Comic for Monday 12/18 (Early High Res)

It's the ultimate ethical conflict of nearly all superhero stories, and reflects the underlying ethical dilemma at the heart of the philosophy around criminal justice: if taking a life is wrong, how can you take the life of a criminal, even a dyed-in-the-wool killer, without being just as wrong as the criminal? The answer is typically that letting them go causes more people, innocents, to suffer or die, but that's a utilitarian argument that doesn't really full satisfy. That same answer would argue that you should flip the trolley switch and mow down the one dude strapped to the rails to save the 4 on the other track, an act that, while arguably ethically justified, would be troubling and possibly traumatic for most people to handle. It's why we have superheroes like Batman that refuse to kill criminals. Is Batman being ethically superior? Or is he being an idiot and effectively guilty-by-proxy of the murder of anyone those criminals subsequently kill when they almost inevitably escape? How many innocent people would still be alive today (you know, within the DC comic continuum) if Batman had offed Joker the first time Batman caught him? But then, if Batman starts taking the lives of criminals, he's now become judge, jury, and executioner. Is he still a good guy? Or is he a Dexter, a functional bad-guy that just limits his prey to those that are worse?