Cormac McCarthy and Moral Absolutes

I love Cormac McCarthy's work.  It's not exactly cheery stuff, but the prose is incredible and the themes are deep.  His new novel, "The Road," has been getting rave reviews, and I cannot wait to read it.  Here, just as a taste, is William Kennedy in the New York Times:

Cormac McCarthy’s subject in his new novel is as big as it gets: the end of the civilized world, the dying of life on the planet and the spectacle of it all. He has written a visually stunning picture of how it looks at the end to two pilgrims on the road to nowhere. Color in the world — except for fire and blood — exists mainly in memory or dream. Fire and firestorms have consumed forests and cities, and from the fall of ashes and soot everything is gray, the river water black. Hydrangeas and wild orchids stand in the forest, sculptured by fire into “ashen effigies” of themselves, waiting for the wind to blow them over into dust. Intense heat has melted and tipped a city’s buildings, and window glass hangs frozen down their walls. On the Interstate “long lines of charred and rusting cars” are “sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber. ... The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.” . . .

The overarching theme in McCarthy’s work has been the face-off of good and evil with evil invariably triumphant through the bloodiest possible slaughter. Had this novel continued his pattern, that band of marching thugs would have been the focus — as it was with the apocalyptic horsemen of death in his second novel, “Outer Dark,” or the blood-mad scalp-hunters in his masterpiece, “Blood Meridian,” or the psychopathic killer in his recent novel, “No Country for Old Men.” But evil victorious is not this book’s theme. . . .

(Here is another review, from Slate.com.)  Now, at one point in the book, the two main characters (the boy and his father) narrowly escape a gang of cannibals . . .

When six of the cannibals return to the house the man and boy barely escape the same fate. Hiding, afraid to breathe, the father tells the boy it’s going to be O.K. He says that often.

The boy asks: “We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?”

“No. Of course not. ...”

“No matter what.”

“No. No matter what.”

“Because we’re the good guys.”

“Yes.”

“And we’re carrying the fire.”

“And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.”

Here's a question -- one that resonates, I suppose, with the recent return in the news to the possibility of "torture warrants" -- which might be of interest to law profs:  What has to be true about the world in order for it to be true -- really true -- that there are some things that "the good guys" do not do, no matter what?  That is, what are the premises of the claim implicit in the father's assurance to his son that, "no matter what," to be a "good guy" is to be someone who does not do certain things, e.g., kill other human beings for food?