"Black Book" builds a tension between the brash certainty of Mr. Verhoeven's filmmaking and the ethical ambiguity that clouds the characters' actions.

At its core, the concept is suffused with a troubling ethical ambiguity, as if one could be present at the scene of a crime and yet morally absent.

The real world doesn't come in nicely packaged public-service announcements, and we're better off with entertainment like "The Sopranos" that reflects our fallen state with all its ethical ambiguity.

But there were also moments of ethical ambiguity that Dr. Ramage admits gave him pause.

He called ethical ambiguities like these M.i.s.t.: Moral Issues Sliced Thick.

Still, she saw how a large number of people gathered to commit acts of moral and ethical ambiguity would make an excellent rendezvous point for clandestine meetings.

Plagiarism charges in Hollywood have become so institutionalized that they are no longer a question of ethical ambiguity so much as business as usual.

This sort of ethical ambiguity had not served Jean Marq well in his times of need.

Museums are the very public end of an often willful ethical ambiguity that appears at its worst among private collectors and dealers of antiquities.