Moral Ambiguity Research Articles

Hero or villain? Moral ambiguity and narrative structure under the Comics Code in 1950s Superman stories

Abstract This article explores the decades-long influence of the Comics Code on American comic books’ storytelling form by identifying the interpretive processes underlying the Code’s application and adapting the Code as a theoretical model for approaching the narrative structure and implied ethical stance within 1950s Superman comics. Instead of treating the Comics Code as a series of regulations seemingly interpreted arbitrarily, this article explores how interpretive issues were framed by figures such as Charles Murphy, Leonard Darvin and John Goldwater to identify ‘the spirit and intent of the Code’ and resolve challenges such as distinguishing between the ‘spirit’ and ‘letter’ of the Code, identifying interpretive authority outside the Code, weighing past interpretive precedent and locating authorial ‘intent’. Ambiguities and aporia within the Code’s language demanded that administrators reconstruct the Code’s possible meanings and conceptualize ‘justice’ by distinguishing between the Code’s general preferences and actual prohibitions, resolving terminological nuance and prioritizing conflicting stipulations. Administrators’ efforts to balance competing stipulations regarding characters’ physical unattractiveness, criminality, justice and institutional authority shaped comics’ storytelling form and perpetuated ambiguities that comic creators could – intentionally or unintentionally – exploit. Where Silver Age DC Comics have often been viewed as sacrificing psychological complexity to plotting and social conformity, this article argues that the plotting intricacy in several 1950s Comics-Code era Superman comics in fact enabled writers to present a more complex rendering of moral issues. Where the Comics Code explicitly forbade that ‘crimes’ be ‘presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal’, the Comics Code’s own textually unstable meaning – coupled with the narrative complexity of the stories’ plotting, shifting points of view and situational and dramatic irony – enabled 1950s Superman writers to create sympathy for a supposed ‘criminal’, depict the frequent inaccuracy of assumed knowledge and introduce moral ambiguity, all while arguably ‘following’ the Code.

The subversive dreams of Alice in Wonderland

This article examines the specific features of dreaming found in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, using current dream research as a guide. These features include falling, magical animals, metamorphoses, wordplay, bizarreness, memory distortions, moral ambiguities, metacognition, curiosity, empathy, existential questioning, and freedom. When Carroll’s stories are viewed through the lens of the current dream research, it becomes clear that he has provided a surprisingly accurate and comprehensive accounting of human dream experience. Drawing on historical and biographical evidence, this article goes on to argue that Carroll intentionally made dreams a central part of the stories because he wanted to give his young readers a tool for resisting the oppressive normality of adulthood in Victorian England, at the peak of the British empire. By subtly teaching his young listeners about the true nature of dreaming, Carroll was cultivating their critical capacity to look beyond the status quo of supposedly “civilized” Imperial reality.

Cyber-noir: Cybersecurity and popular culture

ABSTRACTCybersecurity experts foster a perception of cybersecurity as a gloomy underworld in which the good guys must resort to unconventional tactics to keep at bay a motley group of threats to the digital safety of unsuspecting individuals, businesses, and governments. This article takes this framing seriously, drawing on film studies scholarship that identifies certain aesthetic themes as associated with moral ambiguity in noir films. This article introduces the term “cyber-noir” to describe the incorporation of noir elements in cybersecurity expert discourses. It argues that the concept of cyber-noir helps explain the persistence of practices that blur legal, moral, and professional lines between legitimate and malicious activity in cyberspace. Consequently, changing cybersecurity requires not only institutional and technological measures, but also a re-constitution of cybersecurity identities themselves.

‘Don’t let the side down, old boy’: interrogating the traitor in the ‘radical’ television dramas of John le Carré and Dennis Potter

ABSTRACT This article examines three British television plays which draw upon political and aesthetic radicalism to examine the Cold War traitor. John le Carré’s The End of the Line (1970) uses a traitor’s interrogation to create an absurdist vison of Cold War espionage whilst Dennis Potter’s Traitor (1971) uses experimental flashback techniques to explore the motives and moral ambiguities surrounding treachery. Although le Carré’s later novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) closes off radical possibilities offered by these plays, Potter’s Blade on the Feather can be read as a riposte, redeploying the former’s generic and heritage conventions to newly subversive ends.

