SOURCE: Platt, Michael. “Natural Right, Conventional Right, and Setting Things Aright: Joseph Conrad's ‘The Secret Sharer’.” In The Moral of the Story: Literature and Public Ethics, edited by Henry T. Edmondson III, pp. 177-92. Lanhan, Md.: Lexington Books, 2000.
In the following essay, Platt analyzes ethical issues in “The Secret Sharer,” contending that the narrator eventually satisfies the “conflicting claims of natural right and conventional right” and in the process “learns much about himself, about justice, and about statesmanship.”