Yet, intuitively, we view Batman as virtuous for not killing him.
I don't.
I'm frequently annoyed with supposed "good guys" letting the psychopathic super baddy live, taking their neck off their throats, only to lose many more lives and have to stop the bad guy again and again. I don't view them as virtuous, I view them as holding the idiot ball to keep the narrative going. It's like a bad guy stroking a white cat who sends James Bond off to die some elaborate ceremonial death, instead of clubbing him unconscious, putting a few rounds in his head, and having him rolled up in the carpet and thrown out.
Note that the storyline often allows the hero to have his "virtue" and execution too, as the bad guy will often overpower the idiot security forces holding him to pull a gun and shoot at the hero, allowing the hero to return fire in self defense. How transparent and tiresome. Generally "moral dilemmas" in movies are just this kind of dishonest exercise in having your cake and eating it too. How I long for a starship to explode when the Captain ignores the engineer and says "crank it to 11", or see some bozo snuffed out the moment he says "never tell me the odds".
Bond actually refused to play that game in Goldeneye.
[Bond is holding Trevelyan by his foot on top of the satellite antenna.]
Trevelyan: For England, James?
Bond: No. For me. [lets Trevelyan fall to his death]
Boy, are you ever on the right website. As far as I can tell, this place is basically a conspiracy full of Dangerously Genre Savvy people trying to get good things done in real life through the use of our Dangerous Genre Savvy.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go find a white dog to pet. I'm allergic to cats.
Disclaimer: I am not a philosopher, so this post will likely seem amateurish to the subject matter experts.
LW is big on consequentialism, utilitarianism and other quantifiable ethics one can potentially program into a computer to make it provably friendly. However, I posit that most of us intuitively use virtue ethics, and not deontology or consequentialism. In other words, when judging one's actions we intuitively value the person's motivations over the rules they follow or the consequences of said actions. We may reevaluate our judgment later, based on laws and/or actual or expected usefulness, but the initial impulse still remains, even if overridden. To quote Casimir de Montrond, "Mistrust first impulses; they are nearly always good" (the quote is usually misattributed to Talleyrand).
Some examples:
I am not sure how to classify religious fanaticism (or other bigotry), but it seems to require a heavy dose of virtue ethics (feeling righteous), in addition to following the (deontological) tenets of whichever belief, with some consequentialism (for the greater good) mixed in.
When I try to introspect my own moral decisions (like whether to tell the truth, or to cheat on a test, or to drive over the speed limit), I can usually find a grain of virtue ethics inside. It might be followed or overridden, sometimes habitually, but it is always there. Can you?