From above: The answer was, quite far… and the takeaway message is that we only lose if we let ourselves, like Harvey Dent, be consumed by hatred, and fall. Villains like the Joker, and Osama Bin Laden, want to prove to the world that Harvey Dent, or the American people, aren’t as good and noble as they’re cracked up to be. They want us to cave to anger and compromise our ideals, and we can’t let them make us do that.

Problem: this is straight-up not true. They could care less if we get angry or not. They want us to collapse no matter what. The literal fact of our destruction is the point, for with that only can arise the Islamic world-state.

That already conflicts with the Joker – he’s more concerned with morality than the terrorists faced daily. He has a point to prove.

Furthermore, just because torture isn’t efficacious doesn’t mean it isn’t the responsible thing to do when emergency situations arise. Joker was toying with Batman and Gordon, but terrorists have self-interest, some of them. If you can get them to spill the beans on a major plot once, you’re going to save lives and let moral people continue unharmed.

The question now becomes whether moral society requires something vastly immoral to protect it. The answer for thousands of years has been “yes.” If you want to argue torture has no place in protecting society, you literally need to argue for a new relation between state and society, where a democracy is entirely moral and truthful to itself. That’s anarchism, and it’s a more than legitimate argument, but it requires enormous insight into human nature and governance.

Joker is not that insight. Joker is a very particular argument about the nature of justice, if we conceive of redeemers as necessary.

There are plenty of good arguments against the War on Terror. Batman isn’t it, and inasmuch as it gives you villains that are not redeemable whatsoever, it’s screaming something about the necessity of very deliberate, very harsh action.