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Morality's Muddy Waters: Ethical Quandaries in Modern America, by George Cotkin, University of Pennsylvania Press, 262 pages, $20.95

In literary theory the mimetic fallacy is an error authors make when they depict a condition too literally. An example is the portrayal of cruelty in a way that is repulsive in the eyes of the audience or a portrayal of boredom that is itself dull. Thus, the blinding of old Gloucester by the Duke of Cornwall in King Lear must seem cruel yet it must also have its peculiar aesthetic appeal; Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus may be bored, but he must seem somehow interesting in his ennui. 

In Morality’s Muddy Waters, George Cotkin must negotiate a similarly challenging path. But it is not a mimetic fallacy that he must avoid. Rather, it is a discursive fallacy, for Cotkin wants us to see that moral decisions of a high and consequential order are oft surrounded by mud and that moral clarity is rare—yet there is a strange paradox in the idea of clarifying muddiness. Can Cotkin show us the mud in bright detail without leaving us stuck in it? This troublesome question is implicitly at the heart of his fine work.

His procedure is admirable in its logic and diversity. He begins with a long exposition of Hannah Arendt’s investigations into evil, with particular attention to her theories of its radical and banal incarnations, before delving into several case studies. Among these are the decision to bomb civilians during World War II, culminating with the choice to use the atomic bomb on two Japanese cities. He stays with war by exploring the reasons for the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam. He then moves on to peacetime problems—racism and capital punishment—and concludes by returning to war in Iraq, with special consideration of those “liberal hawks” who supported the Bush administration’s war of choice on Saddam Hussein and later came to regret it.

In great detail he delves into the conflicts over both facts and values during World War II with the decisions to bomb civilians (or at least include them as likely collateral victims) and to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He shows decision makers and commentators wrestling with the murky moral issues of capital punishment. For instance, he traces the once ascendant assertions of Ernest van den Haag that the rehabilitation of murderers is an illusion and that anger over barbaric crimes is perfectly moral. He details the dilemmas of some American liberals who became convinced that the removal of Saddam Hussein was a moral imperative but who remained ambivalent about trusting the Bush administration to do it. Cotkin admirably demonstrates how opaque and conflicted are the complexities of these issues.

Although a fairly short book, Morality’s Muddy Waters tackles big, first order questions and ranges over a half century. Cotkin skillfully returns his case studies to the penetrating observations of Arendt. He demonstrates the power of historical investigation and reflection to illuminate ethical problems. He prefers fact-based particularity to abstract universalizing and offers us compelling evidence of the former’s strengths. He works hard to visit all sides of the ethical questions he covers. His approach is judicious, and his prose, despite the well described muddiness of his subject, is lucid. 

Several themes recur. One is the radical face of evil. Among Arendt’s big ideas is that modern totalitarian regimes seek to change the human condition altogether and that they are rooted in mass and systematic cruelty that strip human beings of both their ways of continuing and their will to live. Thus, the Nazi camps destroyed cleanliness, privacy, and dignity. On the basis of the idea that their victims were subhuman, the Nazis proceeded to make them subhuman. Another theme is the banality of evil: evil does not present itself, as Satan did, with horns and a tail and red-faced sneer, or even as a serpent in the garden. Rather, evil is found in ordinary-looking people who render repeated and systematic acts of evil as routine events. This can be expressed by the all-in-a-day’s-work activities of Adolph Eichmann and the Nazi guards. At other times, it comes out in the “nice and decent boys,” like the immature, gung-ho, and incompetent Lieutenant William Calley, at My Lai. Evil is radical and