Justice In The Dark Knight

What is justice? Whether it is defined as punishing and rewarding people according to their actions or as simply being fair, many of us have rather simple definitions of the word. Justice, however, is an idea that is far more complicated than it seems at first glance. A particularly good example of the non-simplistic nature of justice is the movie The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight is an effective example of the complicated nature of justice because it uses powerful symbolic scenes to demonstrate the difficulty in finding justice, it uses characters as strong symbols for the various natures of justice and injustice, and it shows that the obviously just and unjust characters have striking similarities.
The Dark Knight’s scenes provide many examples
Each character in The Dark Knight goes by a different creed, and these creeds show what the characters themselves stand for. Take Batman, for example. Batman is seen as the “good guy” of the movie. His actions and motives are guided by the need to be just toward others; he protects innocents and defeats bad guys, no matter the cost. This drive for justice, however, also causes him to act above the law. In a similar corner as Batman is Rachel. Rachel is driven by the need to uphold the law. She does not like the idea of Batman, and instead feels that all actions should be performed entirely within the law. In the opposite corner is the Joker. The Joker is a man who wants to show people’s “true nature” through chaos. He takes heed to neither morality nor law. And then we have Harvey Dent. Harvey starts the movie as a great good guy, morally in between Rachel and Batman. He operates within the law to take down criminals, but he recognizes that the law can fall short when it comes to justice. It is this latter belief that causes him to like the idea of the “vigilante” Batman. While each of these characters stand for something different, they aren’t as clean-cut as their creeds make them seem. Batman, the “good guy”, commits several rather heinous acts. Although these are means to an honorable goal, they still should not be overlooked. There are multiple occasions where Batman tortures
Batman, Harvey (both before and after he becomes Two-Face), and Joker are all symbols for separate types of justice and injustice. Batman and Harvey (before he becomes Two-Face) both believe in the fairness of justice; they believe that the bad should be punished and the innocent should be protected. Two-Face also believes in fairness. He believes that “the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased. Unprejudiced. Fair” (The Dark Knight). Essentially, Two-face takes hold of chance as being the ultimate fairness. Decision making based on chance doesn’t take people’s actions into account; it just decides randomly, and randomness is fair. After all, Harvey was an incredibly just man. And what did he get for it? The death of his girlfriend, Rachel. Looking at the Joker, we can see that he also follows a definition of fairness when he says, “I'm an agent of chaos. And you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It’s fair” (The Dark Knight). So the Joker believes that chaos is the ultimate fairness. This is similar to Two-Face’s definition of fairness, but rather than relying on chance, the Joker just “does” things depending to how he feels. The scary thing that this comparison shows is that both good and bad guys are relying on the same thing – fairness - in order to justify their actions. In other words, fairness is at the