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Films

The Road to Perdition

Our philosophical film columnist Thomas Wartenberg ponders the complexity of human motives as he takes in the latest gangster movie, The Road to Perdition.

In the popular imagination, morality is structured by clear-cut and rigid dichotomies. There are good people and bad. Good people act morally while the bad are evil. Usually, ‘we’ are the good ones and ‘they’ the bad. Our motivations are pure and moral, theirs selfcentered and evil.

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