Moral ambiguity in media reports of dying alone

ABSTRACT More older people are living alone in the UK, thereby increasing the prospect of dying alone at home. Lone deaths tend to be regarded as bad deaths, in that they contravene notions of accompaniment and open awareness espoused in UK end of life care policies. We describe a media analysis of dying alone conducted in two phases. First, we revisited a previous media analysis to examine whether news reporting of dying alone has changed. Second, we focussed on a single case study to explore how an account of a lone death unfolded during the days following its discovery. We found that dying alone remains a threat to individual and collective moral reputations. However, we also identified reports in which dying alone was presented as acceptable in some circumstances, and as congruent with aspects of a good death. We suggest that dying alone can be made good through media reporting, reflecting the individual choice and autonomy associated with a good death. There is potential for news media to revise cultural scripts of dying, largely based on the experiences of people dying under medical supervision.

Mostly, do no harm: Representations of morality in the television medical drama The Resident

Television programmes continue to impart ‘narratives, consumer choice’ and ‘moral predispositions’, although there is conjecture among scholars over the influence of television on the formation of a moral viewpoint in audiences. These components allow consumers to evaluate the content of television shows in the light of their own cultural understandings of morality and then either accept or reject them. This article uses thematic analysis to reveal patterns in the representations of moral ambiguity in the first season of the television show The Resident (2018–present), a contemporary US-based television series that is broadcast to global audiences in a number of international territories. The series explores the intricacies of hospital management, patient care and medical ethics particularly in light of increasing commercial pressures within a US context. Our analysis shows that the series grapples with four main themes: do no harm, experts and egos, money muddies morality and good versus evil, and in doing so, interrogates the basis of implicit knowledge about right, wrong and individual responsibility in western culture.

Rethinking gaming: The ethical work of optimization in web search engines.

When measures come to matter, those measured find themselves in a precarious situation. On the one hand, they have a strong incentive to respond to measurement so as to score a favourable rating. On the other hand, too much of an adjustment runs the risk of being flagged and penalized by system operators as an attempt to 'game the system'. Measures, the story goes, are most useful when they depict those measured as they usually are and not how they intend to be. In this article, I explore the practices and politics of optimization in the case of web search engines. Drawing on materials from ethnographic fieldwork with search engine optimization (SEO) consultants in the United Kingdom, I show how maximizing a website's visibility in search results involves navigating the shifting boundaries between 'good' and 'bad' optimization. Specifically, I am interested in the ethical work performed as SEO consultants artfully arrange themselves to cope with moral ambiguities provoked and delegated by the operators of the search engine. Building on studies of ethics as a practical accomplishment, I suggest that the ethicality of optimization has itself become a site of governance and contestation. Studying such practices of 'being ethical' not only offers opportunities for rethinking popular tropes like 'gaming the system', but also draws attention to often-overlooked struggles for authority at the margins of contemporary ranking schemes.

Intervention, Encroachment

AbstractThis article shows that Walter Benjamin's initial characterization of the “sphere of moral relations” as divided by two mutually exclusive poles, law and justice, without a mediating third term such as “ethical life” or “moral education,” generates the basis for his critique of violence. After describing how this characterization of moral relations both reproduces and inverts the underlying schema of Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, the article outlines the procedure whereby Benjamin's initial definition of violence as an “intervention” into moral relations is supplemented by a corresponding definition of legal “encroachment”: law presents itself as a resolution or “expiation” of morally ambiguous relations; but insofar as the “sphere of moral relations” is split between the two poles of law and justice, such expiation conceals and thus intensifies the moral ambiguity of the situation on which law encroaches. The article concludes by suggesting that contemporary encroachments of law constitute a danger, akin to the growth of nihilism (in Nietzsche's sense), to which Benjamin's essay seeks to alert its readers.

