One Bad Second:
One Bad Second: Utilitarian Terror, Deontological Firewalls, and the Mirror-Image Apocalypse in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), directed by Zack Snyder, transcends its status as a superhero confrontation to become a rigorous philosophical interrogation of preventive apocalypse in an era where human fragility coexists with god-like power. The film stages a high-stakes collision among three destructive ethical paradigms: the Joker’s “one bad day” theorem, which posits psychological breakdown as an inevitable law of entropy; Batman’s “1% doctrine,” a form of strategic rationalism drawn from nuclear deterrence theory; and Lex Luthor’s utilitarian indictment, which leverages the death of Robin as empirical evidence that non-lethal restraint enables future catastrophe. These forces converge upon Batman’s no-kill rule , which operates as a deontological absolute —a duty unbound by consequences. Superman and the Joker function as mirror-image e...
