A planner engineers a fake catastrophe that kills millions in one city, reasoning that a shared external threat will unite warring superpowers and prevent a nuclear war that would kill far more. The book presents this as a coherent utilitarian argument while refusing to resolve whether averted hypothetical deaths can license actual ones.
A character who perceives all moments of time simultaneously and can manipulate matter at will becomes progressively unable to care which humans live or die, since from a wide enough vantage a living body and a dead one are equally arrangements of particles. Omniscience and omnipotence here erode, rather than deepen, moral attachment.
The book examines masked vigilantes as case studies in pathology: the sadist who enjoys violence, the man who can only function behind an identity, the impotent nostalgic, reframing 'who would dress up to fight crime' as a question about damage rather than courage. Heroic action is read backward to the private wound that produces it.
A vigilante recounts investigating a kidnapped girl, finding she was murdered and fed to dogs, then killing the killer; he describes this as the moment the compromising man 'died' and only the absolutist remained, who sees meaning as something humans paint onto a blank and indifferent world. It is offered as the concrete episode that forges a refusal to ever compromise, even when compromise would save millions.