The virtue of selfishness: a new concept of egoism by Ayn Rand; Nathaniel Branden

Author:Ayn Rand; Nathaniel Branden
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Epistemology, Modern, Conduct of life, Psychology, Philosophy, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945), General, General & Literary Fiction, Philosophy (Specific Aspects), Egoism, Selfishness, History & Surveys, Ethics, Ethics & Moral Philosophy, Personality
ISBN: 9780451163936
Publisher: Signet/New American Library
Published: 1964-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

(April 1962)

9. The Cult of Moral Grayness

by Ayn Rand

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.”

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.” (The reverse order used in that catch phrase is interesting psychologically.)

In any respect one cares to examine, that 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 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.”

If a moral code (such as altruism) is, in fact, impossible to practice, it is the code that must be condemned as “black,” not its victims evaluated as “gray.” If a moral code prescribes irreconcilable contradictions—so that by choosing the good in one respect, a man becomes evil in another—it is the 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.

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, in order 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 to obscure the contradictions and to disguise the actual meaning of the doctrine of moral grayness.

Some people believe that it is merely a restatement of such bromides as “Nobody is perfect in this world”—i.e., everybody 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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.