What "V" Kant and Can Do: Questioning Whether Justice Can Lack Morality

     According to Kant, the idea of “morality” is premised by a couple of factors. One of them being that “actions are moral if there are no ulterior motive.“ So if someone has an ulterior motive, does that make all of their actions immoral? If following this rule of morality, are their actions unjustified? The answer would be no. Justification doesn’t need to be morally promising. Justice can be sought through a form of war, but that also does not make war morally right. Take 9/11 into account, basically, the US was affected by terrorism, and sought justice by declaring war against those the United States deemed as a current enemy.  Fighting against enemies can be justified on the premise that they affected the citizens, but the war itself and the techniques used to find our enemies was immoral in so many ways. 

     In V for Vendetta, V had been seeking vengeance against Britain’s wrong-doers for administering illegal testing and “treatments” similar to that of the Nazi concentration camps in WWII. The comic and film were meant to mirror real life immorality in war, and take the possibility of revenge to justify V’s actions in a way that the audience and Evey can sympathize, or even empathize. V had obvious ulterior motives, mirroring Guy Fawkes from the 19^th century, to take down the tyrannical, futuristic government of Britain. He killed the scientists and government officials that once abused the human rights of the citizen experiments, he blew up parliament (which Guy Fawkes could not do), and practically aimed for anarchy, since he deemed the government unfit. He took power into his own hands and wasn’t very secretive about it. He helped Evey understand his means by recreating the torturous camps he once was a part of.   

    His motives make him immoral, but the question I ask is if he was justified. If these actions that he took, was a form of justice. Justice can be immoral, it can affect bad people while helping the good, and it can also be just completely wrong from a moral standpoint. Correlating that back to 9/11, the United States tortured prisoners which is immoral, as most countries have done, but they thought it justice, because it was believed it could help to “stop the bad guys”.