The Chivalric Virtues

In the first season of HBO’s True Detective, an exchange between Marty Hart and Rust Cohle captures a very old problem.

Hart: “Do you ever wonder if you’re a bad man?”

Cohle: “No, I don’t wonder, Marty. The world needs bad men. We keep other bad men from the door.”

It’s one of the great lines in the history of anti-hero rhetoric. But I’d argue that Cohle’…