Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

The Will and Its Responsibilities 69
Then there are people like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, who funk doing anything
irrevocable, and will commit the horrible atrocity of imprisoning
a human creature for life rather than mercifully kill him anesthetically,
and if possible, without his knowing it. We can dispose of
this phobia by pointing out to the abolitionists that a day’s imprisonment
is just as irrevocable as decapitation. If that does not silence
them nothing will. (Everybody’s Political What’s What? 282)
They have not been silenced, for most are really concerned not with irrevocability
but with what politicians, in cynically frank avowal of their dishonesty,
call deniability. It is an old story. When Sophocles’ Creon learned
that his terrible decree had been violated, he declared that the culprit must
be stoned to death. Then, faced with the prospect of inflicting this horror
on his own niece, he chose the more cowardly course of having her entombed
alive. This, he proclaimed, absolved the state of her death, on the
theory, one supposes, that if she was foolish enough to starve to death,
it was her affair. Such ruses fool only those who desperately want to be
fooled.
Realism is hard, not because the mask it must pierce is so dense or
opaque but because we find the face beneath unbearably hideous.
It is the face of responsibility.