"Good" characters are often despicable in their moral certainty: the hypocritical Chadbands, Jellybys and Pecksniffs in Dickens; Tietjens in Parade's End, the sanctimoniously liberal family at the heart of AS Byatt's The Children's Book.
On this view we can more accurately, and less perniciously, understand and describe morally despicable actions, characters, and events using more pedestrian moral concepts such as badness and wrongdoing.
Laws against multiple marriages in the US were originally enacted in response to 19th-century Mormon polygamy, and since then, having a bunch of wives has been associated with extreme Mormons like Tom Green and David Kingston who force women to marry them, have sex with young girls, and even engage in incest horrific, despicable acts by any moral standard.
"The fraud is just so despicable that we felt that, from a moral perspective, it just didn't make sense for us," Mr. Barse said.
The response in the US is to see the character as kind of despicable, they have got on their high moral horse about it.
And even if I thought it despicable, you'd be seriously overestimating my moral fiber to think that I'd make a principled stand at a joyous occasion in a faraway land.
His character's calculating and at times despicable, but Lester brings to life his moral complexity, eliciting an often frustrating level of empathy from the viewer.
His fear of the political consequences of criticizing a political ally, even one as despicable as McCarthy, overrode any consideration for moral courage.
It's not just the moral outrage we share at the despicable felon, how we can all cluck at the millions he bilked from widows and orphans.
Moral of the story: It'd be despicable to actually buy dinosaurs, but at these discounts, it's almost more offensive not to.
