In the previous four chapters, aspects of Shakespeare's moral vision have become clearer. He values the duty and reciprocal good service necessary for authority; this helps to give people a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. He values two person friendships held together by loyalty, which depends on love and charity. He values fairness as a measure of proportionality. However, he cautions against the selfishness and vindictiveness that can result from the feeling that the world is ‘unfair’ because people are not equally good-looking, talented or wealthy – a fact with which individuals must make their peace, lest they become a Richard III. When these values are violated (sanctity), there is mental and physical degradation, as sin moves like a contagion infecting all it touches. In each case, care and harm are symptoms or by-products, and invariably this comes either from selfless and altruistic gestures towards fellow human beings, or from selfish and hateful behaviour driven by spite. A subject providing good service, or a leader who is true to the principles of authority, performs a duty of care. Those that do not invariably bring harm to others and eventually themselves. The abandonment of friendship, love and charity leads inevitably either to their opposites – enmity, hatred and selfishness – or else to a Timon-like loneliness in misanthropy and self-exile; the net effects bring harm to those involved. When fairness gives way to selfishness, society descends into a dog-eat-dog death spiral. And when moral decay in the form of degradation, disease and contamination taints all it touches, the obvious consequences are physically and psychologically harmful. In this chapter, I will assess the extent to which this is true by focusing on plays in which moral order seems to break down completely, and the dramatis personae revert to the Hobbesian state of nature and unspeakable cruelty: Titus Andronicus, 3 Henry VI, Richard III and King Lear. In the constrained or tragic vision, when there are no institutions with which to reinforce the morals that bind people together (authority, loyalty, fairness, sanctity), the worst aspects of humanity – as embodied in the tiger – are granted their fullest expression. However, in Shakespeare's version of this vision, human nature provides the seeds of its own rebirth.