Arrow - S8 E3 - Leap of Faith

I mean, they're called "worst case scenarios," because they're worst outcome out of all the outcomes that are still distinct possibility if you're not cautious, or even if you are.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions; it may not seem like a big deal to bargain with yourself and justify this one compromise, because it's one person, just one small step over the line.  Then the next person comes along who's just as bad and just as dangerous and it seems like even less of a departure, because the decision had already been once before; and the risk lies in the potential risk of objectivity, so that before you know it, you don't end up so far from where you started you hardly recognize what you've become.

As for the Joker specifically, I have two thoughts on this.  The first was a point I was trying to make, but even at the time I was writing it, I wasn't sure if I was bringing it across properly, but it's arguably the most important. Why is the Joker Batman's responsibility?  Why is it on Batman's shoulders to decide that he's too great of threat to the world, that he has to be put down?  If someone like the Joker is such a danger, where no walls can hold him and the lives of virtual anyone who crosses his path are up for grabs, it should be the decision of the courts or law officials or government leaders to determine that lethal action is warranted; not an individual who's taken the law into his own hands.
Again, it's one thing to use lethal force during a physical confrontation and when it's a very last resort in trying to subdue that person; and it's something else entirely, especially for someone who has no official authority and is acting solely as a rogue vigilante, to proactively find someone that they personally have deemed too great of threat and decide to kill them.  Whether the ends justify the means, the latter is premeditated murder.

Your example of Osama Bin Laden is a good point of comparison; it was not some private militia group or lone wolf who took it upon themselves to say, "I'm going to hunt this guy down and take him out."  He was deemed by the authorities of the US to be of such a threat as to warrant his death and it was sanctioned by the top most authority of our country.  If the President of the United States personally went up to Batman and said, "The Joker is too great of threat to the personal security and safety of the citizens of our country and I'm authorizing you to use all necessary force to end that threat once and for all," that would be something else entirely; that would be Batman being made an agent of the legitimate powers of government to act in an official capacity as one of it's agents in this one specific mission.  And arguably it wouldn't necessarily need to be the President, it could maybe the governor or a judge or perhaps the police commissioner can hypothetically give that kind of order.  But point is that the authority is coming from the right place, from individuals who have been charged with the responsibility of making those decisions by the people of our society. The people, in granting that power, are saying, we trust you to wield it judiciously and not abuse it; and presumably such an authorization would fall within that assessment.
And even then the question of personal morality and how that might weigh on Bruce Wayne would be another component of that; just as it invariably weighs on real world police and officers and soldiers who have had to take a life.  And interestingly, the whole idea of a government agent authorizing and tasking Batman with the execution of someone who poses a real threat to public safety was at the heart of one of the clips I shared from Justice League Unlimited, involving Batman and Ace, with Amanda Waller ordering Batman to kill Ace for the greater good; and the way they deal with that is just sooooo good.  Which is why I feel the need to share it again:



The other perspective though is purely from a creative, logistical standpoint; which is that Batman can't kill the Joker.  No one can kill the Joke so long as the story continues; and then he can't come back to antagonize the protagonist.  It's arguably only when you have an ongoing story, that has gone on for as long as the comics have, that the repetition of certain characters constant and perpetual threats starts to take on a Sysophisian quality, where continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting a more permanent resolution begins to strain credulity.  But as with a lot of these sort of issues, my opinion is that if something is meant to be a conceit that wouldn't otherwise make sense in a more conventional setting - like why should the Joker get to live - it falls to the writer's responsibility of finding an in-story reason that makes that conceit plausible.  An example that comes to mind, that happens to do with the Joke and why Batman hasn't killed him, is when the Joker originally killed Jason Todd; writers then had the Joker, somehow, be made a diplomat of some foreign country and given diplomatic immunity.  It was a bit ham handed, but it addressed the very clear issue that if Joker was going to do something so extreme as to kill Batman's own partner, then obviously Batman's expected retaliation should be in kind and they needed a reason to avoid that.  And since it was the 80s and the writers were probably too busy doing coke, they're like, "yeah, let's just make him a diplomat." 

I do think, however, that there are better ways of offering some reason why Batman takes the necessary more pragmatic approach to Joker, let alone the rest of his rogues.  One approached I've always liked is how Two-Face was dealt with, again, in Batman the Animated Series; where they made Harvey Dent a close personal friend of Bruce Wayne's.  And so the dynamic between them changes from Batman simply beating up on a villain, he's trying to stop a friend who has been victimized, who's sick; and while it doesn't excuse his actions, it's understandable that Bruce wants to help him as much as he wants to stop him.  One of the more brilliant episodes that brings Two-Face back was "Judgment Day," where Two-Face becomes the target of "The Judge" - a vigilante passing judgement on criminals, with lethal consequences and Batman is put into a position of having to protect him and stop the Judge.  And then

As I see it, a good way of doing this with the Joke is to make Batman feel personally responsible for the Joker's existence; and the writers have sort of done that in the various re-tellings of the Joker's backstory, where the man who would become the Joker falls into a vat of chemicals after an altercation with Batman.  They don't always play it up to the degree I think they could.  The man in question who becomes Joker may or may not be an unassuming individual at the start; in some versions he's a patsy and shouldn't have even been there.  But I think playing on Batman's guilt and the sense that he has sense of responsibility for anything the Joker does, that it would make it that much harder for Batman to end it by killing the Joke; not because he doesn't want to see the threat ended, but rather out of the concern that doing so wouldn't assuage his own sense of guilt, but compound it.  And so long as he can catch the Joker and put him away where he can't hurt anyone else, while still being alive, and take the necessary measure to improve things to improve the chance it'll stay that way, Bruce's conscience may not be put at ease, but the weight of his own sense of responsibility doesn't increase.

My own thoughts on how this could be achieved would be to expound on an idea more recently introduced in the comics, which is that there is more than one Joker.  In my scenario, not only is there more than one Joker, the inherent reason that's so is as a result of a virus - one that shares properties with Joker's iconic poison - but rather than kill a person, leaving a person stuck with a Joker like grin; it contorts the facial muscles into that sort of expression, makes the skin paler and might sometime changes the hair color, while also affecting the mind, suppressing the ID/or the centers of the brain that control the sense of right and wrong or judgement.  And that virus, which Bruce may have play some tangential role in accidentally developing or failing to stop its release, has spread through Gotham, to every citizen; and Bruce manages to develop a treatment, but he couldn't find actually find a cure, he could only find a way of suppressing it and keep it from spreading.  But it's still there in everyone who was in the city and was exposed to it; it's lying dormant for an in-determinant amount of time.  So in a city of a million+ people, everyone them of them has a become this ticking time bomb, where at any moment they could become a grinning, psychotic maniac; and Batman has to stop them, but at the same time, they're still an innocent underneath it all.  And some of them he's able to save, as much as he's able to stop their harm of others.  But then there could be one or two or more for whom the virus progressed so far that remission remains out of reach and they are "The Joker" or one of the classic iterations; and they're a constant threat, yet still in a certain sense a victim and Bruce holds out hope of one day finding a way to treat them.