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

[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.