Is Moral Ambiguity Overrated?

For years, many people have been declaring Black-and-White Morality as an outdated and unrealistic concept that needs to die to make way for Grey-and-Gray Morality. Major works of fiction such as A Song of Ice and Fire have prided in using morally ambiguous characters to make for a compelling story.

However, sometimes it feels like authors are abusing grey morality and making up contrived stories in the process; as they feel that characters that are pure good or pure evil are boring and unrealistic. Applying it to characters who are known for being pure good or pure evil, ironically taking away what made them for memorable in the first place. (i.e. Film/Maleficent)

Is grey morality misused/overrated in your opinion? Or is there a good reason why it's becoming a standard?

"they feel that characters that are pure good or pure evil are boring and unrealistic."

I think you kind of confusing Gray-and-Gray Morality with characters simply being Rounded, rather than Flat (characters of any alignment, may I add).

It's becoming standard because no one in this world is purely bad, or purely good.

Barring that good and evil are points of view, and if you look only at things that are accepted as wrong by the vast majority of people, talking anyone who is not a psychopath or has psychopathic tendencies, even then there are no purely evil people.

There are shades of grey, and the darkest of them may seem black, and the lightest of them may seem white, but there is no such thing as a perfectly good or evil character.

I agree. However, before anyone invokes the obligatory reference to a real life politician or mentally unstable criminal of their choice as representative of a purely evil person, I just want to say that, even if the above statement is deemed untrue, Black-and-White Morality usually affects entire settings - that is, everyone is either wholly good or wholly evil, which is inarguably not the case in reality.

At any rate, morally ambiguous characters are simply less predictable and hence more interesting to watch than clear-cut heroes and villains. More to the point, characters driven by personal goals or loyalties are far more realistic than those ostensibly motivated by melodramatic slogans or blatantly fictitious representations of mental conditions. Ditto similarly designed entire societies, apart from meticulously crafted fantastic creatures - your garden variety bug war is actually a pretty logical conflict, though it probably fits better as a Blue-and-Orange Morality situation.

All in all, when picturing a setting with its various characters, I usually imagine them having relative relationship values and alliance meters rather than objective karma meters as essential moral drivers, and build up on that.

edited 29th Dec '15 12:40:59 PM by indiana404

Also, as noted before, moral ambiguity oftentimes just a result of characters being round characters.

Kind of a derivative of Art Imitates Life in my opinion.

Popular perception for most of history is "us good, them bad." Tribe mentality, liege lord loyalty, patriotism, and plenty of propaganda. Hell the film industry was practically invented for propaganda.

But now with much greater access to information and various opinions we are starting to notice the gray in the world. Public word is scrutinized more, enemies are more nebulous, and the question of "right" isn't as clear. So I think it's a case of positive feedback where media creators notice the grey, it influences them which influences future creators.

If anything I think this is the writing theme of our time as most media seems to follow this theme now. Not all of them do it well of course but that's true regardless of time period. Just because black and white isn't "in" though doesn't mean that it's boring or any more unrealistic than grey and gray, at least in my opinion as I've enjoyed both immensely. Just different flavors.

My two cents at least.

-Carpe Jugulum, by the late Terry Pratchett

edited 29th Dec '15 4:03:35 PM by Tungsten74

Good quote. I always liked Pterry.

Anyway, to the subject at hand: The reason why having purely evil or good characters is considered unrealistic and shallow is because it is. While I like to believe that most people have more good in them than bad, the vast majority are some kind of mix. While I have no doubt that there are some people in the real world who fall on opposite ends of the bell curve (for whatever reason), and I have no problem with stories that have a handful of truly monstrous or incorruptible characters, I feel like reducing the world to black and white takes away a lot of the potential for emotional investment. It is much more interesting to me to know why the antagonist does what they do; if they have followers, I want to know why they are devoted to this person. Same goes for the protagonists. I want them to feel like real people so I can actually feel invested in their winning or losing in the end, and turning people into moral absolutes—objectifying them, one might say—kind of kills that because you are never forced to ask, "Why would they do that?"

I'm personally a big fan of the "morality kitchen sink" approach, both in my own writing and the kind of stuff I like to read and watch. I like being able to have people that I sympathise with on a personal level or can at least understand regardless of how messed up their actions are, but also true selfless friends of the world and hateful sadistic creeps and some whose moral calculus is entirely orthogonal to how most of us see the world. But more than that, I want to see as many sides of the story as possible, which I suppose is at least partially outside the domain of this discussion seeing as it's less about morality and more about forced perspective.

