I’m not sure whether the title of this essay in New English Review was written by Dalrymple, the magazine’s editor Rebecca Bynum, or by some great sage centuries ago, but I find it very profound! It certainly captures the sense of the piece, in which Dalrymple discusses a murder of pigeons that he recently witnessed and pokes a little fun at his own sense of moral indignation:

Rational as it is to view their behaviour as devoid of all moral significance whatsoever, and absurd as it would be to consider those birds as morally reprehensible, I find it almost impossible entirely to clear my mind of the irrational notion that the scene had a moral significance or meaning. If, for example, I had been able by some means or other to protect the pigeons from the unprovoked attack of the sparrowhawks upon them, I should have done so, even though saving the pigeons meant harming the sparrowhawks…