Emad himself is a restrained, cerebral guy, but it could well be that starring in Miller has given him a conceited, dramatic, morally heroic view of himself.
But once we look for examples of morally vicious or villainous action that is nevertheless permissible (which is the counterpart of a morally heroic action), we find it difficult to come up with an example.
His recent leading man status is the result of a body of work that made him the poster boy for twisted, multi-layered, morally ambiguous heroic villains.
So does the ultra-Zionist stance of some American Christians.But Jews too young to have watched Israel rout three Arab armies in six days in 1967 are less likely to see it as heroic, morally superior, in need of help, or even relevant.
Feminists championed her as a heroic victim, morally exonerated by a lifetime of extreme sexual abuse.
Most of them, with the exception of the brave and kindly Peter (the novelist's self-portrait), are morally mottled, not entirely heroic but not wholly wicked, either.
In their textbooks, Israel's 1948 war of independence is purely heroic and morally flawless, waged after Arab countries rejected the U.N. proposal to partition the territory into Jewish and Arab states.
That doesn't mean we're all morally excellent (we can become heroic or vile); it doesn't gives us the right to abuse and exterminate other species; and it doesn't mean humans can do everything better (a cheetah will outrun me and a bloodhound will outsniff me every time).
A fine reporter, and a genuinely heroic one both physically and morally, has died in the line of duty.
Many of these historical migrations have by no means been the morally uplifting experiences depicted in mythologies of heroic conquerors, explorers, and pioneers; rather they frequently have been characterized by violence, destruction, bondage, mass mortality, and genocide in other words, by human suffering of profound magnitudes.
Critic Drew Marton described it as a "baroque manipulation" that criticizes the American ideology of the Western, by replacing the heroic cowboy popularized by John Wayne with morally complex antiheroes.
