Ozymandias gets Doctor Manhattan's powers

[Kirika]

Either a similar event happens to Ozymandias or the same exact things happens-- what does Ozymandias do now that he has the powers of Doctor Manhattan? How well does he compare to Jon Osterman in how he handles them? Does he do and handle them better? Will be become anything like Jon Osterman in the along run?

Fight 1: After just getting them (His new powers) both Ozymandias and Doctor Manhattan fight.

Fight 2: Having as much time as Doctor Manhattan had getting used to his powers, the time he got them and the time passed that is the whole comic right to the end of it, both Ozymandias and Doctor Manhattan fight.

[Jonathan]

He probably loses scenario one due to the experience advantage of Mahattan, but wins scenario 2 since he has equal experience and as a human was the one with the most intellectual potential between them.

[BitVyper]

I think seeing the clockwork behind the universe would break Ozy, to be honest. Manhattan basically invalidated his entire character with one line that becomes pretty undeniable when you have Manhattan's perspective. Like either the guy named Ozymandias sees that everything he does will eventually amount to dust and goes Owlman crazy, or he gets the "nothing ends" thing and chills out to the point of being a different kind of person. Any reaction I can see him having to Manhattan's perspective should break who he is. Beyond that, however...

The specific reason Manhattan was even able to rebuild himself is pretty intrinsic to his character having been heavily invested in the slow, careful, meticulous assembly of parts, and lets not forget, a pretty high level nuclear physicist. Ozy is SMART, but when he needed to, for instance, build a monster, he didn't slowly design and build the thing himself (and why WOULD he), he hired people to do all that stuff. I don't know that he has the specific set of traits that allowed for the miracle of Dr. Manhattan's existence. Even if we float him that part, I doubt he'd be as capable with the powers as Osterman.

Osterman's backstory is really crucially important to what he's able to do as Dr. Manhattan. I just don't see Ozy being able to be the same way.

[Nik Hasta]

I echo Bit's summation there.

Manhattan's powers are quite transformative in terms of worldview. Being untethered from time alone radically changes how you interact with people and things, it's hard to say how Ozy would be effected.

[Shellhead]

It also seemed like Doctor Manhattan became nearly omniscient, and that eliminated his sense of free will. He already knows everything that will happen, and so already knows what he will or won't do before he does it. The only exception was the quantum uncertainty surrounding Ozymandias' trap in Watchmen #12.

[Tomzilla]

Interesting thread. Arguably one of Doctor Manhattan's most significant weaknesses is his determinism. He knows he's a puppet and can't do anything unless, well, he's meant to do it. Physicists typically identify as being deterministic materialists. What if Doctor Manhattan sees himself as a puppet because that's what he believes himself to be? Coupled with nigh-omnipotent power and a materialistic worldview, Doctor Manhattan may have violated Richard Feynman's first principle: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."

If true, Ozymandias might see things very differently. Whether we'd all be better for it is a different matter.

[MichaelC]

Doctor Manhatten's determinism is kind of odd. It seems like knowing the future would result in the future constantly changing, rather like what happened when Morty got the death-crystal this season, since your knowledge of the future would constantly interact with your reaction to that knowledge. This is true even if the universe is utterly mechanistic, since that awareness itself would be a mechanism.

[Shellhead]

Doctor Manhatten's determinism is kind of odd. It seems like knowing the future would result in the future constantly changing, rather like what happened when Morty got the death-crystal this season, since your knowledge of the future would constantly interact with your reaction to that knowledge. This is true even if the universe is utterly mechanistic, since that awareness itself would be a mechanism.

True knowledge of the future would mean that the future cannot be changed by any actions taken in the present.

Knowledge of one possible outcome that can be totally changed by actions taken in the present would be ephemeral and not particularly useful information.

[MichaelC]

But how does that work? If he sees that a murder is about to happen, what's stopping him from stopping the murder?

[The Dork Knight]

But how does that work? If he sees that a murder is about to happen, what's stopping him from stopping the murder?

It's because Doc is a non actor . He literally didn't stop a murder he knew was going to happen . The knowledge made him an unfeeling observer . He simply does not (mostly) react to the knowledge

And also the idea of determinism I guess . So for all of Ozys plans ultimately Rohrshachs diary made it to the desk so it is implied that the "true future" is simply not preventable. So Doc has a hazy perception of events in Watchmen, the idea being it's going to end in destruction anyway, even clouding the omniscient beings senses to achieve this outcome. So it does not matter if Doc "acts "

[Kirika]

Not saying myself whether I think it's true or not for either one of them, but does anyone consider Ozymandias or Doctor Manhattan to be a good person?

[Nik Hasta]

Not saying myself whether I think it's true or not for either one of them, but does anyone consider Ozymandias or Doctor Manhattan to be a good person?

I'm going to preface this with my view that people aren't intrinsically good or bad. "Bad" people still are capable of kindness and humanity, "good" people are still quite capable of doing horrendous things in the right circumstances without either side seeing a conflict in their own actions.

Applying a blanket moral judgement insofar as labelling people "good" or "bad" is seldom a useful thing. I subscribe to the idea that people do good or bad things and our perception of them is shaped by those actions.

Obviously, moral philosophy gets waaay more complex than that, but I wanted to at least explain where I am coming from.

All that said... neither of them could really be argued to be "good" people.

Ozymandias killed a city full of people with a superweapon, murdered people with his own hands and orchestrated the slow agonising deaths by cancer of multiple people in pursuit of his plan. This plan was preventing imminent nuclear war and saving the world. The moral take on this really comes down to your personal interpretation of utilitarian philosophy as whether it's intrinsically moral or not.

