Thanos's logic makes sense

The argument

The argument that Thanos is not really a villain rests on the internal coherence of his reasoning rather than on any defence of what he does. His logic is rather simple: get rid of half the planet so that the other half can survive. On this account he is not killing for its own sake, for gain, or out of malice, which are the motives that usually make a character a villain. He acts on a calculation, and the calculation rests on a premise most audiences already accept: a population that outgrows what its world can support faces environmental problems and lives that get progressively worse. Given that premise, culling half is a terrible circumstance but a coherent response to a worse one, and in his own mind he is sparing the survivors from terrible lives rather than inflicting suffering on them. His intent is to be the savior of the planets he destroys, Earth among them. Proponents argue that this matters because villainy is ordinarily understood as a fact about motive rather than about scale. A character who wants suffering and a character who accepts suffering as the price of preventing more of it are not the same kind of character, however similar the outcome. Thanos, on this reading, belongs to the second kind. The final move is to test that intuition against the world we actually live in. We all live in fear of global warming destroying our planet, and no one has a plausible way of stopping it. What if someone simply came in and fixed it, with one snap? The suggestion is that we would recoil, and then adjust to the new life set before us — and that the recoil is directed at the means and the presumption rather than at the logic, which is why the logic survives it intact.

Premises

Counter-arguments

As depicted in Avengers: Endgame, losing half of the world's population in an instant would be disastrous. The world is built to sustain the current population. Who would take care of all the buildings, all the creations that this world has made? Families would be lost and destroyed, and the world would fall into despair. Additionally Thanos has an absurd amount of resources at his disposal, in the Avengers films he is depicted as having a massive space armada and control over an absurd stretch of territory. Surely Thanos could use such resources to restructure earth, and other planets economic systems in such a way that would make them more sustainable. It is unclear as to why Earths population won't simply bounce back after the snap, even without the events of endgame, and the systems responsible for environmental desegregation still very much control the economies present in the MCU.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Halving a population does not follow from the aim of relieving scarcity, and the premise never says why a proportional cull would produce a lasting result rather than a temporary one. [Rejecting P2] What the character believes about himself is a claim about his motives, and a sincere belief that one is saving people is entirely compatible with being a villain — which is what the rival position holds. [Rejecting P3] The analogy to climate change breaks at the point that matters: the objection is to the method, not to the goal. As the counter-argument notes, a figure commanding that much territory and technology would have far less destructive options available, and the argument gives no reason why the population would not simply recover.