Veep, Invective Spectacle, and the Figure of the Comedic Antiheroine

Abstract This article approaches HBO’s Veep through the lens of what Dan Hassler-Forest (2014) has described as the meta-genre of ‘Quality TV.’ Against the backdrop of ‘Quality TV’s’ conspicuous investment in masculinity, I ask how Veep actualizes the meta-genre’s conventions of moral ambiguity and sensationalist storytelling around a female protagonist and in the genre of comedy. I focus on one key strategy I see the show employ in this actualization, a strategy I conceptualize as invective spectacle. In Veep, invective spectacle translates ‘Quality TV’s’ characteristic transgressiveness into the conventions of comedy and, in the process, constructs the figure of a morally ambiguous antiheroine. The dynamics of invective spectacle – as a poetics that appears to be booming in contemporary television culture – structure the show’s elaboration of a complex female protagonist as a morally flawed woman of power.

In Praise of Useless Poetry

What if all we thought we knew about Philip Sidney, literature, and the good life was wrong, and what he is actually doing in his Defence of Poesy is to make a case, however implicit, for a poetics of uselessness, waste, corruption, and pleasure? L’art pour l’art 250 years before nineteenth-century bohemians, and a reaction to social realism? If this sounds challenging, that is exactly what Catherine Bates intends in her book on Sidney’s failure to defend poetry. While peddling the humanist justification for reading (the advancement of learning, and the teaching of morals), Sidney actually, she argues, explores the possibility of a literature that is anything but exemplary. This literature, and its concomitant aesthetics, kicks back against the pedagogical aspirations of poetry that, all too often, smack of the marketplace and its hyper-accountability. Instead, Bates claims, Sidney is ‘straining towards’ (p. 137) a model of poetry that is more in line with his own writings in terms of its moral ambiguity and anything but idealist plots and personages. Close-reading the Defence line by line, Bates locates contradictions and inconsistencies of style in the split between what Sidney’s education and Tudor money culture compel him to say and what he really wants to say. There is, she explains, a roughness in both style and content of the text which is a product of a self-division in Sidney, manifesting in an ‘official’ voice which she calls the ‘speaker’, whose ‘promotion of idealist poetics … can hardly be taken as anything other than blatantly ideological’ (p. 118), and an ‘unofficial’ voice, Sidney himself, ‘self-doubting, self-contradicting’, a ‘creature who appears so often within the fictions that bear his signature’ (p. 10).

Campus conspiracies: security and intelligence engagement with universities from Kent State to counter-terrorism

ABSTRACT Security and intelligence agency concerns with universities range from the commissioning and protection of security-sensitive research, the ongoing recruitment of staff and students for covert security and intelligence work, as well as prominent counter-terrorist concerns. This is an ethically charged terrain of moral ambiguity which raises issues not only of academic freedom and freedom of speech but a less explored, cross-disciplinary complex of intelligence-led interactions from protection of campus property and personnel to ideological battles at the heart of the Academy itself. Current-day counterterrorism on campus agendas is, then, only an intensified aspect of an historical but ongoing and likely future interface between universities and security and intelligence agencies. Drawing on exemplars from the Kent State University shootings on 4 May 1970 at the height of the Vietnam War to the present era of globalised counter-terrorism, the article uses securitisation theory to conceptualise the historical, contemporary and future parameters of university engagements with the security and intelligence agencies as ‘Incidental’, ‘Incendiary’, and ‘Inevitable’.

Ethical dilemmas in global mental health.

Global mental health (GMH) work reminds us about our professional ideals and mission. GMH specialists conduct research and provide psychosocial and mental health support to populations affected by humanitarian crises around the world. This work exposes these specialists to situations with a high degree of moral ambiguity and no good solutions, where humanitarian accountability takes priority over conflicting values. Self-awareness helps to address the countertransference that confounds complex decision-making and can compromise the health and safety of all involved. The evolving role of GMH as a humanitarian actor underscores the importance of professional competencies in assuring the integrity and standards of practice.

