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There’s a scene in the movie High Noon that seems to me to capture an essential feature of our moral lives. Actually, it’s not the entire scene. It’s one moment really, two shots — a facial expression and a movement of the head of Grace Kelly.

The part she’s playing is that of Amy Kane, the wife of Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper). Amy Kane is a Quaker, and as such is opposed to violence of any kind. Indeed, she tells Kane she will marry him only if he resigns as marshal of Hadleyville and vows to put down his guns forever. He agrees. But shortly after the wedding Kane learns that four villains have plans to terrorize the town, and he comes to think it is he who must try to stop them. He picks up his guns in preparation to meet the villains, and in so doing breaks his vow to Amy.

Unrelenting in her passivism, Amy decides to leave Will. She boards the noon train out of town. Then she hears gunfire, and, just as the train is about to depart, she disembarks and rushes back. Meanwhile, Kane is battling the villains. He manages to kill two of them, but the remaining two have him cornered. It looks like the end for Kane. Then one of them falls.

Amy has picked up a gun and shot him in the back.

We briefly glimpse Amy’s face immediately after she has pulled the trigger. She is distraught, stricken. When the camera angle changes to a view from behind, we see her head fall with great sadness under the weight of what she’s done.

What’s going on with Amy at that moment? It’s possible, I suppose, that she believes she shouldn’t have shot the villain, that she let her emotions run away with her, that she thinks she did the wrong thing. But I doubt that’s it. More likely is that when Amy heard the gunshots she decided that the right thing for her to do was return to town and help her husband in his desperate fight. But why then is Amy dismayed? If she performed the action she thought was right, shouldn’t she feel only moral contentment with what she has done?

Grace Kelly could have played it differently. She could have whooped with delight at having offed the bad guy, perhaps dropping some “hasta la vista”-like catchphrase along the way. Or she could have set her ample square jaw in grim determination and gone after the remaining villain, signaling to us her decision to discard namby-pamby pacifism for the robust alternative of visceral western justice. But Amy Kane’s actual reaction is psychologically more plausible — and morally more interesting. While she believes she’s done what she had to do, she’s still dismayed. Why?

What Amy’s reaction shows, I believe, is that morality is pluralist, not monist.

Monistic moral theories tell us that there is one and only one ultimate moral end. If monism is true, in every situation it will always be at least theoretically possible to justify the right course of action by showing that everything of fundamental moral importance supports it. Jeremy Bentham is an example of a moral monist.

He held that pleasure is the single ultimate end. Another example is Immanuel Kant, who held that the single base for all of morality is the Categorical Imperative. According to monists,successful moral justification will always ends at a single point (even if they disagree among themselves about what that point is).

Pluralist moral theories, in contrast, hold that there is a multitude of basic moral principles that can come into conflict with each other. David Hume and W.D. Ross were both moral pluralists. They believed that various kinds of moral conflict can arise — justice can conflict with beneficence, keeping a promise can conflict with obeying the law, courage can conflict with prudence — and that there are no underlying rules that explain how such conflicts are to be resolved.

If Hume and Ross are right and pluralism is true, even after you have given the best justification for a course of action that it is possible to give, you may sometimes have to acknowledge that to follow that course will be to act in conflict with something of fundamental moral importance. Your best justification may fail to make all of the moral ends meet.

With that understanding of monism and pluralism on board, let’s now return to Grace Kelly as Amy Kane. Let’s return to the moment her righteous killing of the bad guy causes her to bow her head in moral remorse.

If we assume monism, Amy’s response will seem paradoxical, weird, in some way inappropriate. If there is one and only one ultimate end, then to think that a course of action is right will be to think that everything of fundamental importance supports it. And it would be paradoxical or weird — inappropriate in some way — for someone to regret doing something in line with everything of fundamental moral importance. If the moral justification of an action ends at a single point, then what could the point be of feeling remorse for doing it?

But Amy’s reaction is perfectly explicable if we take her to have a plurality of potentially-conflicting basic moral commitments. Moral pluralists will explain that Amy has decided that in this situation saving Kane from the villains has a fundamental moral importance that overrides the prohibition on killing, even while she continues to believe that there is something fundamentally morally terrible about killing. For pluralists, there is nothing strange about feeling remorse toward acting against something one takes to be of fundamental moral importance.

Indeed, feeling remorse in such a situation is just what we should expect. This is why we take Amy’s response to be apt, not paradoxical or weird. We think that she, like most of us, holds a plurality of fundamental moral commitments, one of which she rightly acted on even though it meant having to violate another.

The upshot is this. If you think Grace Kelly played the scene right — and if you think High Noon captures something about our moral lives that “hasta la vista”-type movies do not — then you ought to believe in moral pluralism.

Headline image: General Store Sepia Toned Wild West Town. © BCFC via iStock

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Our modern-day suburban sprawl is much more than bad architecture and sloppy planning, yet there might be a simple solution. Benjamin Ross, author of Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism, argues that the expansion of rail transit would help us to create better places to live. In the interview clips below, Ross explains how the federal government’s regulation of mass transit lay down the roots for the suburban sprawl we see today, and defines two new terms that are key to understanding the future of urban and suburban planning.

