Hi again Anon!
Full disclosure here; I don’t think Jason has been written consistently enough over the years to necessarily have one set, inarguable philosophy. But I do think there are certain themes that carry through.
So;
Red Hood: Lost Days #3
This is, notably, the first time Jason kills. (I’m not including Garzonas, which is debatable, or the Cheer incident, which is a retcon) He finds out his hand-to-hand teacher has a barn full of drugged children about to be sex trafficked. The cops and politicians are in on it, making lawful justice extremely unlikely, but taking out one man takes out the system. Jason crosses that line for the first time because nobody else is there to stop it, and this is the most practical route.
He does not see it as “murder” because he feels it was deserved.
Red Hood: Lost Days #4
After that line has been crossed - as Talia points out here - a pattern emerges. It’s notable that Jason does not kill all his dubiously skilled teachers, only the ones he deems the worst of the worst - people deliberately and repeatedly harming everyday people, especially children.
Jason reiterates this in his famous utrh speech. He’s not talking about killing every rogue, every criminal. He’s talking about killing the worst of the worst, the people who can finagle their way out of the system, the people the system fails to catch.
Under the Red Hood
It would be remiss of me not to include that one time Jason killed a nazi. Good for her dot gif.
To Jason, these people are beyond the regular means of justice, so he provides his own. He stops them from hurting anybody else.
This is not an exclusively post-resurrection opinion of his, either. Jason expressed similar thoughts during his Robin run.
Batman #422 (thank you @benbamboozled 😘)
This woman, Judy, baited her sister’s murderer into attacking her too and then slits his throat. She’s unrepentant, and Jason agrees with her decision. (Bruce, for the record, gives a speech on how “nobody is above the law” which is. An interesting stance for an illegally operating vigilante to take lmao)
It makes sense to me that Jason, as someone who has seen the system fail repeatedly (both as a civilian and as a hero), would have those kinds of doubts. The system doesn’t always work. The system often fails the most vulnerable people.
When Bruce was failed by the Gotham justice system, he became his own extra-judicial system. When Jason is failed by both the justice system *and* Bruce’s own vigilante system? Why wouldn’t he do the same.
Unfortunately, this thread is mostly dropped for a while with the wave of writers who either actively hate Jason and try to make him capital E Evil or who are playing shameless self insert with him, but there are two more recent panels that I want to include too;
Task Force Z #12
So, in TFZ, Jason pushes who he thinks is Bane off a roof for killing Alfred. It… is not actually Bane, but instead the brainwashed former corpse of Gotham re-reanimated via comicbook science and. You know what, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Jason regrets killing Gotham because he didn’t deserve it, but reiterates that he will kill the real Bane if he gets a chance.
Jason sees killing as something he can do that others can’t, that others maybe *shouldn’t* have to do.
The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #8
And finally, I adore this little beat in JTMWSL. This is something Jason thinks about. He’s not just some brute that doesn’t understand that “killing is bad”. He thinks about it, reads theory about it. He sees that between the black and white, there are many, many shades of gray.
He understands that people who don’t kill with their own hands aren’t necessarily good people - like these cops here, gleefully waiting for him to be killed in prison. And that the people who *do* get their hands dirty aren’t necessarily the bad guys - like poor Judy.
And I think he probably varies where he places himself on that scale at any given moment.