Brokering Transnational Flows of Care: The Case of Citizen Aid

ABSTRACTA Cambodian town is the site of transnational flows of resources between private donors, and Cambodians in need of assistance. Such forms of ‘citizen aid’, initiated by individuals, constitute a form of resource transfer across borders which falls outside the purview of migration scholars. Unlike remittances, they are not primarily channelled through kin-related or geographical ties. Instead, they are enabled by brokers of care, Cambodian and international, who facilitate both personal connections and forms of support. The lens of the broker enables an understanding of citizen aid as a form of brokering care. It offers a critique of the moral ambiguity of the broker, as well as on the relationship between care and control. Casting people in need not merely as recipients, but as providing opportunities for intervention sought after by supporters, means upending conventional notions of who are recipients and donors, and what kind of resources they control respectively.

Taking humor seriously in contemporary food research

ABSTRACTThis paper highlights the social significance of humor in everyday interactions with food within families and related household contexts. The paper approaches humor in relational terms, emphasizing its role in negotiating the way power is exercised within the moralized context of “feeding the family.” Having reviewed previous work on the social significance of humor, the paper provides some examples of food-related humor from recent research with British food consumers, illustrating what such occasions reveal about participants’ relations with each other, with us as researchers, and with the food they consume. Specifically, participants were found to use apologetic and self-deprecating humor to negotiate the moral ambiguities of food and to cover potentially embarrassing situations; to express familiarity and disgust regarding their current consumption practices; and to excuse potentially shameful behavior or guilty pleasures. The paper argues that an understanding of the “background disposition” through which consumers make sense of their multiple encounters with food is critical to the analysis of food-related humor and that ethnographic methods are particularly adept at revealing the social context in which humor occurs.

Middle English Marvels: Magic, Spectacle, and Morality in the Fourteenth Century. Tara Williams. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Pp. vii+176.

<i>Middle English Marvels: Magic, Spectacle, and Morality in the Fourteenth Century</i>. Tara Williams. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Pp. vii+176.

Introduction

This issue of Soundings might be thought of as an extended consideration of the concept famously addressed in John Keats's 1820 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and especially the canonical line from its closing stanza, “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.” What is the exact relationship between art, beauty, balance, and truth? Can and should considerations of beauty be used in assessing seemingly nonaesthetic ideas and concepts? What is the nature of the boundaries between “art” and “reality” and what is gained through pushing these boundaries to their breaking point? How are works of art and artists shaped by historical and philosophical notions of law, justice, morality? Can beauty and truth, however defined, be reconciled? These questions are unpacked and explored by the contributors in this issue.To begin, Junxiao Bai's “The Spectrum of the Divine Order: Goodness, Beauty, and Harmony” interprets the writings and ideas of Ptolemy and Augustine in considering the relation between a harmonious world order and the divine. Exploring deeply their notions of numerical and musical harmonic ratios and the connections of these ratios to the cosmos, the author concludes that Augustine saw such perfect relationships between numbers and music as evidence of God's divine order in both the physical and metaphysical realms.Devon Brickhouse-Bryson considers somewhat similar conceptual territory in his article on the relationships between judgments of beauty and judgments of theory. Interpreting a method of evaluating theories known as “reflective equilibrium” through which common sense principles are weighed against background theories, Brickhouse-Bryson makes an engaging case for both the centrality of the idea of coherence in this evaluative method, and for the idea that such judgments of coherence can best be conceived of as species of judgments of beauty. This insight, he argues, will help theoreticians more effectively understand reflective equilibrium and devise epistemically better theories.Next, Jenessa Kenway examines the “blurring of life and art” in the works of visual and literary realist and hyperrealist artists. Focusing particularly on nineteenth-century French realist painter Gustave Courbet, the late twentieth-century superrealist American sculptor Duane Hanson and the contemporary Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, she considers the intersections between their deep exploration of the repetitive, mundane reality that makes up most of human existence. Kenway imaginatively argues that these artists force their readers and viewers to confront the truth of what she characterizes as “the thought stream running through non-being,” but also to recognize the richness of considerations of daily “nothingness.”Finally, Mark Packer reinterprets Herman Melville's classic unfinished novella Billy Budd through the intersecting prisms of literary criticism, jurisprudence, philosophy, and American and British history. In “‘Yet the Angel Must Hang’: Billy Budd and Melville's Moral Skepticism,” Packer concentrates on the moral ambiguity that permeates so much of the novel and explores its legal and historical implications. He connects the struggle in the story (set in 1797), between how to balance admiralty law and natural morality in determining Billy Budd's fate for having killed a superior officer, with similar tensions experienced by Melville's anti-slavery father-in-law and Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice who reluctantly upheld the Fugitive Slave Act and similar legislation. Packer concludes that Melville's refusal to provide a morally definitive conclusion was a product of this history of the refusal of men in positions of authority to act on spiritual wisdom rather than legal mandate.Collectively, these works provide multiple approaches toward considering the nature of the boundaries and distinctions between art and life, law, and justice, and the everyday and the sublime—issues that remain as vexed and pertinent today as in Keats's time.