The rise and decline of suburbanism

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Not-in-my-backyard” politics

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The “New Urbanist Movement”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Benjamin Ross is the author of Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism. He served as the president of Maryland’s Action Committee for Transit for 15 years, which grew under his leadership into the nation’s largest grass-roots transit advocacy group. Ross is a consultant on environmental problems and served on committees of the National Academy of Sciences and EPA Science Advisory Board. He writes frequently on political and social topics in Dissent Magazine and is the author of The Polluters: The Making of Our Chemically Altered Environment.

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The post Politics and cities: looking at the roots of suburban sprawl appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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I'm suuuperlate in posting this but a zillion things are going on, including moving (K and R), writing CHOSEN, doctor appointments, etc.

BUT

Kate and Ross sold their 2 book series to Sourcebooks this week!

I was lucky enough to witness the entire process from first word to sending it off to their agent. I couldn't be more proud and thrilled to see their book on shelves in spring 2012.

Want to keep track of them?

Kate's Website is so fun

Ross' (some adult content, FYI, tween readers) links you to some of his best work

Kate's Twitter accounts for Editor K and Kate are must-follows as is Ross'.

They just started a joint Twitter for their book and a Website will be coming soon.

Yay to both! Sooo excited! <3

Last night, I went to see ECLIPSE with Kate and Ross. We got to the theater around 11:50ish and it was already packed. We were almost about to leave because we didn't want to split up in the theater and three seats together were sooo not happening. Then, in a supersparkly way, three seats opened up in the front row. *freaks*

We grabbed the seats and the energy from the crowd was INTENSE. Screaming girls were all around and everyone was losing it. The majority of the midnight crowd at our theater? They were, without a doubt, Team Jacob. !!! Gotta admit, though, I was/am Team Edward, but ECLIPSE is my favorite book and it got me to a place of being torn between Jacob and Edward. It also was so well written as a possibility for a person (Bella) to be in love with two people.

The action in ECLIPSE was intense, the CGI was flawless (Edward's sparkle was fab), and I liked Bryce Dallas Howard as Victoria. More romance and Jacob/Bella time was definitely lacking for me as were more talking/intimate moments between Edward and Bella since they were going back and forth about being engaged. This is an instance where I felt the book was better than the movie. But I still enjoyed it greatly and can't wait for it to come out on DVD. It actually made me want to reread ECLIPSE while the movie is fresh in my brain.

I hope everyone who wanted to see it last night made it to theaters! :) Major hearts to K for going out with me and R for being awesome about seeing another Twilight Saga flick.

I Tweeted pics about everything yesterday AND as if ECLIPSE coming out wasn't enough, Barnes & Noble has released CITY SECRETS!! Yaaay for Canterwood Crest #9!

So sorry to the reader girlies for being MIA lately on the blog. But a serious scare came up with The BFF and she's going to be completely fine, but it was very, very scary. I'm taking the day off and today to clean my apt and regroup.

I haven't been in a hospital since my back surgery and I was such a wuss then that I'd faint or throw up at the mere sighting of a needle or blood. K made a point to shield me from that, but I was running on adrenaline. Even with all of my baggage about hospitals, doctors and surgery--I would have swapped places with her in a second. And I can't say that about anyone else. But this girl is a trooper. She was in indescribable pain and she pushed through it like R and I knew she would--no doubt. I wanted to strange a few of the ER staff, but she got great care on her floor.

Plus, we had a very sweet and uplifting surprise from friend PG Kain who brought the flower that defines KA. It has a prickly stem and pretty pink petals on the top. :)

She's resting, ready for a fun TV marathon later and it's going to be a chill evening. Plus, we decided we deserve mani/pedis to erase the nail colors we wore to the hospital.

I'll be contacting the winner of the Amanda Marronne giveaway, though.

I've got some work to do, which probably won't be book related. More like half work and half apt cleaning.

Finally, thank you ALL for the fan mail you've been sending to Simon & Schuster. I read every letter and as soon as my schedule slows, I promise you'll get a response whether you emailed or snail mailed me.

Again, I can't thank you all enough for the texts, Facebook messages, Tweets and e-mails about Kate. It means a lot and really--thank you. <3

xoxo

I've always been a solo writer. It felt like something I had to do on my own without people around. When I moved to New York, I tried the coffee shop thing. It was okay aside from my people watching. And I would have gone broke because I kept buying frozen yogurt, coffee, etc. Not. Good.

But several of the past few weeks have been marathon working sessions with Kate and Ross. When we're together working--stuff gets DONE. We're pulling our hair out at the end of the day, but there's also a huge sense of accomplishment. I wrote 13 pages yesterday, Ross knocked out a bunch of revisions and Kate got a ton of editing done.

So, I like the BK Trio we've formed to work and it's proving to be quite productive and fun. :)

Don't forget to see yesterday's post and enter to win a signed copy of HOME SWEET DRAMA!

Another day of crazy. Gotta write a zillion words (or my Excel sheet will continue to tell me that I will not finish RIVAL REVENGE until July 2010 (!!!). And if I don't pick up my laundry, the cleaners will probably keep it. I'm about to have to wear BFF's clothes that she left here the other night.

Usually, I'm very OCD about keeping things neat and clean. But empty boxes from Fresh Direct haven't moved since Monday morning, my sink is piled with dishes and I'm ignoring cleaning. Too focused on book.

BUT

Tonight is supersparkly because it's RA's birthday!!! There will be amazing food, drinks and fun--we *never* have a boring night out.

So, happy birthday, Ross! *throws confetti*