"Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret"
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McCarthy goes for the jugular of moral fog. The question isn’t naive; it’s accusatory. “Is it really so difficult” treats ethical confusion less as a philosophical dilemma than as a convenient pose - the kind that lets people stall until the moment has passed and they can claim ambiguity. She’s puncturing the alibi culture of “it’s complicated,” insisting that most of the time we’re not lost, we’re bargaining.
The line’s bite comes from its timing. “Right away or a moment afterward” admits the mind’s favorite trick: if we can’t ignore the warning, we can at least outpace it. That “moment afterward” is where self-justification begins, where the story edits itself. McCarthy locates conscience not in lofty principles but in a visceral sequence: impulse, action, then the body’s receipt. The “horrid flash of regret” is instantaneous moral accounting - not a slow, dignified remorse but a strobe light that exposes what you’ve done before you can dress it up.
Subtextually, she’s wary of moral rhetoric used as camouflage. McCarthy, a novelist and critic with a talent for unsparing social observation, often wrote about the lies people tell in polite rooms: the performance of sophistication that masks plain cowardice, cruelty, or opportunism. Here she implies that ethical knowledge is common and inconvenient, which is why we outsource it to ideology, institutions, or endless debate. The sentence dares you to admit what you already knew - and to notice how fast you started pretending you didn’t.
The line’s bite comes from its timing. “Right away or a moment afterward” admits the mind’s favorite trick: if we can’t ignore the warning, we can at least outpace it. That “moment afterward” is where self-justification begins, where the story edits itself. McCarthy locates conscience not in lofty principles but in a visceral sequence: impulse, action, then the body’s receipt. The “horrid flash of regret” is instantaneous moral accounting - not a slow, dignified remorse but a strobe light that exposes what you’ve done before you can dress it up.
Subtextually, she’s wary of moral rhetoric used as camouflage. McCarthy, a novelist and critic with a talent for unsparing social observation, often wrote about the lies people tell in polite rooms: the performance of sophistication that masks plain cowardice, cruelty, or opportunism. Here she implies that ethical knowledge is common and inconvenient, which is why we outsource it to ideology, institutions, or endless debate. The sentence dares you to admit what you already knew - and to notice how fast you started pretending you didn’t.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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