However, I do agree that there can be something cheap about just making everyone a bit of an asshole or a hypocrite or having your hero kill people and destroy property just to say, "THIS IS THE WAY THE REAL WORLD IS, HOMES." But again, I feel like that's more a problem of lazy writing than the purview of this premise. Perhaps you should have asked not why people ostensibly dislike black/white moral frameworks, but why they must excuse a framing that treats bad behaviour as justified by saying that this is how the world is.

The chief problem with black and white morality is that, eventually, people find they disagree on which is which, frequently leading to unpleasantries. It's far more functional to accept some issues as grey than to label the disagreeing side as evil in any capacity. Pratchett himself was a proponent of medically-assisted suicide - also known as justified murder to those who find the practice abhorrent. Can anyone say the matter is clear-cut?

The same thing applies to real life conflicts. It's not even that they're "grey", but that practical necessities can force good people to do bad things to other good people, in defence of yet other good people. Two armies fighting over an extra piece of arable land so the soldiers' families won't starve should drought happen to occur - in theory, it's a white and white conflict; in practice, it can be as bloody as any war of genocidal conquest, and even the victors emerge drastically changed by it.

Even on smaller scales, strapping an ideal hero with some pointless minutiae like, say, a family or other personal stakes to have to take care of, so that the question isn't about doing "the right thing", but about choosing one right thing over another - that's a pickle few writers are willing to put themselves in. There's a reason why most superheroes are childless, or alternatively have children conveniently showing up already trained in the trade - the choice between risking your life to stop the villain du jour, and, well, not endangering the guy who tucks your kids in every night - that's an actual choice, unlike the stupid moral pseudo-dilemmas some comics try and pull nowadays.

Bottom line, gray morality isn't so much "realistic" as it is a functional way to describe the myriad daily considerations and compromises only the insane have the privilege of not having to consciously deal with.

I don't think any shade of conflict can be overused in the same way "characters going from one location to another" can be. Like JHM my preference is Morality Kitchen Sink; white, black, and gray are perfectly capable of coexisting violently in the same world.

edited 29th Dec '15 10:58:59 PM by Novis

Nah, morality's pretty straightforward. Don't be an asshole. Don't treat people like things. Be considerate of other people's agency. Always forgive (at least once; what you do with repeat offenders is up to you). Always start by assuming the best of people.

And remember: there is no such thing as absolute morality. We're all just stumbling in the dark. So have a care for those who fall, hmm?

And this is all well and good... until you get hungry, or sick, or cold, or tired, or experience any other kind of basic human need... and realize the resources to fulfill them are not immediately available, and may not even be enough for all in the long run. That's when things get interesting.

No, not really. That's falling in the dark. Have a care, because it could just as easily be you.

And if you must abuse another man's liberty or agency, don't hide it behind labels. Own your actions. Did you kill a mugger, to save a stranger? Then know that you murdered a man, with a name, a history, a family, a story. A man that you might have been, were it not for the accident of your birth and upbringing.

All killing is murder, all death is tragedy. But sadly, murder and death are sometimes necessary, because we live in a tragic universe. A universe where we need to look out for each other, because if we don't, no-one else will.

Sorry but that was a bad example. If you kill a mugger to save a stranger, someone who would have died had you not intervened, then though you can say "oh, it's murder, it's evil", it's not that simple. Because what matters then is why you did it: was it to kill the mugger, or to save the stranger?

And what if the mugger died in a scuffle, by their own weapon, but you never intended to do anything more than incapacitate them and it's their fault for persisting in the attempt to harm you? Does that mean you murdered them in cold blood, still, even though it was basically an accident on your part?

The very notion is just ridiculous. So you can have your "black and white" and categorise it like that, but then you get situations that truly are questionable, and either you start arbitrarily categorising things that don't belong in any of those two places—not fully at the very least—or you start adding additional rules which grey it all out.

In the end, I'm with what Pratchett wrote, yes; it is a good way to approach it in general, because for as long as you treat people as actual people rather than objects it should be fine. And that very fragment itself, and I'll remind you that you were the one who posted it in this thread, goes against your example. Because yes, it's as simple as not falling and not letting anyone else fall. But in the end, all it means is that if you treat people like people you won't be "black"; so either there are a lot of "white" people who are all equally "white" no matter their circumstances (and you can't be "white" if you murder someone, so I guess killing a mugger in defence of another makes you still pure and good and can't count as murder), or we start having fun with tones and get some grays there.

edited 30th Dec '15 4:07:20 AM by Kazeto

In addition, the question is, who do you look after first? The thing about social relationships is that they tend to have an order of priority. Saving a stranger is easy enough, but would you put a stranger's life over that of a family member; ditto foreigners whose values you don't share, over countrymen you respect?

