TiaC wrote:I would say that the obvious way society would validate her decisions would be for him to attempt to bring charges against her. That is usually how society defines what is acceptable.
Actually in this specific case society would bring charges against her, because she committed a crime against him, specifically, extortion. So if he wanted to he could report said crime and which ever state he lives in would choose whether or not to bring criminal charges. Of course there are no witnesses in this case and no physical damage, so no case would ever be made, but that's not really relevant to the ethics.
The real ethical question presented, for my money, is one of justification. Is it justified to do harm in the service of doing good? It's a
reducto ad absurdium argument for utilitarianism: the potential harms being extremely small and the potential good being practically off the scale.
Once you accept the utilitarian principle as operating though, you start talking about issues of scale. So, what if, in order to achieve the same outcome, rather than wasting four hours of his time and traumatizing him slightly, she'd needed to kill him?
Is you could cure cancer forever by walking across the hall and killing the person who lives next door would you do it? And would it be justified? would it be correct?
For a government, building a framework of laws and policies, the answer is certainly yes, because the law deals with people as abstractions and takes the Spockian view. Superheros, by contrast, reduce the ethical to the personal and one of the strengths of SFP is its general awareness of this. I also think that the answer proffered in this specific case: that you'd do it, but you wouldn't feel good about yourself afterwards, is about right.