Last Friday, Netflix unveiled the first season of its exclusive TV series Daredevil, which is based on the Marvel comic book of the same name, but which takes place in the “MCU” (Marvel Cinematic Universe) some time after the end of Marvel’s 2012 summer blockbuster The Avengers. I have seen all thirteen episodes of the TV series, and I really enjoyed it, not least because of the cast filled with familiar faces: Charlie Cox as attorney Matthew Murdock/Daredevil (Owen Slater in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire), Elden Henson as Murdock’s friend and business partner Foggy Nelson (Fulton Reed in Disney’s The Mighty Ducks series in the 1990s), Deborah Ann Wolf as Karen Page, Nelson & Murdock’s client-turned-secretary (Jessica Hamby in HBO’s True Blood), Rosario Dawson as Claire Temple, Murdock’s romantic interest and off-the-books medical caregiver (Gail in Sin City), Vincent D’Onofrio as Wilson Fisk/Kingpin (Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket), Bob Gunton as Leland Owlsley, Fisk’s accountant/money launderer (Warden Norton in The Shawshank Redemption), and many others. But the themes the story addresses in the script and through the characters are also, I think, particularly important for any political theorist, amateur or professional, including (perhaps especially) libertarians, and nothing in the show’s writing should preclude libertarians from enjoying it.

For the uninitiated, the Daredevil comic book tells the story of Matt Murdock, a young boy growing up in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan with his single father, Jack Murdock, a small time prize fighter entangled with the mob. An accident involving a small chemical spill leaves young Murdock physically blinded. Worse, his father’s ill-timed decision to win a particular fight, betting his small savings against the odds to leave an inheritance for his son, instead of taking a dive for the mob running the books like he agreed to do, leaves young Matt fatherless during his formative years. Despite these tragedies, Murdock develops heightened, superhuman sensory acuity of hearing, taste, smell, and touch, allowing him to “see” the world using a kind of echolocation. He also learns Braille and puts himself through law school, after which he sets up a small practice in his native Hell’s Kitchen, where he defends clients against crooks in the city by day. Murdock dons a mask to anonymously dole out vigilante justice to the same crooks by night as the Daredevil, or “the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen”–namely those in the employ of his arch-nemesis, Wilson Fisk (a.k.a. “Kingpin,” although the show never referred to him as such), the mob boss trying to take over and remake the city in his own, lucratively self-dealing image.

Today the nice folks at the Geeks Are Sexy blog have posted a funny chronicle of the Daredevil story if you’re interested in further albeit abbreviated reading.

What might appeal most to libertarians or classical liberals about the story is that Murdock’s bête noire, Wilson Fisk, is a crony capitalist of the worst kind, a literal mobster who buys off police, judges, the media, and elected officials in a massive city-wide scheme to build up his real estate holdings and criminal empire, all while dressing up his activity publicly in his own brand of Hell’s Kitchen nativism, a supposed duty or debt he owes the neighborhood that raised him to help clean it up. A fan of the TV series as I am, I was perplexed by this critique of it, offered on Facebook by my friend and former Cato Institute colleague Jason Kuznicki, editor of Cato Unbound, the think tank’s monthly digital “journal of debate”:

The gratuitous endorsement of torture in Daredevil leaves me puzzled as to why so many of my friends claim to like it. Two episodes in, and I’m done. What a morally reprehensible show. The glorification of the mystics of muscle, as Ayn Rand would term it, I believe.

I wanted to clarify what Kuznicki meant before engaging the comment above, as throughout the show Murdock/Daredevil uses his heightened senses and superior physique to beat information out of the bad guys. His super-senses allow him to hear someone’s heartbeat, to taste the pH level of their sweat from a distance, etc., to tell if they’re lying; brute force is the only persuasion to which some people will listen, Murdock/Daredevil seems to think. Kuznicki told me in an email that his specific objection to the show was a scene in which a masked Daredevil binds a Russian henchman’s wrists, and ties him to a water tower on a New York rooftop. Daredevil then asks Claire Temple, the nurse that previously treated his wounds in her apartment, to help him avoid inevitable identity exposure had he gone to a hospital, who is also masked in this scene, where he should physically cut the henchman so as to inflict the most possible pain (without killing him), thereby enabling Murdock to extract the most truthful, and therefore valuable, information he would need to locate a child the Russian criminal syndicate had kidnapped at that point in the storyline.

