Some phenomena demonstrating that moral good and bad can form productive coalitions on a moral middle ground are presented in this chapter: healthy selfishness, Machiavellianism, the case of Oskar Schindler, black humor, grey hat hackers, transgressive art, the combination of the pure and impure in the tradition of Émile Durkheim, and the repositioning of the “wrong” other-in-the-self. Three practical implications are outlined: a guideline to evaluating transgressive art beyond one’s first emotional response and the existence of grey areas in the abortion discussion and in the #MeToo debate.

In his exhaustive cultural history of the atomic bomb, Paul Boyer suggests that the unthinkable scale of nuclear warfare registered in the American consciousness as an aesthetic problem. “How was one to respond imaginatively to Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” he writes, “and, still more, to the prospect of world holocaust?” This chapter sees the decidedly American strain of black humor that emerged in the wake of the Japanese bombings as an attempt to build a new “atomic aesthetics” that would be capable of registering and critiquing nuclear violence. A key feature of these aesthetics is an “atomic laughter”—a shattering strain of laughter that is both interior to and elicited by these darkly comic texts. This essay offers a theory of this atomic laughter—its political and affective dimensions—by way of a close reading of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964).