Literature is usually a fine barometer for measuring any fundamental philosophical shifts that have occurred in a culture's worldview. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there arose to prominence in the realms of drama and the novel the realistic genre or mode known as modern tragicomedy. Its success can be attributed to its more accurate mirroring of a reality that was increasingly becoming to be understood as rich in complexity and uncertainty, a vision in which boundaries are necessarily blurred. Indeed, the contemporary theories of chaos and complexity that have recently triumphed in the sciences reflect this paradoxical vision of tragicomedy. Such a shift in a culture's philosophy cannot help but have implications for how it envisions ethical decision-making. Indeed, the postmodern disdain for method and is but one important consequence of the embrace of ambiguity and uncertainty in the tragicomic mindset. Whether a pessimistic and paralytic nihilism must be the inevitable result of such a vision remains to be seen. Accordingly, in this essay, I will explore the tragicomic vision and how it is reflected in contemporary theories of chaos and complexity. I will then consider the implications such a vision has for traditional ethical theory and how its challenges for effective decision-making can best be met by leaders of today. I should alert the reader to my bias from the start. I believe that the tragicomic vision is not merely an aesthetic of accommodation, as some have argued, but rather that it can constitute the basis for an activist approach towards the reform of society as well. The Tragicomic Vision In this section, I will examine the analysis of several critics regarding the nature of tragicomedy before summarizing their findings. Karl Guthke regards tragicomedy as primarily a dramatic genre.1 He argues that what were called tragicomedies before the nineteenth century were primarily plays in which there existed an alternating mixture of elements from both tragedy and comedy, with the ending being the key determinant.2 Modem tragicomedy, on the contrary, requires the identification of opposites, in which an event is experienced as simultaneously tragic and comic, at least as portrayed in the plays of Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, Ionesco, Pinter, and Durrenmatt, the chief architects of modern tragicomedy.3 Such plays reveal the tragic and comic as an integrated compound. All tragedies and comedies depict a hero in conflict with his or her world, i.e., their quest for the ideal is always frustrated by circumstances or inner flaws. In a tragicomedy, according to Guthke, the contrasting responses of tragic endurance and comic laughter are enhanced by both being present simultaneously.4 Moreover, he maintains that it is our very uncertainty over what ideals to believe in today that is embodied in the tragicomic hero's plight, creating both tears and laughter.5 Guthke, echoing Durrenmatt, admits that our world is chaotic, meaningless, and unpredictable, but that a to is just as valid an option as despair itself.6 Indeed, Guthke argues that tragicomedy can perhaps foster a cheerful tolerance for the way things are.7 Nevertheless, a refusal to despair might mean only the willingness to endure rather than a quest to try and reform the world. This is why Guthke concludes that, though the very act of writing tragicomedy refutes its purported nihilism, still at most it can only provoke questions, not answers.8 Randall Craig feels that tragicomedy is more at home in the novel, less as a genre or historical form, and more as a mode or attitude to reality, though not detachable from its literary expression.9 With Guthke, he agrees that the paradoxical and dualistic vision of tragicomedy has its heroes experiencing lives of laughable but painful chaos. They are able to envision a satisfying existence but unable to achieve one.10 All their efforts at making sense of life fall short of any coherent closure and this is reflected in the very uncertainty and open-endedness of tragicomedy itself. …