The bad boy archetype as a morally ambiguous complex of juvenile masculinities: the conceptual anatomy of a marketplace icon

ABSTRACTIn this article, we explore why the bad boy is a popular archetype in advertising, erotica, fashion, journalism, movies, songs, television serials, and other forms of commercial culture. First, we interpret the bad boy as a combination of juvenile masculinities (aggression, rebellion, hypersexuality), appealing qualities (charisma, ruggedness, sensitivity), and moral ambiguities (via confusion, contradiction, and cumulation), which keep audiences engaged. Second, we trace the evolution of these meanings in over a century of American popular culture. Third, we reveal the many commercial faces of the bad boy in the contemporary marketplace, including as an archetypal brand positioning strategy, a transformative protagonist in erotic fiction, an unapologetic voice for macho fantasies, a beguiling object of irrational love, a journalistic frame for polarizing masculinities, and an inexhaustible source of dramatic tension. In the final analysis, the bad boy archetype is a contemporary marketplace icon because it has historically been good at channeling all kinds of bad.

Dangerous Conversations in The Duchess of Malfi

The proposition of this essay is that conversation exists as a theme in its own right in The Duchess of Malfi. It is clear that Webster borrowed from The Civil Conversation (1586), as Steffano Guazzo’s book was known in English translation. As in Guazzo, honest conversation, in Webster's play, has a civil rather than courtly character, and as such the conversation theme corresponds with an antithesis that has been noted by John L. Selzer between merit and degree. But the conversation of Webster’s meritorious characters is entangled with dishonesty in ways that Guazzo would not have countenanced. The result is a moral ambiguity which is difficult to square with virtue ethics, and which calls for a reading in terms of the totalitarian contexts of the revenge play and the Tacitean history play then gaining ascendancy in Jacobean England. Ironically the Duchess is restored to her honesty by conversing with her murderer at the climax of the play.

“Les Années noires avaient été grises:” A Meta-Ethical Examination of Pierre Assouline’s Appropriation of Primo Levi’s Concept of the “Grey Zone”

