Editor's Introduction

This issue was assembled during the early days of the COVID-19 crisis. As I write this, hospitals around the world are suffering surges of patients and shortages of supplies, and economists are fearing a global recession the likes of which we haven't seen since World War II. As governments, schools, and health care systems seek to protect human life, many have wondered how we will preserve ethical commitments in the age of social distancing and self-isolation. If we are only able to look each other in the face through a digital medium now, how will that impact our sense of responsibility to others? Just how different will our society, riddled as it is with inequities, appear after untold months of teleworking on Zoom? Perhaps the most trenchant critique to emerge in the terror of this pandemic, however, has been the recognition that our crisis began long before the appearance of COVID-19. Unequal access to education, health insurance, and job security; a capitalist economy that rewards hoarding and deliberately discourages the measures necessary to mitigate the deadliest effects of a global pandemic; and the unnecessary precarity under which millions of people survive but fail to thrive–these, all along, have constituted the crisis.

The contributors to this issue ponder the structural vulnerabilities of modern life that leave us flailing in the current moment. Don Adams lays bare the philosophical underpinnings of fascism; Brian Elliott interrogates the social psychology of victim-blaming; John McAteer makes visible the vulnerability of children; and Jeroen Vanheste examines the trauma and healing of a chronically ill patient. Each essay proposes an ethical model for managing disaster; each essay contains the implied imperative that we address the enduring precarity underlying the current crisis.

Adams reads Graham Greene's 1938 novel Brighton Rock as a prophetic allegory for the rise of fascism in Europe. By conceiving the central conflict between Pinkie, the teenaged antihero, and Ida, the justice-seeking detective, as the philosophical disagreement between Heideggerian individualist-existentialism and Levinasian ethics of the Other, Adams displaces critiques of Ida as a self-satisfied and self-righteous avenger of evil. On his reading, Ida represents justice itself, a commitment to protecting vulnerable populations from the nihilistic, presumptive "little dictator."

In the next essay, Elliott emphasizes the risks of immanent justice, a form of reasoning that attributes moral causality to circumstantial outcomes. In this model, good things happen to good people, while poverty and pain are the results of personal moral failings. Using the Just-World Hypothesis of social psychology, Elliott unspools the enigma of Herman Melville's cold characters—specifically the narrator of "The Piazza" (1856) and the lawyer in "Bartleby" (1853). Why do these characters seem to hate the people who suffer? They "cannot bear to look upon" pain, Elliott theorizes, because the afflictions that befall "innocent" people fundamentally contradict the personal contract that a "just world" shall reward people for their personal sacrifices of instant gratification, sacrifices often demanded by our social contract. In short, the assurance of personal justice incites a collective denial of the injustice experienced by others. No wonder, explains Elliott, that the lawyer in "Bartleby, the Scrivener" wants so badly to be rid of the man who insists on performing the pain of his humanity at the office.

Like Adams and Elliott, McAteer prefers an intersubjective ethics to individualist morality. Viewing the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne through the lens of Levinas, McAteer suggests a paradigm of parenthood grounded not in biological connection, but rather in a simultaneous admission of personal vulnerability and recognition of the child's vulnerability. Individual freedom must be tempered by moral responsibility, and nowhere is this more evident, argues McAteer, than in the parent-child relationship. In a final critical twist, McAteer proposes a reading of Rosetta (1999) and Le Gamin au Vélo (2011) in which parents and children must mutually accept their own vulnerability in order to give and accept parental care.

In the final essay, Vanheste offers us a note of existential optimism in his analysis of the 1986 BBC television series, The Singing Detective by British screenwriter Dennis Potter...