#all this philosophy is giving me a headache jfc]

[dramatisperscnae]

Headcanon - Bruce Wayne

Morality

Bruce’s sense of morality can seem extremely black and white at times, and to be fair it often is. But living in a city like Gotham, even the blindest of men eventually has to admit that there are shades of grey. Bruce has been – and still is, when necessary – willing to work with those whose morals are far more chaotic than his own in order to accomplish what he needs to. This was far more true in his youth than it is in the present day, when he was driven by urgency and anger and impatience and was more willing to think that the ends could justify a lot of means, but it remains true even now.

I have said before and I will continue saying it: Bruce’s standards are much higher and much stricter for himself than for those around him. Not to say that he doesn’t hold his family and colleagues to a high standard, because he absolutely does, but if he considers those standards lenient just imagine what he expects of himself.

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in his absolute refusal to kill. To murder, I should say, since Batman has killed in the past; he regrets every instance and goes to arguably insane lengths to avoid doing so, but when it truly is down to the enemy’s life or his there really is only one choice. There exist individuals whose death would only benefit Gotham City and the world in general, Bruce knows this. He has come a hair’s breadth from taking those lives himself on more than one occasion, only being called down by others who respect him and who he is too much to let him fall – and he is grateful to each one of them for doing so.

Bruce cannot ever – ever – let himself kill in anything other than absolute last-ditch no-other-option self-defense, because it truly would be too easy. He knows how he would justify it, and he knows that he would. Not. Stop. He will even – and has – freely admitted this.

To phrase it as Sir Terry Pratchett once did, if you do something for a good reason then you will do it for a bad one. To further draw on [and paraphrase] Sir Terry’s writings, who watches the Batman? He does. Every minute of every day. Because he knows how easy it would truly be for him to fall; he’s felt it. On one occasion he briefly ended up with Superman’s powers[Superman/Batman2003, #53-56], and to this day he is ashamed of how he behaved with them. Everything he did was in the name of justice, of finally winning his war and ending crime and evil, but his actions nearly cost him his son Dick, when the lad tried to pull him back and Bruce beat him down.

Meanwhile, for others he is moderately less strict, and can be rather more pragmatic. While he never had any real intent to use it, he had devised a plan that would end up putting all of Gotham’s organized crime under a single leader that would be allied with him; had Black Mask not interfered during the War Games in Gotham, he might even actually have succeeded. His willingness to work with known rogues when necessary also shows this; if there is clear good being done, particularly if there is more good than harm being done, then the Bat can often be convinced to look the other way, at least for a time. Drawing once again on the writings of Sir Terry, sometimes good and bad don’t matter so much as which way you face.

So yes, Bruce’s morality often seems extremely black and white – for himself, because it has to be, especially when it comes to his Code – but for others he can allow at least a few shades of grey here and there.