Last week, as race-related news in the United States slid down a moral scale from mendacity to pure evil, it was hard to maintain much faith in art.
As the days passed and doctors soldiered on without electricity, running water, sleep, or outside help, they flipped their moral scale upside down.
Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, the Occupied Territories, Occupied Palestine: all denote the same geographical reality, but on a sliding (or ascending, take your pick) moral scale.
Sometimes acting as a mentor to Ford, sometimes undermining his relationship with the inconstant showgirl, Kelley is hard to pin down on the usual moral scale of the western.
On the great moral scale most people understand, AIG won a prize from the government: rather than failing and spending years in bankruptcy while destroying the financial system, the company survived.
He has this great line, he says that 'Feelings aren't facts… They are real and they are human and they are understandable but they can never be judged against any kind of moral scale'.
Benedict should get credit for defrocking four hundred sexually abusive priests during his papacy, although, again showing a present failure to appreciate the moral scale of past mistakes, he describes to Seewald his dread of "premature intervention" in abuse cases and the need to "go about it slowly and cautiously".
"Mere theories of democracy" cannot be applied to "a rude people, incapable of perceiving their own place in the moral scale, nor of understanding the social and political obligations" of civilized peoples ("Our National Mistakes" [AA], 185).
On a moral scale Trump's views are just as reprehensible.