Greatest good for greatest number often leads to the smaller number getting treated horribly.

I would personally pitch him as definitely not a good man. He's well-intentioned (kind of) but ultimately amoral, profoundly lacking in empathy with others and breathtakingly egotistical. He's capable of extraordinary acts of violence and doesn't seem to feel much regret or sorrow for the millions of lives he snuffed out.

As for the Doctor; Jon specifically tries to position himself outside of the notion of good and evil because he doesn't perceive free will as all that real for the most part. People, to him, are mostly puppets in one form or another and their actions aren't wholly significant because the results, to him, have already happened/are happening.

It's worth noting that most moral philosophy is based on the normal flow of time - cause and effect. This makes Jon harder to morally judge because he experiences all moments as the present at once. There is no cause and effect to him because the two don't have a causal relationship from his point of view.

That said, I would also class him under not good. He murders hundreds, maybe thousands, of people at the behest of a major superpower, murders criminals without due process, murders Rorschach to preserve what he ultimately believes is an entirely fleeting moment of peace and ultimately comes to the decision that he's so disinterested in the affairs of humanity that he doesn't care any more.

Both of them have done big crimes and have relationships to morality that would leave them on the darker side of the moral spectrum. Not "good" in my books.

[BitVyper]

Applying a blanket moral judgement insofar as labelling people "good" or "bad" is seldom a useful thing.

I'd argue that it's practical here. Like we're not talking about whether or not to hire someone who had jailtime here; Ozy's a mass murderer on an unimaginable scale, and even aside from that, he's betrayed, stalked, and murdered all over the place. If he asked you to go live on an island and build some weird thing for him, would you do it? Go to dinner with him? Work for him? He has freely murdered people who had no reason to suspect he would under all of these circumstances. He spent years giving people cancer just so that he could isolate Osterman. There's a point at which you recognize a pattern and decide like, hey this guy is a bad person and maybe shouldn't be trusted like... ever. Like I honestly can't think of a situation where I think it would be wise to trust Ozymandias period. He's proven pretty solidly that there is no one he isn't willing to betray (just look at all the people he set up and then murdered), so yeah, at any decision point it's pretty practical to say Ozymandias is bad and you should assume that whatever he is saying, whatever front he presents, he's going to do bad. It may not be truly intrinsic nature, but he is who he made himself.

You might not use the words good or bad or evil or just or whatever, but any words you'd us in their place serve the same function.

This plan was preventing imminent nuclear war and saving the world.

I think his core motivation was a lot less altruistic than that. He sees himself as a human paragon and wants to be better than Alexander and build some eternal legacy or somesuch and yeah his plan involves (at least he thinks) "saving the world" but it's more about making the world a prop for his personal story. His failed attempt to kill Dr. Manhattan is particularly telling because there was really no reason to do it at all; he'd already accomplished his master stroke. He didn't know he'd succeeded yet, but the plan itself was finished; but he still sacrificed Bubastis to take a crack at Manhattan, and while no real reason is given, I can't see that as having been anything but ego-driven. Just like he had to go beat the Comedian personally, he wanted to beat the only other guy who could make him feel inferior. He didn't need to murder the people who built his monster either; they had evidence of nothing and could have been dealt with any number of different ways.

As I recall, he didn't just (maybe) prevent war, he did it in such a way as to set himself up as more or less controlling the new world order from behind the scenes. At best, Ozy is egotistical to the point that he effectively views the rest of humanity as sub-Ozy, and at worst, he's barely treating them as alive.

He's a great example of someone who uses utilitarianism to justify whatever he wants. Any utilitarian defense of his character is doomed from the outset though, because he sure as hell couldn't possibly have known with any degree of certainty that his plan was going to work, and he was committing himself to murders long before it started coming together. You might come up with a utilitarian defense of the event as a whole (and I'd disagree with it), but Ozy was giving people cancer on the premise that like... maybe it would help his plan. What would the utilitarian analysis of it be if his psychological profile on Osterman had been off and Dr. Manhattan had just started killing everyone who was crowding him?

Edit: Changed "decades" to "years" because I think it was more like... A decade or maybe a bit more?

[Nik Hasta]

I don't disagree with any of that overall, my application of the utilitarian interpretation was definitely the most charitable view of Ozy's reasons behind his actions. I would also disagree with it myself.

As to the labelling of people as good and bad, my objection was more to the notion that he or anyone else is intrinsically "bad". I don't disagree that the colloquial use it has its purpose and agree that it can be used correctly, but I'm wary of it because I don't like the implication that goodness or badness is somehow tied to someone's very being because I don't think it's true.

Ozy is the things he does. The things he has done are consistently horrendous and monstrous. He is, however, not incapable of doing a good or humanitarian thing. He has that capacity in him whether he chooses to use it or not.

To be clear, he is guilty of a ton incredibly heinous crimes and I also do not think there was any reasonable justification for them.

[The Arbiter]

I overall agree with the points and themes presented by Nik and Bit. Furthermore, it was a very enjoyable discussion to read.

I absolutely agree that ultimately "you are the things you have done".

This is a tricky/fun conversation to have. Once, a very good teacher of mine whom I have a lot of respect for asked the class (this was highschool), "A man is walking down the street when he sees a small child about to be struck by a car. He selfishly jumps in and saves the child from certain doom at the cost of his own life. Was he a good person?" Most of the class said yes. Teacher proceeds- "What if I then told you that the reason he was on his walk to begin with is because he was cooling off after a heated argument with his own wife and child? What if I told you that he struck his wife during that argument and had done so multiple times in the past while screaming at his child? Is he still a good person?" Class was suddenly a bit less unanimous haha