I confess to not being well read in Ayn Rand’s works, so I had to search online for context for Kuznicki’s reference (this is a completely different issue from not being as well read in the broader canon of classical liberal/contemporary libertarian political theory as is Kuznicki, who was also assistant editor of The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, but I digress). The mystics of spirit and muscle refer simply to man’s instincts to set aside reason and rely instead on emotion and reflex, instincts that run contrary to Rand’s objectivist ethics (objectivism extolls rational individualist pursuits as the most virtuous kind of impulse):

As products of the split between man’s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter—the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit—the destruction of his mind.

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive—a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society—a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself. Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man’s mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man’s right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man’s life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth—to his great-grandchildren.

Selfishness—say both—is man’s evil. Man’s good—say both—is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man’s good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice—cry both—is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man’s reach.

That’s quite a mouthful, so suffice it to say I assume that Kuznicki’s invocation of the concept in his critique of Daredevil is to claim that it’s unthinking, callous, and immoral for libertarians to cheer on a hero who is willing to set aside reason in pursuit of “the will of Society,” a collective abstract that otherwise bad actors use to impose tyranny on individuals, to enslave his body to that will by using whatever means necessary (in this case, torture) to bring about justice for Hell’s Kitchen and all its residents.

In Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, if we allow the cardinal virtues of Force and Fraud to prevail, then life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Daredevil’s torture of the Russian henchman is brutish and poor (in morality, anyway), and his vigilantism forces him to isolate himself from the people who care most about him. His extrajudicial tactics are Force run rampant. In John Locke’s state of nature, no man can be a judge in a case in which his own rights have been violated, a sentiment that Thomas Jefferson echoed decades later. Murdock’s internalization of injustice throughout Hell’s Kitchen, how personally he takes it, disqualifies him from being a neutral arbiter of what’s right and wrong–but he appoints himself as referee of political and economic life in the city anyhow. Through either theoretical lens, we exit the state of nature and enter into civil society, giving up some of our sovereignty over ourselves and our wills/desires to a neutral third party, or system of laws, to adjudicate disputes between us and to protect our rights from encroachments by each other. On these counts, too, Murdock’s impulses in the torture scene, and over the bulk of the show’s first season more generally, run contrary to what we consider to be classical liberal ideals.

Categorically speaking, “torture” is exactly what Daredevil does in the scene in question. To boot, all throughout the show Daredevil beats helpless criminals literally bloody to get information from them, another form of torture. It is also true that torture is morally reprehensible (and even those readers of you for whom that notion gives some pause do not have to accept that premise to follow the rest of this argument). But that these forms of torture exist in the script is wholly insufficient to indict the entire series, or libertarians’ enjoyment of it, as morally reprehensible; indeed, I think it’s quite a reach to claim that the show gratuitously endorses torture simply because torture occurs in the script.

To wit, the second scene of the first episode of the series finds Matt Murdock who, like many New Yorkers of Irish descent, grew up Catholic, in a confessional booth. He regales the priest with a story of how his grandmother, to whom he refers as “the real Catholic” in their family, insisting that the “fear of God ran deep” in her and that the priest would have liked her, used to say “Be careful of the Murdock boys…they got the Devil in ’em.” This was apparently especially true of Matt’s father Jack, the boxer, who would occasionally snap in the ring and “let the Devil out” after having trapped a helpless opponent in the corner of the ring. This “Devil” would allow Jack to overcome his fear in the ring (side note: while this particular theme of overcoming fear did not play much of a role in the TV series, if at all, it was a recurring theme throughout the comic book and, to its credit, in the disastrous portrayal of Daredevil by Ben Affleck in the 2003 pre-Disney-acquisition Marvel Studios feature length film of the same name). Murdock chokes back some tears as he talks with the priest about his father, seemingly weeping at the realization that a man he once idolized was deeply flawed, but also perhaps simply missing the man who departed his life suddenly in his youth, never to return. “What he was feeling deep inside, I didn’t understand it…not back then,” continues Murdock, suggesting he has since become acquainted with the same fear-taming rage that accompanies letting one’s inner Devil loose that once both plagued and empowered his father. The scene concludes with Murdock insisting to the priest that he’s not looking for penance for what he’s done, but forgiveness for “what [he’s] about to do,” a clear sign that Murdock is fully aware that what he plans to do–act the vigilante, outside the boundaries of the law–is wrong.

