Machiavelli's Moral Outrage

I'm always amazed by decent students who are delighted by reading Machiavelli. There's this sort of vicarious delight that they take in bad things happening, I think. The fact that he's so smart and he surprises you page after page keeps you reading like a good detective novel or something like that. He was trying to reorient how people thought about moral good, morally good, morally bad things.