yeah, yeah, batman should just kill the joker to prevent further harm from coming to gotham. sure. what would it do to gotham, though, to know that batman is willing to kill? to know that there's a masked vigilante hidden out there somewhere in the night, and if you step too far out of line he might just fucking kill you? do you think the people of gotham would feel safer? do you think they would want to go out at night? would they have to try harder to look nonthreatening, do you think, to avoid being mistaken for a criminal? would they avoid putting their hands in their pockets or walking with their hoods up?
as a soft pacifist, I think we would have more effective conversations about violence and punishment and harm if we changed the focus of the discussion from "do bad people deserve to be hurt?" to "what are the consequences of using violence? and is that what I want to happen in my community?"
if the goal is to actually make vulnerable people safer, not just to make bad people hurt, then the question becomes, "will acting this way make vulnerable people safer? what is the most effective way to actually make the vulnerable people in my community safer?"
values are personal and the concept of justice is slippery and compassion can be hard to muster for people who have done great harm. but behavior is external and being able to observe a behavior and then see the consequences of that behavior playing out in your environment makes a much stronger argument for why we shouldn't dehumanize people who do harm, why they need to be met with principled nonviolence and compassion even while the harm that they're doing is halted or prevented or corrected.
I think dehumanization and violence are bad strategies to use for preventing harm because the effect of using them is to create trauma and division and paranoia and harm. because when you accept the use of these strategies for problem solving in your community, suddenly anyone could be the target of violence if the person who weilds the violence decides that they're a "problem." and more often than not, the people in your community who are going to get labeled as a "problem" are the vulnerable, the powerless, the crazy, the racialized and criminalized and nonconforming. but even when the system works "correctly" to only target the people who are doing harm, does it actually stop harm from being done in your community? and does it only hurt the people that it's targeting? or do all the victims and the friends and family and loved ones of the victims and the friends and family and loved ones of the perpetrators and all the innocent people who have to witness the violence and everybody who lives through the trauma of existing in a violent world where failure is met with violence—does it hurt them too?
