Moral High Ground

Susan Jacoby has an interesting post about politics and morality over at the Washington Post.

"Shouldn’t politicians stop talking about which party holds itself to some abstract “higher standard” and start talking about common sense, compassion, and fairness in political decisions inevitably circumscribed by inevitable human error?"

I agree with her that painting issues in a black and white manner cannot lead to good outcomes. Neither side of a conflict will be able to come together if they each view it through a lens of good and evil. Once you identify your opponent as evil, the only option then becomes totally destroying them. How can you settle for less when the stakes become that high? Unfortunately, we do not leave in a world of blacks and whites, but a spectrum of grays. That doesn't mean I believe in a wishy-washy moral relativism where I don't judge anyone's actions. It does mean that I believe the world is too complex to put everything into two neat, sharply divided categories such as black and white, good and evil.