On Page 87 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand introduces her essay 9,
The Cult of Moral Grayness: “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.’”
My response: as an ethical moderate, I believe there are issues that are black and white morally, but many are highly probably right, and some are gray, so complex, that assigning right or wrong to a moral action is hard to pinpoint, but we should take each issue, one at a time, and describe it as accurately as we can, and that must suffice, and we still should be able to make moral progress, and Rand is a bit fanatical and purist, but she still has much to teach us.
Rand on Pages 87 and 88: “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.’ . . . In any respect one cares to examine, the 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 one 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 one 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 attempting to pretend to oneself that one is merely ‘gray.’”
My response: Rand is too pure, too monist, too idealistic, too simplistic in her ontology and ethics on this point. Good is not pure goodness and evil is not pure badness, and neither has any minority elements of the other in them. I see the good as part evil, and the bad as a bit good, so the moral person develops his good attributes, while not seeking to wipe out but control his bad traits. The evil person strives for the fiction of purity by pouring attention and resources into his primary trait that oozes evil, and his residual good traits are just along for the ride, and he cannot convert or eradicate them completely.
In the eyes of the Good Spirits, a very high standard, being gray as being mostly good is enough to get one into heave, and on the other side, being mostly evil is enough to get one sent to hell.
Rand: “If a moral code (such as altruism) is, in fact, impossible to practice, it is the code that must be condemned as ‘black,’ nor its victims evaluated as ‘gray.’ If a moral code prescribe irreconcilable contradictions—so that choosing the good in one respect, a man becomes evil in another—it is a code that must be rejected as ‘black.’ If a moral code is inapplicable to reality—if it offers no guidance except a series of arbitrary, groundless out-of-context injunctions and commandments, to be accepted on faith and practiced automatically, as blind dogma—its practitioners cannot properly be classified as ‘white’ or ‘black’ or ‘gray’: a moral code that forbids and paralyzes moral judgment is a contradiction in terms.”
My response: Some contradictions are, true white most or false so we prefer those actions be black or white if possible and if reality is our standard of truth then it may be hard to contrast our value system with the world out there with complete clarity and consistency. Rand seems to dismiss all morally mixed or gray characterization as irrational or false or bad and that is a mistake, though most are.
Rand: “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, 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 obscure the contradictions and to disguise the actual meaning of the doctrine of moral grayness.
Sone people believe it is merely a restatement of such bromides as ‘Nobody is perfect in this world’—i.e., everyone 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.”
My response: Only a divinity could be perfect or near perfect, so humans are all roughly gray or a mixture of good and evil, and the moral person becomes more good than bad and a bad person becomes more bad than good. We are not responsible in the eyes of the Good Spirits for our initial gray moral consciousness, but we are responsible for the mixture of how we end up for we choose the result we get later in our lives.
Rand on Pages 88 and 89: “If man is ‘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 will make it; it necessitates nothing—and proves nothing—in regard to any individual.”
My response: we are born gray and live gray and moral concepts are applicable to us, though not as absolute truths. But as probably certain moral truths.
Rand: “There are many reasons why most people are morally imperfect, i.e., hold mixed, contradictory premises and values (an altruist morality if one of the reasons), but that is a different issue.
Regardless of the reasons of their choices the fact that most people are morally ‘gray,’ does not invalidate man’s need of morality and of moral ‘whiteness’; if anything, it makes the need more urgent. Nor does it warrant the epistemological ‘package deal’ of dismissing the problem by consigning all men to moral ‘grayness’ and thus refusing to recognize or to practice ‘whiteness.’ Nor does it serve as an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment: unless one is prepared to dispense with morality altogether and to regard a petty chiseller and a murderer as morally equal, one still has to judge and evaluate the many shadings of ‘gray’ that one may encounter in the characters of individual men. (And the only way to judge them is by a clearly defined criterion of ‘black’ and ‘white.’)
