Ambiguous Alternatives

In many fictional stories, morality is all black and white. The heroes are the good guys, they only do good things, and everything they do is totally and unambiguously good, while the villains are the bad guys who only do bad things and everything they do is absolutely bad. In better stories, and in real life, the question of morality is far more nuanced. It is said that there is a little good in the worst of us and a little bad in the best of us. To quote Bishop Fulton Sheen (who may or may not have been quoting someone else), "The good are not always good in all things, and the wicked are not always wicked in all things." So, people are neither all good nor all bad.

Similarly, our choices are not usually between pure good and pure evil. Sometimes, we are forced to choose between something good and something better or between something bad and something worse, and it's mostly our own moral evaluation that tells us which choice is better or worse. The choices we make are morally complex, leading to a great degree of moral ambiguity when it comes to the question of how good or bad individual people are. People are neither all good nor all bad because their choices are neither all good nor all bad, and even if the choices were morally unambiguous, people don't always choose good and they don't always choose evil.

What this means for me is that I'll always have morally-interesting questions to ask. What this means for us is that we always have both some redeeming qualities and some room for improvement. And what this means for others is that we shouldn't be too quick to judge them. Nobody is perfect, and nobody is perfectly wicked either, and neither are our options in the big decisions of life. There's both good and bad in everyone we meet and in nearly everything we do, which is partly why I'm so grateful that God's the one judging our souls, not me. These situations are too complex for me to pass any clear-cut moral judgments on anyone. There is such a thing as pure good and pure evil, but there's enough space in between to leave nearly everything at least a little bit ambiguous.