Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Stephen King, writing in Danse Macabre said something almost exactly alike, except he didn't couch it in the language of morality. As is his wont, he said that "horror is Republican" (meaning in this sense "conservative," not "drooling horrors from beyond the River Strauss") because the characters who behave decently almost always come out well in the end, and the characters who don't usually get creamed before the middle of the second reel, so to speak. (Harlan Ellison is a departure from the form, because often with his stories, as one of his cover blurbs said, "there are no winners or losers [and s]ometimes there are no survivors.")

I rarely ever notice that aspect of a story, however, since I'm more or less utterly uninterested in questions of morality per se. To me, "moral" and words related to it have been so abused, they've pretty much become meaningless, aside from the generalised meaning of "behavioural standards imposed by an outside socialising agency." To me, the behaviours of the socialising agencies, and the agents affected by them, are much more interesting than the codes themselves. *shrug*