We have to imagine a very paradoxical thing: not that there are no rules – indeed, the opposite, that there are rules we are very impressed by – but our project, our new moral law, so to speak, is to get away with breaking them; the new question being, as Searle suggests, not why did they get away with it, but how? We might have to take seriously the possibility, intimated by the definitions of the phrase in the OED and Webster’s, that a new morality was being announced towards the end of the nineteenth century in America. In this new morality it is not that rules are made to be broken, but
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