The best art dramatizes what happens when ethical impulses collide with the monsters within, but these enactments themselves leave behind a nasty residue.
Then he sells out, too, becoming a wealthy lobbyist, but he's no good at suppressing his ethical impulses: by the end, with Biden as vice-president, we find Connaughton living far from DC, nursing his sick dog and writing a book to be entitled The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins.
It is very difficult, however, to escape the feeling that Leibowitz is driven here by his ethical impulses, and more significantly it is clear that all manner of halakhic decisions are motivated by explicit consideration of ethical principles such as "the ways of pleasantness" or "doing the right and the good".
Naomi Zack identifies the problem with racists, which, I believe, can be applied to sexists, as being that a racist "lacks basic moral or ethical impulses to identify with other living beings [who are not members of the group with which the racist or sexist identifies]," and that such identification "rests on the ability to seriously imagine oneself in the place of another" (1998, 42 43).
Portnoy's infamous complaint was neither his masturbatory inclination nor the immoderate attentions of a Jewish mother but — in the book's quasi-medical definition — "a disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings".
This type of self-love, which warrants comparison with, but is not the same as, Rousseau's amour de soi, encompasses love of one's fellow human beings, apart from whom one cannot either cultivate or satisfy the ethical, intellectual and aesthetic impulses and capacities in which one's essential humanity consists, and to whose well-being one's own is thus inextricably linked.
Their impulse, individual and ethical in nature, was to cleanse and restore.
In many cases this is an ethical commitment, a politically inflected impulse to show the world as it is.
Ms. Gurira, of course, has the perspective of a hundred and more years of history to draw on in dramatizing the moral and ethical issues involved in the missionary impulse, and its alliance with the forces of colonization.
