You can’t help but like a man who punched Hitler in the face. That was Captain America, right from the start (Volume 1, No.1, 1941). But two things made it easy for frail, young Steve Rogers to be transformed into the moral saint, ‘Cap’: Professor Reinstein had injected him with superhero serum, and the enemy was Nazism. As thought experiments in ethics go, it doesn’t reveal much, if anything, about human moral character and the problems of choosing the right thing to do. But the Cap finds that out later – frozen in the 1940s he re-emerges in 1964, and since then he’s always been fighting in complex moral times, a man/superman struggling with a simple good-versus-evil sense of duty in a world where the ‘land of the free’ seems to act as badly as anyone. He’s had to learn moral judgement – exercise his own ethical character – rather than just apply the rules of the American Government of the day. That’s Mark D. White’s contention about Cap and it’s indisputable when we look at Cap’s record. White’s aim is the relatively modest one of showing that Cap‘s ‘old-fashioned ethics are still of value in the 21st century.’

The disputable point is whether White is right to also conclude that Cap’s a moral exemplar by thus representing a morality that combines – and this is where the moral philosophy comes in – virtue theory and deontology. Cap supposedly exemplifies acting virtuously (bravely and honestly for example) and dutifully (‘it’s the right thing to do’). And both require judgement because neither our moral virtues nor a sense of duty determine clearly what to do in a given situation. The practical intention of the book is that this view of ethics, coined ‘virtuous deontology’ by White, and the Cap’s moral example, is right for American students to learn, for American politics even, ‘to show what we have in common in a time of divisive acrimony’ – in that sense then Cap’s been given a truly heroic task. I wonder though whether Cap is at his moral best when, paradoxically, he’s Steve Rogers, doubting whether there’s a clear sense of the right thing to do, assessing economic and social complexities, and simply that, before acting.

White’s argument is worth considering because the Cap’s got some moral maturity behind him – he’s been here before, tasked with saving America’s moral soul, that loose characterisation of values of freedom from coercion and self-improvement called the American Dream or Way. In 1983 Cap reflects that the American Dream ‘is often light years removed from the American reality’ (a quote directly from the comic) and that it’s no longer possible to see things in the black and white terms of the 1940s. The reflection’s context is interesting too, with Cap confronted not by evil incarnate but a drunken husband threatening his wife and children with a gun in their tenement apartment. The story takes the reader through the desperate man’s life, especially his war experiences and economic circumstances, tells us what’s driven him to this state of affairs. It ends with him disarmed by Cap, who intervenes so that the police don’t shoot him. And that’s all Cap does – he’s relying on some restoration of hope, that the man’s wife’s love for her husband will prevail, that ‘he’s too much to live for’ and that sense will prevail. There’s no appeal to conventional justice, to the narrow state and police view.

So what’s going on here, morally? Cap admits he has ‘sidelined right and wrong’. We could go further, beyond White’s virtuous deontology then and say Cap’s morality here is truly existential, a judgement made not from his virtues and sense of right but from choosing freedom itself as a value, here by intervening to give the desperate man a chance to choose his life differently. That principle of hope, if it can be called that too, pervades Cap’s life and adventures. After 9/11, the first thing he does is restore that as a preliminary to any other action. He encourages the American public again with: ‘Today there’s hope. You’re not too late.’

But the Cap’s real, defining existential crisis had happened a long time before. Disillusioned by the American government, he had become Nomad: ‘from the moment I returned to life in 1964 I felt out of my time … the people who had custody of the American Dream had abused it and us – there was no way I could keep calling myself Captain America.‘ He refused to work at the simple behest of the government, but he’s also repeatedly frustrated at his own ability to work out the best thing to do: ‘Blast! Why can’t I remember how complex life is today?’ Nomad is a serum-enhanced Steve Rogers, but with moral doubts. Morally, he’s you and me then. But a sense of duty kicks back in, of defending the American Way. And he thinks he’s got the best of both worlds now, his new complex view of the world and those old ideas of duty. As Nomad, Steve realises he must still fight for the Way – ‘The man Nomad is won’t die, everything he’s learned will live on – only now, once again, it’ll be as [you turn the page of the comic in anticipation] CAPTAIN AMERICA’. This is White’s exemplary moral figure. And in the next issue, to its credit, if we’re concerned that the supposed new Cap with experience has just gone back to doing what the government tells him to do then: ‘Make no mistake: Steve Rogers has not travelled in a circle’.

So is this the moral way too, a pre-reflective sense of right and wrong, some innate (or injected) virtues, plus experience? But what happens once we have made that journey, once we’ve lost our virgin moral sentiments to, say, Vietnam, the oil crisis, Watergate, and 9/11? A key problem with Cap’s morality is that The American Way is barely characterised beyond the word ‘freedom’ and never questioned adequately. White says the Cap exercises judgement. But his judgement, ultimately, is the exercise of the Way in its simplest ‘freedom from all restrictions’ form. It doesn’t draw, as it could, on his experiences of people in real, concrete situations, and how their freedom ‘to be’ is best defended. So in the latest film version of Captain America (2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier), Cap’s apparent ability to adapt to a new present is really nothing more than an updated punch-in-a-Nazi’s-face, a fight against obvious evil, against plots and assassinations. As soon as the idea of duty - the Way - sets back in, moral complexity and invention disappear.

But perhaps we can still admire a version of Cap - the one who, even if only once or twice, saw beyond the constraints of an ideologically constructed ‘freedom’. The man who understood the material and situational complexities of morality - of how difficult it really is to decide the right thing to do. We don’t need moral saints. Be Steve Rogers. Be the (super?) human who, drawing on beliefs and experience, works the coexistence of hope and doubt, of truth and invention.

Jeffrey Petts has recently completed a PhD on 'Work and the Aesthetic' with the Department of Philosophy at the University of York.

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