system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What ethics would you say the (anti)superhero Rorshach is following?

Was pondering that yesterday and I am not sure. He is wiling to torture "underworld" people to get information, so that points towards a utilitarian. (The criminal's pain caused by me breaking his fingers is outweighed by the net gain of happiness by me stopping a criminal plot with the information I got from him.)

But at the end of the series/movie, he is willing to risk the fate of the entire world rather than letting a criminal go. This seems very deontological to me. (Ozymandiaz saves the world from nuclear war by criminal acts; Rorshach wants to expose the plot, thus reactivating the potential for nuclear war. Ozymandiaz plot is btw a clearcut utilitarian scheme; sacrifice a few million lives to protect the lives of the entire planet.)

So I'm not sure about it. I wonder if there were some ethically competent people that knows the Rorshach character. It is off course a possibility the character is not coherent, but the series reads like he is.
gpt
Rorschach believes that those who have "sinned", in his judgement, deserve punishment. So, aptly, he's a desert retributivist. This doesn't conflict with his hard-line deontology; in fact, it compliments it. This is why, in his mind, he's able to torture people for information without contradicting his strong, rules-based morality. The people he tortures *deserve* to be tortured, to him.
  
He's an extreme, diseased manifestation of deontological justice. He was meant to take the Batman vigilante archetype to its natural conclusion, which is that of a conspiratorial fascist.