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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2017
I begin with the story told by Herman Melville in his short novel, Billy Budd. The year is 1797. Britain is engaged in a long and bitter war against France, and the British war effort has been threatened by two naval mutinies: the Nore Mutiny and the mutiny at Spithead. The scene is His Majesty's Ship, the Indomitable, and the central character is Billy Budd, sailor. Billy Budd is a young man of exceptional beauty, both physical and moral, whose only flaw is a stammer. He is loved by all his fellow sailors except the master-at-arms, John Claggart. The incarnation of evil, Claggart recognises in Billy the incarnation of goodness, and is consumed by a jealousy which leads him to accuse Billy (falsely) of inciting the crew to mutiny. Alone with Claggart and the ship's Captain, Edward Vere, Billy hears the lying charge against him. He is enraged, but his stammer prevents him from responding in words. He strikes Claggart, and the blow is fatal. Billy Budd, sailor, has killed the master-at-arms of one of His Majesty's ships on active service, and the penalty for this is death.
2 All references are to McCall, Dan (ed.) Melville's Short Novels (New York: Norton, 2002).Google Scholar
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4 See the critical essays in McCall, Dan (ed.) Melville's Short NovelsGoogle Scholar for some examples of the range of critical responses to the novel.
5 Arendt, Hannah, On RevolutionGoogle Scholar as quoted in McCall, (ed.) Melville's Short Novels, op. cit., 397.Google Scholar
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7 StMatthew, 27:24.Google Scholar
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16 For an illuminating discussion of this case see Bennett, Jonathan, ‘The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn’, Philosophy, 49, (1974), 123–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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20 In making this claim I am, of course, assuming that a distinction between the right and the good can be drawn, and that the fact of pluralism is confined to pluralism about the good. This claim is contestable—see, for example, Waldron, Jeremy, ‘Rawls's Political Liberalism’Google Scholar, in Waldron, , Law and Disagreement, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 149–63.Google Scholar
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