3. How Come They Don't Just Kill People?
DC/WildstormSo here's two things we're all agreed on at this point: that supervillains will always, always break out of wherever they're incarcerated to commit crimes again, and superheroes don't exactly follow the letter of the law. Put those two problems together, and there's an easy way to cancel them out. Why don't the vigilantes just up and murder these "bad guys"? We're not saying they should, just that we don't understand what's stopping them. They're already messing up the court system and ignoring due process, so they may as well go the whole hog and just enact justice as they see fit. Works for Judge Dredd. Again, we wouldn't condone Superman and co going down this route - what with Dredd being a fascistic dystopian satire and all - we just don't see any good reason why they haven't. We guess there's the whole moralistic "KILLING IS BAD" thing, but when you're ignoring actual laws so you can go beat the crap out of people before they've had a fair trial, you've kinda already compromised any such social contract. Plus if you really want to have a philosophical debate about things, just look at how many people have been murdered or otherwise died as the result of a supervillain's actions, usually after the criminal in question has been beaten up and taken to jail by a superhero a few hundred times. If they'd been killed, it would have spared so many innocent lives. Maybe The Authority had it right all along?