In this vein, I find a lot of fictional villains to be little more than scapegoats for issues too complicated to just point and accuse a culprit, particularly regarding scientists, businessmen or heads of state. Even as it's become fashionable to have villains consider themselves heroes, this frequently devolves from "guy who may have a point" to "deluded egomaniac and/or hypocrite", precisely because it's the writers who fear owning up to the conflict they've concocted.

This is bad written Grey-and-Grey Morality.

I hate this even more than Black-and-White Morality.

Personally, i'm more a fan of the Morality Kitchen Sink, normally my heroes are good people with few moral ambigueties, and they are working with people with their moral arround the scale (Normally Anti Heroes, and eventually when the things start to getting worse they have to work with a Well-Intentioned Extremist Knight Templar to have the chance of win).

Part of the problem is that grey and grey conflict isn't necessarily that much more realistic than black-and-white conflict. While it is true that nobody's perfect, nor is anybody pure evil, it is true that there are good, evil, and neutral people in the world. Safe to say: Hitler was evil, and that Mr. Rogers was good. Therefore, black and white conflict is actually quite plausible in real life.

Factional conflicts between groups become a bit more complicated, particularly when dealing between wars between nations. People don't join nations by choice so much as by birth-therefore, nations can't be morally uniform.

Also, interesting (but not necessarily more realistic) villains tend to have comprehensive values even when they're evil.

Hitler was also ultimately defeated by Stalin, of all people, so in hindsight, even that conflict was closer to black and gray morality at best.

I'd say the problem with making a black and white conflict feasible is that neither completely good or completely bad people work all that great in a conflict situation. It's pretty annoying how, for instance, supervillains are described as psychopathic, when their actual behavior doesn't really fit the medical criteria - particularly the utter lack of long-term planning or organization skills. Sorry, the cliched egotistical mastermind is just that - a cliche. A strawman caricature, like so many others.

Conversely, ideal heroes who regularly get into violent situations without exhibiting sociopathic traits themselves are just as unrealistic, never mind the contrivance of them never going too far, even by accident, or never needing to compromise their ideals over practical or personal concerns.

All in all, even in an initially black and white conflict, graying morality is bound to set in, sooner rather than later.

That reminds me of something I noted regarding the Technical Pacifist. Writers tend to ignore that less-than-lethal combat aren't foolproof, and one of these days a Technical Pacifist will end up killing someone on accident. Batman, for example, might accidentally punch someone with a health problem a bit too hard and give them a lethal brain hemorrhage.

To be honest, it's kind of necessary when you have a pacifist in a combat-oriented work. Even tasers and pepper sprays aren't foolproof IRL.

Considering how long the series has been around, I'm quite confident Batman has accidentally killed someone at least once.

Given how comics usually work I have no idea whether it's still canon or not, but he definitely has, yes.

Given how some of the traditionally "moral, wouldn't commit murder" heroes habitually drive in movies, without regard for road rules or safety, Fridge Horror tells us that our morally upright guardians have killed numerous people in traffic accidents just to bring a single "villain" down.

All over IMDB, they're whinging their arses off about how "Supes" broke a villain's neck deliberately and "Superman doesn't kill, goddamn it!" - without one thought for the numerous lives that would've been lost in that showdown while two superpowered beings duked it out above, around, in and through the buildings of central Metropolis.

Even the earlier smackdown in Smallville would've claimed lives of the people working in the buildings that got damaged.

Tell me about it. When the argument switched from "Superman should never kill" to "Superman should never encounter circumstances where killing might be necessary", it became pretty clear just how myopic and pretentious the traditional superhero morality is. It's one thing to use near misses or non-human villains so as retain a PG rating, but it's hardly convincing when such contrivances are used to enforce an in-universe moral stance. Not to mention stories where it is contrasted with "gritty anti-heroism"... meaning simply the same fighting style with less sugarcoated consequences.

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense to some degree for Batman to have a code against killing-if nothing else, it makes what he does less questionable. He doesn't take the law into his own hands, but rather is an aid to the law. Also, a superhero like Batman values human lives very strongly, so he doesn't want to kill.

The problem is that, when taken to an extreme, a Technical Pacifist becomes a Designated Hero who values his own moral purity over human lives. They also tend to use a slippery slope fallacy that you're either Batman or the Punisher, which isn't how it works.

Let me put it like this: if a cop were in the same situation, would they not just be justified for using lethal force, but actually punished for failing to do so? If so, then your superhero should do so as well.

edited 2nd Jan '16 11:00:32 AM by Protagonist506