Is there Moral Gray? (Part1)

Image Credit: i_yudai

Because we are dealing with some weighty ideas and I don’t want to overwhelm everyone I am going to be writing in a serialized format. For a week, or two weeks, I will be posting articles related to a specific idea. My hope is that each article will be able to stand on its own. Yet, in the end they will make the most sense when seen as a complete unit. It is my hope that this will be the best of both worlds. For those who want a little reading to stimulate the mind you can just read a post here and there. For big picture people, like me, I will be reposting the entire series as a complete unit when I finish before moving on to another topic.

Our first articles will be loosely grouped under the topic of morality. The main topic we are trying to cover: “Is there moral gray?” Namely, is there such a thing as actions that are some mixture of good and evil? Or as another way of looking at it, does there exist pure good actions and pure evil ones, or is everything just some mixture of the two?

I’d like to show that the Bible doesn’t support a morally gray hypothesis and neither do I. I would also like to allude to how this can still be considered logically consistent. This does not mean that I am setting out to construct a vast philosophical system. I am merely presenting some interesting concepts, both old and new, that will hopefully get readers thinking about some of the assumptions we make without realizing it when we look at the world. For those who know little about Christianity this will be a good opportunity to learn what Christians believe and how it makes sense. For those who have studied the topic for a number of years it is possible you have heard all of this before, so might I direct you to this blog.

I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that the prevailing worldview in America today is one that embraces the idea of the moral gray. But might I assert that people don’t think this way because they have pondered long and hard and formed a thoughtful picture of the world. Instead, I think it exists more because of a reaction to a different worldview; a worldview where we split things into polar opposites, or a binary.

Consider this analogy: A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it."
Text from: Lawrence Kohlberg's Collected Papers on Moral Development and Moral Education.

What would you do? Would you steal the drug? Some could quickly jump to the Ten Commandments and turn this argument into a binary. It is wrong to steal and therefore stealing the drug is evil and not stealing the drug is good. Now, ultimately I would agree with them, but this way of thinking misses the whole point! We don’t really care about theft. We would like to know what our husband’s next move is. This is especially true given the inconsiderate actions of the druggist against him and his wife! After all, there must be some alternative that will lead to a better outcome, right? If the man were to steal the drug the wife would be saved and the druggist would certainly be able to continue selling the drug and making his enormous profit. So what harm is there in this really?

After considering this story called “Heinz’s Dilemma” it quickly becomes clear why a system of balancing alternatives begins to fit the world. After all we can’t all be winners. If we give a billion dollars to one program we certainly have to be taking it from a different one. So we are left then with a system of balancing many extremes and trying to create an outcome that could be called “good.” But this balancing act comes with its own dilemmas such as trying to decide who makes the final decision, among with many others I don’t want to go into here.

Clearly the system of binaries has been rejected because it doesn’t fit with what we see in the world. On top of this, it contradicts Christian teachings on free will. If your life is only a series of choosing between two extremes, one which will result in evil and the other good, it is not like you could say you have been given a fair choice! But what if there is a third option to these two worldviews? A view of morality that doesn’t require the existence of moral gray areas, one that still accounts for all the variety of options that are in front of us when we make decisions, and one that provides an outcome that can truly be seen as good?

For that I think we will have to wait for the next post.

Greatest Blessings,

Carl Myhre