morality test is different from others think of situation when Scarlet Witch was being unstable and was threat to billions. If "heroes" in that situation treat killing Wanda like it is the stupidest suggestion ever they have bad morals imo. Therefore Wolverine, Emma, Bishop, etc rank alot higher to me because they understand the difficult decision for the many. The most moral thing to me is saving the lives of the most people possible. And yeah if one person should die to make that happen then yeah that person dies. All the people you are putting up as the most moral wouldn't have dropped the Atom bombs on Japan. And as brutal as those bombs were way more lives would have been loss trying to overpower that military in conventional war.

If you believe there always another way then some X-men will rank higher,If you believe that you sometimes have to pick the best of a bad choice then other X-men would rank higher.

[Zelena]

My morality test is different from others think of situation when Scarlet Witch was being unstable and was threat to billions. If "heroes" in that situation treat killing Wanda like it is the stupidest suggestion ever they have bad morals imo. Therefore Wolverine, Emma, Bishop, etc rank alot higher to me because they understand the difficult decision for the many. The most moral thing to me is saving the lives of the most people possible. And yeah if one person should die to make that happen then yeah that person dies.

If I remember well, it was Captain America who was the most vehement to defend the Scarlet Witch. But is it because he was more "moral" than Logan or because he was unable to contemplate a situation where he has to kill a "sister-in-arms", a friend for the greater good? I don't think it is because Captain America was less smart or brave…

All the people you are putting up as the most moral wouldn't have dropped the Atom bombs on Japan. And as brutal as those bombs were way more lives would have been loss trying to overpower that military in conventional war.

A controversial historical fact. History is not science, you cannot make experiences to see if it will lead to different results. So a decision is made, moral or not, that will result in consequences, good and bad… And you are judged afterwards by people who have not been in these situations. It is what makes me feel uneasy about this thread, I have never been in a life-or-death situation, who I am to judge?

[Ricochet Rita]

The real question is which characters accept the logic of utilitarianism which is not super hero logic. Utilitarianism is the sort of logic that would argue super hero ideals don’t matter that stopping social harm to others matters even if it causes some smaller level of social harm doing so.

Here is what I would say in that regards.

Do not accept utilitarian logic normally: Jean, Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus, etc.

Accept utilitarian logic normally: Magneto, Emma, Cable, Wolverine, Polaris.

I quite agree with this...highlighting the word 'normally'. I think in this sense one of the most interesting plots was the first Asgardian War: a healthy world for everybody in exchange for magic and magical people. Piotr, tears in his eyes, accepted his sister must die in order to get rid of starvation and war forever.

I insist on morality is not the same thing that heroism, IMHO (setting aside that morality is not completely objective, either). One person can be highly moral and not be a hero, though. A 'hero' (=someone who saves a lot of people from death) can do quite immoral things.

Personally, I consider someone has lax morals when (s)he thinks (s)he can decide about else's life and death, and/or (s)he can manipulate else's decisions.

Thus, X-Men like Nightcrawler, Cannonball or Storm would rank high for me.

There are other like Colossus (remember when he was called "Peter Pureheart"?), Wolfsbane or Meggan who are strong moral people, too, but more confused, so they tend to do wrong things.

Then there are people who can be considered 'heroes', but who I hardly consider as people with morality, since they often consciously kill and/or manipulate, such as Xavier, Magneto, Wolverine, Cyclops or Psylocke.

These are my modest two cents.