ABSTRACT
This chapter advances the first of three principle logics of paradox. This first logic is stated thus: paradox thwarts moral or ideological closure. While questions of ethics were courted in earlier chapters, these become a guiding concern in this chapter. In distinguishing this discussion from the purest philosophical tomes which typically grapple with ethics in a disembodied intellectual sense, the focus here is on the lived experience of ethics. The chapter begins with an exploration of the relationship between paradox and ethics by recourse to the aphorism ‘might is right’. Attention is then directed to more specific paradoxes including ‘the paradox of binary morality’, ‘the paradox of free will’, ‘the paradox of selflessness’, and ‘the paradox of conflict’.
