Silvanus said:
Saucycarpdog said:
I know that X-men was created to show racial prejudices in a fictitious, superhero fashion. Except that this question is not meant to be racist, but question the how much equality humans are willing to give. Some mutants can roast entire armies and move entire cities. Is that even human? Should we give equal rights to such dangerous individuals?
Some humans have those abilities, you know.
Humans only have those abilities through working with other humans, the President of the U.S. can authorize the nuking of a city, but only through convincing the chain of command to follow that order, and if the President goes crazy he can still be stopped fairly easily through physical force or a bullet to the head. Even spectacularly armed, a single person is still no real match against a large group of other humans, a leader may be able to weild the power and technology of an entire country, but he has to convince enough people to enforce his rulings to do so, and in the end even histories strongest leaders are still as vulnerable as any other human in a purely physical sense.
The higher level mutants in Marvel don't have that restriction, against normal human law enforcement and even the military, there's basically no way to stop them, to a high level mutant, laws are just a suggestion and the rest of society would need to depend entirely on every individual mutant's sense of morality to function properly. The government derives a large part of its power from the ability to use force to enforce the laws it sets down, they also depend on the ability to gather enough support from the majority to not rebel against its edicts.
High level mutants basically destroy both of these tenets, the government loses the option of force, so any high level rogue mutant could easily demolish a major metropolitan area before the proper authorities would even have the chance to react.
In the case of mutants from Marvel, it likely won't matter what the normal humans think because you only need a couple dozen mutants at Magneto's, Jean Grey's, or xavier's level and any government like what we know today will cease to exist. The most likely scenario is that the world would be divided up into feudalistic forms of government with the high power mutants ruling over humanity and using those less powerful than them to enforce their rulings. The only reason that normal government similar to our world even exists in the Marvel universe is because of authorial fiat that demands the world resemble ours as much as possible except with superheroes, aliens, and magic users running around. There's no way in hell our government wouldn't collapse like a house of cards if actual high level Marvel mutants started showing up.
TheKasp said:
I would be for 'registration of powers'. They would have all the same rights as anyone else but, like people with dealdy weapons, they need to register their power to proper authorities.
Would you trust the human authorities to refrain from misusing such a database? It would leave mutants tremendously vulnerable.
And the opposite leaves the unpowered humans tremendously vulnerable, there likely is no clean solution that works perfectly. With mutant registration you are exposing the mutants to government abuse, without it, you are exposing basically everyone else to forms of abuse that the government will no longer be able to stop, or even mitigate. The cops aren't going to be able to effectively track or catch a serial killer that uses his mind control powers to make people kill themselves, even the military isn't going to be able to stop a high power mutant hiding amongst the population that just snaps one day.
You are right, I wouldn't entirely trust the human authorities not to abuse such information, but the opposite case involves me trusting that any mutant with mass mind control or nuclear explosion powers isn't going to decide to abuse the fact that they can pass anonymously amongst the populace. Both sides are going to abuse any trust given to them, unlike in reality, a top class mutant abusing that trust ends up with a city disappearing or the entire leading branch of the government secretly mind controlled to their whim.