“Les Années noires avaient été grises:” A Meta-Ethical Examination of Pierre Assouline’s Appropriation of Primo Levi’s Concept of the “Grey Zone”1 Helena Duffy The Grey Zone: Readings, Re-readings and Overreadings Primo Levi’s landmark essay “The Grey Zone” opens with criticism of those who, when trying to understand the dynamics of l’univers concentrationnaire, reduce the complex network of human relationships to the mutually opposing categories of evil tormentors and saintly victims. Reflected in Christ’s gesture on Judgment day—“here the righteous, over there the reprobates”—, such dualistic thinking fails, according to Levi, in relation to Auschwitz whose horror consisted also in its indecipherability. Namely, some of the victims were dragged into defiling complicity with their oppressors, thus entering what Levi describes as an area so “incredibly complicated [in] its internal structure” that it “confuse[s] our need to judge” (The Drowned and the Saved 27). Within this “grey zone” the Italian writer-survivor situates all kinds of “privileged prisoners,” beginning with kettles washers, bed smoothers, checkers for lice or interpreters (29), and ending with Sonderkommandos. Recruited predominantly amongst Jewish inmates, these “special squads” were responsible for maintaining order among those to be gassed, disposing of the victims’ bodies, and sorting out their belongings. Seeking examples of the “grey zone” beyond the Lager, Levi invokes controversial leader of the Łódź ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, or even SS Erich Mühsfeldt, who briefly showed pity to a young survivor of gassing and whom Levi gives the benefit of the doubt by believing that, under different circumstances, he could have been a decent man (40). However, whereas Levi recommends that our moral judgment be suspended in relation to the “privileged” prisoners, in line with his more general and emphatic declaration of his unwillingness to ever forgive his oppressors, he fully endorses the 1948 verdict of the Supreme National Tribunal to sentence Mühsfeldt to death (37). [End Page 29] Since the publication of Levi’s essay, critics have been arguing about who indeed should be included in the “grey zone.”2 While some mobilize the morally murky area as a universal figure of enforced complicity with one’s oppressor, others believe it to be restricted to the physical space of Nazi concentration camps. Giorgio Agamben, for instance, has famously and controversially deployed the “grey zone” as a paradigm for post-Auschwitz ethics, positioning all human beings within this space of moral ambiguity (101).3 Others have reapplied Levi’s term to bystanders, collaborators or resisters, or have even assimilated it with Holocaust-unrelated situations.4 As for Levi himself, he expands the meaning of the “grey zone” by reaching with his intertextual references beyond l’univers concentrationnaire, as exemplified by the analogy he draws between the Sonderkommandos and the collectors of corpses in Alessandro Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed (1827) (39). In the same vein, Levi likens Mühsfeldt’s brief hesitation to an old woman’s single good deed in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) (40). More directly, the Italian writer-survivor inscribes into this area of moral ambiguity, where dichotomies of evil and goodness are no longer operational, various collaborating governments, including Vichy (27). He also identifies it within the Soviet gulag or compares the Nazis’ strategy of burdening their victims with guilt to the practices of the Italian Mafia (27–28). Yet, despite Levi’s broader references, Adam Brown, who has written extensively on the “grey zone,” firmly believes in the term’s historical and topographical specificity (52). His view is shared by Debarati Sanyal who points to Levi’s repeated insistence on the singularity of the prisoner’s physical and emotional experience of the camp (34): “The mental mechanisms of Häftlinge were different from ours; curiously and in parallel, different were also their physiology and pathology” (The Drowned and the Saved 60). Another contentious point raised by Levi’s essay and relevant to the present inquiry is the confusion of victims with victimizers that some have inferred from the Italian writer’s definition of the “grey zone” as a space “with ill-defined outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants” (27) or, from what...

The Deceivers by Kristen Simmons

Reviewed by: The Deceivers by Kristen Simmons Karen Coats Simmons, Kristen The Deceivers. Tor Teen, 2019 [384p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-250-17579-3 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-250-17581-6 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 8-10 Brynn Hilder is determined to get away from her dangerous neighborhood and especially her mother’s drug-dealing boyfriend, Pete, though she did learn from him how to work the cons she’s playing to earn money for college. Then she’s recruited to a posh boarding school called Vale Hall, where lessons in running successful scams are part of the curriculum. In exchange for room, board, and a stipend, Dr. Odin, the school’s headmaster, tasks her with gathering information on the son of a senator, while her classmates have other assignments in Odin’s private war against corruption in high and low places. As Brynn discovers that her recruitment wasn’t random, she comes face to face with the ethical question of whether the ends justify the means. Along the way, she gains a romantic partner to help her sort these moral quandaries—a boy named Caleb, who’s willing to take substantial risks so that Odin will keep his promises to him and his family. While the connection to Norse mythology hangs by a very loose thematic thread, the excitement of teen operatives learning to work complicated scams makes for compelling drama. The moral ambiguity feels as urgent as it is ultimately unresolvable—people do really [End Page 222] bad things while the police look the other way, and sometimes, at least according to Odin, it takes deception, dangerous gambles, and a willingness to accept collateral damage to bring about justice. Readers then, like Brynn herself, have to make up their own minds about how far they are willing to go to serve the greater good while serving themselves, and vice versa. Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois