Gray Morality

[unspeakablehorror]

How did it happen that so many people I've seen understand gray morality as 'it's desirable to be both good and evil' and not 'it's desirable to show how our choices are often not simplistically good or evil and how portraying them as such can itself feed into great evil'?

Comments

[edrevol]

Perhaps they think good/evil is dichotomous... (I could make some point about the media in some countries becoming increasingly polarised, but I don't have the evidence, and it might just be correlation.)

[unspeakablehorror]

That's what I assume. I've seen people criticizing gray morality as 'idealizing people being both good and evil' one too many times, which is just absurd to me, because real people aren't either all-good and perfect or completely evil. And in fact, even the characters cast in these roles are not these things!

Though I will say that mentions of increasingly polarized media activate my startle reflex because of how many times I've seen it used as a lead in to to idealizing specifically conservative 'moderate' opinions. At the same time media (for example in the US) has absolutely become more polarized in perpetuating an 'us vs them' mentality despite the extreme similarities of the 'us' and 'them' mentalities it recognizes once one scratches below the surface of simple slogans. Nowhere in either of these options do I see things moving toward any actually positive resolution, as the one openly declares its disastrous policies to be good while the other claims to decry those but in its actions largely goes along with them while telling everyone with a smile that they are the best anyone can ever hope to have.

So. Yeah. Maybe those are related, lol.

[alisx]

Amen. u_u

(But also yeah I think it's a side-effect of a particular Manichean strain of US culture/politics, that treats "good" and "evil" as external objective forces rather than subjective descriptors based on harm/consequence.)

[unspeakablehorror]

I always hope this sentiment just seems more common than it is, but I don't feel comforted by the way a lot of people talk about these kinds of things.

I don't know if Manichean is the best word for it, even if there is some context in which that's typically used in that way, because that seems to refer to a whole specific religion rather than specifically the idea of good and evil as objective external forces, and if I was going to talk about the influence of religion on US culture and politics, I'd talk about Christianity, and perhaps about some of the specifics of the way Christianity was imported and is practiced in this country (eg. the Puritans, fundamentalism, born again Christians, etc). Certainly I think this has some influence on how good and evil are parsed in the US.

But I agree there may be a component of this that sees good and evil as some concrete power external to the subject. Whereas I view good and evil as judgments inextricably linked to ethics, and yes, as judgments of specific actions and the consequences of those actions. People therefore can't really *be* good or evil, because these aren't concrete attributes, but rather they commit good or evil (or some combination thereof) through their actions.