A similar notion, involving similar errors, is held by some people who believe the doctrine of moral grayness is merely a restatement of the proposition: ‘There are two sides to every issue,’ which they take to mean that nobody is ever fully right or wrong. But that is not what that proposition means or implies. It implies only that in judging an issue, one should take cognizance of or give hearing to both sides. This does not mean that the claims of both sides will necessarily be equally valid nor even that there will be some modicum of justice on both sides. Moe often than not, justice will be on one side, and unwarranted presumption (or worse) on the other.”
My response: There are almost always two sides to the story, and good is usually more on ones side than the other, and evil is more on the other side than the first proposition, but both are mixed.
Rand on Pages 89 and 90: “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 such issues that the most rigorous precision 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 n 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.’”
My response: As a moral moderate versus Randian failed attempt to insist in moral purity of perfect either/or moral status available to be chosen and attained, if we would just will it, I insist that is a noble ideal, but impossible in reality, for we are always orally mixed in our freely willing determination to choose to be perfectly good, fairly good achieving is as high as we are able to achieve even when so willing. Her pat insistence on willing to be morally perfect as a possibility for moral chosen moral perfection does not make it an existential possibility for any flawed human being.
Rand: “Just as, in epistemology, the cult of uncertainty is a revolt against reason—so, in ethics, the cult of moral grayness is a revolt against moral values. Both are a revolt against the absolutism of reality.
Just as the cult of uncertainty could not succeed by an open rebellion against reason and, therefore, struggles to elevate the negation of reason into some sort of superior reasoning—so the cult of grayness could not succeed by an open rebellion against morality, and struggles to elevate the negation of morality into a superior kind of virtue.
Observe the form in which one encounters that doctrine: it is seldom presented as a positive, as an ethical theory or subject of discussion; predominantly, one hears it as a negative, as a snap objection or reproach, uttered in a manner implying that one is guilty of breaching an absolute as self-evident as to require no discussion. In tones ranging from astonishment to sarcasm to anger to indignation to hysterical hatred, the doctrine is thrown at you in the form of an accusatory: ‘Surely you don’t think in terms of black and white, do you?’”
My response: Rand’s dogmatism, her absolute confidence that Objectivist ethics and epistemology are self-evidently true is not something I can accept I think we should be rational-emotional in epistemology and good-more than bad in ethics, and that grayness of reality as basic is not something I think we can verbalize our way through—perhaps high level deities can, or can come very close to it.. We humans of flawed nature and limited intelligence have to get as close as we can to knowing and being good, and that will have to suffice, and God is pleased if we get that far, for getting there is an impressive feat for such limited beings as humans.
Rand is more right than not with her dogmatic epistemology and ethics, (her black and white thinking and concluding) but she is not totally correct.
Rand on Pages 90 and 91: “Prompted by confusion, helplessness and fear of the entire subject of morality, most people hasten to answer guiltily: ‘No, of course, I don’t,’ without any clear idea of the nature of the accusation. They do not pause to grasp that the accusation is saying, in effect: ‘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!’
Moral guilt, fear of moral judgment, and a plea for blanket forgiveness, are so obviously the motive of that catch phrase that a glance at reality would be sufficient to tell its proponents what an ugly confession they are uttering. But escape from reality is both the precondition and the goal of the cult of moral grayness.”
My response: There are self-evasive and group-evasive moral subjectivists that do not want morals defined, labeled and applied to curb their evil behavior, and that is condemnable, but moral moderates like me are principled, and not trying to escape from reality, but are trying to understand and rationalize how complicated, shifting reality works, and what is our moral role in making things right for ourselves and others, and that is a heavy life, and I am confident through Mavellonialist ethics and theology, we are getting closer to figuring out what reality is, and how we are to live in reality to please the Good Spirits.
Rand: “Philosophically, that cult is a negation of morality—but, psychologically, that is not its adherents’ goal. What they seek is not amorality, but something more profoundly irrational, a nonabsolute, fluid, elastic, middle-of-road morality. They proclaim themselves ‘beyond good and evil’—they seek to preserve the ‘advantages’ of both. They are not moral challengers, nor do they represent a medieval version of flamboyant evil worshipers. What gives them their peculiarly modern flavor is that they do not advocate selling one’s soul to the Devil; they advocate selling it piecemeal, bit by bit, to any retail bidder.”
