Fiction's multifarious nature is why so many people have attributed so many effects to imaginative literature, some of them contradictory: catharsis (Aristotle); dangerous corruption of the spirit (Plato); feverish loosening of morals (Rousseau); redemptive escape from personality (Eliot); empowering creation beyond the boundaries of morality (Joyce).
Art has always gone beyond boundaries of morality and decency.
It is common for politicians to represent the perpetrators of violence as acting outside the boundaries of morality; their actions belong to an incomprehensible realm beyond our understanding of what is good and right.
Behind the author of "Death in Venice" was a conventional family man; and behind Mann's "Buddenbrooks," the great novel of the German bourgeoisie, was the artist who existed beyond the boundaries of conventional morality, treating his children icily and enjoying the love of men and women.
Such is the seductive power of the term — with its associations of shadows and smoke, of hapless men hamstrung by fate, of tough women operating outside the boundaries of conventional Hollywood morality — that it's enough to put the label on the cover of a DVD to transform overlooked movies into salable commodities.
By the nature of the site, there's going to be content that really pushes the boundaries of both legality and morality, and that means it's going to face questions without easy answers.
Even Lisbeth Salander, in her furious revenge on male predators, remains within the boundaries of some kind of higher morality.
As we spoke, he seemed far less interested in the idea of the "perfect crime" than he was in the "perfect story," which, in his definition, pushed past the boundaries of aesthetics and reality and morality charted by his literary forebears.
Carter completed "God's Name in Vain" before my colleagues and I on The New York Times's editorial page chided Senator Lieberman for seeming to "cross the boundaries of tolerance" by asserting that morality could not be maintained without religion.
"He sees life as a zero-sum-game, in which we're all struggling to maximize our social position," said Michele Lamont, a sociologist at Princeton and the author of "The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class and Immigration" (Harvard University Press, 2000).
Evidence from moral psychology undermines previous evolutionary theories of morality focused on cooperation.
