My question is how blameworthy it is to not be at the extreme of self-sacrifice.
The underlying point is that, from a consequentialist point of view, you shouldn’t care how self-sacrificing a superhero is but rather how effective they are in fighting crime and saving people—which is to say how good they are at their job. Reality doesn’t grade for effort. If Batman decides to work twenty-hour days because he feels guilty about anything less, and a week later he falls asleep at the wheel and the Batmobile drifts into the path of an oncoming cement truck, he may have been very praiseworthy by some deontological standard but in practical terms he didn’t do much for Gotham.
It’s still a little more complicated than “how many hours should they work?”, though. Superheroing’s an inherently reactive sort of enterprise—traditionally a superhero doesn’t just go out whenever they want to rough up gang members, but rather shows up when e.g. a guy in a koala mask with a ray gun is robbing a bank—so I expect skilled on-call professionals like trauma surgeons or datacenter admins might be a better model than, say, factory workers.
That seems like a false extreme to me, but I might have misspoken. Lets say he decides okay, I could work 85 hours a week and suffer no loss in productivity, but I am unwilling to work more than 40h. He still benefits the world more than any but 0-100 (I bet someone curing something might win, but still, few...) people. Is he ethically blameworthy or praiseworthy?
The underlying point is that, from a consequentialist point of view, you shouldn’t care how self-sacrificing a superhero is but rather how effective they are in fighting crime and saving people—which is to say how good they are at their job. Reality doesn’t grade for effort. If Batman decides to work twenty-hour days because he feels guilty about anything less, and a week later he falls asleep at the wheel and the Batmobile drifts into the path of an oncoming cement truck, he may have been very praiseworthy by some deontological standard but in practical terms he didn’t do much for Gotham.
It’s still a little more complicated than “how many hours should they work?”, though. Superheroing’s an inherently reactive sort of enterprise—traditionally a superhero doesn’t just go out whenever they want to rough up gang members, but rather shows up when e.g. a guy in a koala mask with a ray gun is robbing a bank—so I expect skilled on-call professionals like trauma surgeons or datacenter admins might be a better model than, say, factory workers.
That seems like a false extreme to me, but I might have misspoken. Lets say he decides okay, I could work 85 hours a week and suffer no loss in productivity, but I am unwilling to work more than 40h. He still benefits the world more than any but 0-100 (I bet someone curing something might win, but still, few...) people. Is he ethically blameworthy or praiseworthy?