My response: Rand is an atheist and physicalist, a material Monist. For her that objective world is knowable and we can have and verbalize knowledge about it, and our knowledge of the world and ourselves, rationally yields for us an objective set of moral principles, necessarily laying out for us, how we should conduct our lives as secular humanist interacting with this world.
Monist of the opposite extreme are pure Idealists: all that exists is the world of spirit, and our only profound means of knowing it and knowing how to live will somehow be made certainly known to us by faith, hunch, or vision.
Monists are claim epistemological and ethical infallibilism, and those that disagree or go against what they say is moral, are sinners to be condemned. These are principled Absolutists, not the cheap, brutal abstraction-fetishishing, cult-fanatics worshiping some ism as the one true faith, but they would avoid so degrading themselves, by refusing to be so strident and coercively evangelical about spreading their cause across the globe.
As an ontological, epistemological, and ethical moderate, I would suggest each of these Monists and their polar opposites are not 100% right or wrong, or 100% good or evil, but are one more than the other, but both opposing conditions, traits, stances and circumstances must be blended, and that is where truth and goodness reside. In short honorable gray thinking is reality-oriented ad black-and-white thinking can lead to error, ignorance and radical enthusiasm and mass movements.
Rand on Pages 91 and 92: “They are not a philosophical school of thought; they are the typical product of philosophical default—of the intellectual bankruptcy that has produced irrationalism in epistemology, a moral vacuum in ethics, and a mixed economy in politics. A mixed economy is an immoral war of pressure groups, devoid of principles, values or any reference to justice, a war whose ultimate weapon is the power of brute force, but whose outward form is a game of compromise. The cult of moral grayness is the ersatz morality which made it possible and to which men now cling in a panicky attempt to justify it.
Observe that their dominant overtone is not a quest for the ‘white,’ but an oppressive terror of being branded ‘black’ (and with good reason) . . . 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. Observe the phenomenon of the so-called neutralists in the United Nations: the ‘neutralists’ are worse than merely neutral in the conflict between United States and Soviet Russia; they are committed, on principle, to see no difference between the two sides, never to consider the merits of an issue, and always seek a compromise, any compromise in any conflict—as, for instance, between an aggressor and an invaded country”.
My response: Unprincipled neutralists or moderates ride the fence hoping to stay out of harm’s way. One side is not absolutely good and right (America, freedom and capitalism) and good, but is more right than good, but Soviet Russian was not absolutely bad and wrong, but it was mostly bad and wrong. If the Communists invade someone unjustly, then compromise s not possible unless they surrender and withdraw, and peace and compromise at any price is not principled moderation, but is self-hating, cowardly appeasement without shame or convictions.
Rand: “Observe, in literature, the emergence of a thing called anti-hero, whose distinction is that he possesses no distinction—no virtues, no values, no goals, no character, no significance—yet who occupies, in plays and novels, the position formerly held by a hero, with the story centered on his actions, even though he does nothing and get nowhere. Observe that the term ‘good guys and bad guys’ is used as a sneer—and particularly in television, observe the revolt against happy endings, the demands that the ‘bad guys’ be given an equal chance and an equal number of victories.
Like a mixed economy, men of mixed premises may be called ‘gray; but, in both cases, the mixture does not remain ‘gray’ for long. ‘Gray,’ in this context, is merely a prelude to ‘black.’ There may be ‘gray’ men, but there are not ‘gray’ moral principles. Morality is a code of black and white. When and if men attempt a compromise, it is obvious which side will lose and which will necessarily profit.”
My response: Rand ethically thinks in black and white terms about her allegedly objective true moral code. Still a moralist that stands for something has a chance to make the world better, or keep it from getting worse, and she contributes much to our moral understanding and advancement. Often gray, compromising leniency in reaction to creeping, steadily growing, and spreading evil in society is just the prelude to coming moral darkness, and that kind of compromise destroys society and the self.
With my gray moral principles, I believe I make a difference and will, though Rand would reject me.
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