Far from endorsing torture, Murdock wrestles fiercely throughout the series with his own moral turpitude, which he acknowledges openly to the priest, insisting at various points in the dialog that he (as attorney), Foggy, and Karen pursue the bad guys through the legal system only. He hypocritically continues to don the mask, of course, but he does so because he doesn’t want the people he cares about most, his family for all intents and purposes, to compromise their own moral characters with extrajudicial means. If anything, his willingness to bear the burden of this moral quandary alone is a species of, I would argue, repudiation of torturous tactics, not an endorsement of them. To put an exclamation point on the topic, the “Devil inside” metaphor resurfaces at later points in the season, including a discussion between Murdock and the priest over a latté, and a discussion in the church pews one afternoon over Daredevil’s moral purpose in life. He tearfully asks the priest why God would allow the Devil to live inside him, clawing for a way out. The priest responds with the suggestion that perhaps God wants Murdock to appeal to the better angels of his nature.

Based on the Randian passage above regarding the mystic of the spirit, Rand would no doubt excoriate Murdock for seeking either absolution or a sense of divine purpose from a God whose arbitrary will ostensibly enslaves an otherwise reasonable person’s mind. On this count, Kuznicki might twice indict Murdock for violating the objectivist ethic, this time on account of the mystics of spirit. But Murdock doesn’t appear (at least in this instantiation of the tale) to be a very devout Catholic–he never attends a church service, he only goes to confession when it’s convenient, and he takes Christ’s name in vain inside the confessional booth in the first episode’s second season recapped above. Recall, too, that his grandmother was “the real Catholic” in the Murdock family, the only one of them with a fear of God that “ran deep.” At no point during the series does Daredevil appear to be motivated by any particular doctrine of faith or other explicitly Christian ethic; on the questions of morality, his views (as he expresses them verbally in the dialog, at any rate) seem to be wholly compatible with secular motivations for doing the right thing. So I would not consider this Matt Murdock to be enslaved in the mind by God’s will; rather I view him as a human being, and therefore an ultimately sympathetic character, looking in a number of places for aid in determining how to act most justly, astutely aware of his own corruptibility and fallibility–perhaps more aware than the average human, indicating a strong moral compass, as opposed to the total absence of one.

And that brings me to what I think was most significant about Season One of Daredevil: Murdock’s moral evolution. I wrote in the headline that this post will not divulge major plot spoilers, and I’ll stick to that. But it’s worth noting that Murdock/Daredevil do appear to undergo a substantial transformation over the course of thirteen episodes; as a young, accidentally blinded boy had to train himself to navigate the world with only some of his senses, so too does a masked vigilante with conflicting instincts have to train himself to act virtuously, to deliver true justice to Hell’s Kitchen as opposed to using unjust tactics to yield what only superficially appear to be just ends. Murdock’s physical blindness is a metaphor for the moral blindness his rage induces, and only through intense training and critical reasoning can he learn to cope with either shortcoming. It’s a good thing, too; his unchecked, unbridled bloodlust almost leaves him dead at one point between the first and last episode. Further, the end of the show doesn’t neatly tie up all the loose ends of the threads we’ve been tugging in this discussion. But that’s what makes the show such a great piece of artwork; as David Chase (creator of HBO’s The Sopranos) persistently refuses to explain the meaning of the final scene of the final episode of his opus, a great artist is always willing to leave questions unresolved for the viewer.

Even if Murdock is enslaved by either the impulses of emotion or reflex, either of which would no doubt offend Ayn Rand, there’s nothing about this series to suggest it endorses torture. It demonstrates the evolution of an individual man’s moral character, likely thanks to rather than in spite of classical liberal ideas, like the importance of the rule of law to a free and civil society. Murdock is, after all, a lawyer largely engaged in criminal defense work (which not enough attorneys do–certainly not enough justices of our nation’s court of last resort have any experience with it), eschewing the partnership track at a big law firm to set up shop with his friend Foggy in his old stomping grounds, where real, ordinary people need massive amounts of help. What’s important about the Daredevil story for political theorists is the transformation Murdock’s character undergoes in light of the circumstances surrounding him. What’s important about the Daredevil story for libertarians is that it forces us to confront the fact that even of the most principled among us must exercise persistent vigilance in our morality, both within ourselves and our thoughts, and in how we relate to the world around us through our behavior.

So if you’re a libertarian and a Netflix subscriber, check out this show. It’s safe to view art that makes you uncomfortable, and this particular piece of art won’t corrupt anti-aggression principles.