[Off-Topic] The Cult of Gray Morality
I’m reading the excellent The Virtue of Selfishness, a collection of essays by Ayn Rand first published in 1964. Before the sarcastic cracks about the word ‘selfishness’ start, let me point you to the book’s introduction:
In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.
Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.
This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.
The ethics of altruism has created the image of the brute, as its answer, in order to make men accept two inhuman tenets: (a) that any concern with one’s own interests is evil, regardless of what these interests might be, and (b) that the brute’s activities are in fact to one’s own interest (which altruism enjoins man to renounce for the sake of his neighbors).
That said, I don’t recommend this book to everyone. It goes straight at the concepts we now file under “common sense,” and most people have zero interest in touching that :-D Seriously though: if you enjoy thinking, this collection is a good time.
Just for a taste, I’m transcribing several excerpts from chapter 9, The Cult of Gray Morality. It lands best if you show up with an open mind.
The Cult of Gray Morality
One of the most eloquent symptoms of the moral bankruptcy of today’s culture, is a certain fashionable attitude toward moral issues, best summarized as: “There are no blacks and whites, there are only grays.” This is asserted in regard to persons, actions, principles of conduct, and morality in general. “Black and white,” in this context, means “good and evil.” (The reverse order used in that catch phrase is interesting psychologically.)
In any respect one cares to examine, that notion is full of contradictions (foremost among them is the fallacy of the “stolen concept”). If there is no black and white, there can be no gray — since gray is merely a mixture of the two.
Before anyone can identify anything as “gray,” one has to know what is black and what is white. In the field of morality, this means that one must first identify what is good and what is evil. And when a man has ascertained that one alternative is good and the other is evil, he has no justification for choosing a mixture. There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil. In morality, “black” is predominantly the result of pretending to be merely “gray.”
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If, in a complex moral issue, a man struggles to determine what is right and fails or makes an honest error, he cannot be regarded as “gray”; morally, he is “white.” Errors of knowledge are not breaches of morality; no proper moral code can demand infallibility or omniscience.
But if, in order to escape the responsibility of moral judgment, a man closes his eyes and mind, if he evades the facts of the issue and struggles not to know, he cannot be regarded as “gray”; morally, he is as “black” as they come.
Many forms of confusion, uncertainty and epistemological sloppiness help to obscure the contradictions and to disguise the actual meaning of the doctrine of moral grayness.
Some people believe that it is merely a restatement of such bromides as “Nobody is perfect in this world” — i.e., everybody is a mixture of good and evil, and, therefore, morally “gray.” Since the majority of those one meets are likely to fit that description, people accept it as some sort of natural fact, without further thought. They forget that morality deals only with issues open to man’s choice (i.e., to his free will) — and, therefore, that no statistical generalizations are valid in this matter.
If man is to be “gray” by nature, no moral concepts are applicable to him, including “grayness,” and no such thing as morality is possible. But if man has free will, then the fact that ten (or ten million) men made the wrong choice, does not necessitate that the eleventh one will make it; it necessitates nothing — and proves nothing — in regard to any given individual.
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A similar notion, involving similar errors, is held by some people who believe the doctrine of gray morality is merely a restatement of the proposition: “There are always two sides to every story,” by which they mean no one is entirely right or entirely wrong. But that is not what this proposition means or implies. It does not mean that the claims of both sides will necessarily be equally valid, nor even that there will be a small grain of justice on both sides. More often, justice will lie on one side, and the disqualified (or worse) premise on the other.
There are, of course, complex issues in which both sides are right in some respects and wrong in others — and it is here that the “package deal” of pronouncing both sides “gray” is least permissible. It is in such issues that the most rigorous precision of moral judgment is required to identify and evaluate the various aspects involved — which can be done only by unscrambling the mixed elements of “black” and “white.”
The basic error in all these various confusions is the same: it consists of forgetting that morality deals only with issues open to man’s choice — which means: forgetting the difference between “unable” and “unwilling.” This permits people to translate the catch phrase “There are no blacks and whites” into: “Men are unable to be wholly good or wholly evil” — which they accept in foggy resignation, without questioning the metaphysical contradictions it entails.
But not many people would accept it, if that catch phrase were translated into the actual meaning it is intended to smuggle into their minds: “Men are unwilling to be wholly good or wholly evil.”
The first thing one would say to any advocate of such a proposition, is: “Speak for yourself, brother!” And that, in effect, is what he is actually doing; consciously or subconsciously, intentionally or inadvertently, when a man declares: “There are no blacks and whites,” he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: “I am unwilling to be wholly good — and please don’t regard me as wholly evil!”
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Observe the form in which people encounter this doctrine: it is almost never presented as something positive, as an ethical theory or a subject for discussion; predominantly, one hears it as something negative, as a quick objection or reprimand, in a manner implying someone’s guilt or breach of something so obviously absolute that it needs no discussion. In tones ranging from surprise to sarcasm to anger to indignation to hysterical hatred, the doctrine is thrown at you in the form of an accusation: “Surely you don’t think in terms of black and white, do you?”
Caught by confusion, inability to defend oneself and fear of the whole subject of morality, most people quickly answer guiltily: “No, of course not,” without any clear idea of the nature of the accusation. They don’t stop to think that the accusation is saying, in fact: “Surely you are not so unjust as to discriminate between good and evil, are you?” — or: “Surely you are not so evil as to seek the good, are you?” — or: “Surely you are not so immoral as to believe in morality!”
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Observe, in politics, that the term extremism has become a synonym of “evil,” regardless of the content of the issue (the evil is not what you are extreme about, but that you are “extreme” — i.e., consistent).
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Such are the reasons why — when one is asked: “Surely you don’t think in terms of black-and-white, do you?” — the proper answer (in essence, if not in form) should be: “You’re damn right I do!”