Where Does Our Conscience Stand Between Black and White?

Exploring moral ambiguity

Photo by Parsoa Khorsand on Unsplash

While growing up, I thought people were either good or bad, right or wrong. It occurred to me later on that they could be both, and that life was not always black and white, but composed of greys too, many tints, hues, and shades of it. And that there was no instrument to measure how much of each shade consisted of black or white.

Grey existed in people’s behavior, choices, and opportunities. I, too, may have been influenced and imbibed a lot of those learnings. If you ask me why I say grey in opportunities, it is because what one may consider an opportunity for oneself, an observer may consider opportunism — taking advantage of a situation that may directly or indirectly harm another. Perception of an action changes depending on the lens through which it is seen.

And our actions do not affect only humans; they affect the entire ecosystem around us. It is not only our moral and ethical behavior, but also our everyday actions such as waste segregation, the extent of our consumerism, and our carbon footprint, that have a significant impact on the ecosystem. Every action leads to a reaction, some consequences known, others unknown. We call this the ripple effect, and sometimes the butterfly effect: the idea that even a small action can alter outcomes far beyond our sight. So, the greys in our decisions may travel much further, impacting lives we have never met.

Do we want to be responsible for someone’s misery, or for their happiness? The answer itself lies in our conscience, but even conscience is shaped by upbringing, culture, and experience. What it considers grey may, in a different moral framework, appear black or even white. Even if there were a universal rule book for human behavior, we might still choose to ignore it.

Perhaps that is why we need to dwell deeper. Beliefs like ‘everything is fair in love and war’ and ‘nice guys finish last’ have made many blacks appear grey to our conscience. I am not even speaking of white here. Does it still exist? I hope many of us can still say yes.

Some of you might still be confused as to what I am trying to imply here and so let me speak about the anti-hero. There is a growing admiration for him in modern noir. He is flawed, often dangerous, and still bound by a personal code of ethics; it is that code which endears him to us. His moral ambiguity makes us sympathize with him even when he does bad things, sometimes many of them. And even when those actions harm the innocent, we rationalize them because we understand his pain, his motive, his past. If he shows remorse, we forgive him more easily.

There is the traditional hero who is always in the white, unwavering in his morals, and the anti-hero, who is always dwelling in the grey, often compromising conventional ethics. But instead of the hero, we sometimes develop a soft corner for the anti-hero because many of his actions mirror our own, they resonate with us and maybe we can relate to the quiet negotiations he makes within himself.

Maybe grey has become the more honest colour of our times. If there were ever a moral compass created for modern living, it might not point firmly to black or white, but hover somewhere in between. The irony is that those shades are decided by us. Yet the process is so complex and painstaking that we often act without realizing we have just chosen another shade of grey.

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