Christopher Nolan’s Joker as a Consistent Naturalist (And That’s Still a Bad Thing)

Abstract

In this article, we discuss C. S. Lewis’s description, and critique, of metaphysical naturalism, and apply this to our reading of the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. We argue that Nolan’s Joker is the most ethically consistent type of naturalist, and that this makes his ethical position at once more praiseworthy than that of numerous naturalistic moral thinkers, such as Sam Harris, insofar as it is consistent, and yet blameworthy in that other naturalistic ethicists, inconsistent though they may be, at least, reasonably, assume a kind of objective morality via implicit supernaturalist assumptions about “right” and “wrong”.