Moral breadth
By moral breadth, I mean the capacity to see a person not just as good or bad but as containing a lot of both.
Last month I wrote:
Thought for the day is that the capacity to see individuals as morally large as capable of being saintly in some ways and fiendish in others seems to be important for everything from mental health, to getting along with others, to grasping how people really are. Tragedy develops this capacity.
If you don’t have this capacity for moral breadth, and you see one person perform deeds of goodness and wickedness, you’ll either try to convince yourself that the goodness was illusory or that the wickedness was illusory. You won’t be able to see that both might be very real.
People without a sense of moral breadth, especially if they have a strong ‘nose’ for evil, tend to drive themselves mad, living in a haunted world full of cruel goblins and evil ghosts. It’s not hard to see why. Life is very long, and possible faults and sins are plentiful. As soon as someone commits a major wickedness- one of the many we can fall into- they become a demon to you. And what about when you inevitably commit one yourself? It’s safer for your health and happiness to recognize moral breadth than to think only people rotten all the way through do wicked things.
But the downside of seeing moral breadth is that sometimes it’s little more than ignoring bad behavior from those you like- “Yes so and so is capable of X horrific thing, but she is also capable of Y, we must not be so quick to judge”. Everything becomes ‘complex’, even when it isn’t. We fail to see the danger to ourselves and others from bad actors. The space between, on the one hand, a judgemental rejection of the species, and on the other hand, a kind of nihilism of tolerance(1), is hard to find and shifts from context to context.
Often people who do not see others in terms of moral breadth, and who are good at spotting wicked deeds, are deeply perceptive- their sharp recognition of the flaws of others is not wrong. This perceptiveness may cause them endless pain and lock them out of much of life, but their words are often true and there is much to learn from their bitter insights.
So how to balance seeing people as morally big, yet knowing when to draw the (often contextually specific) line? Part of the trick, I think, is to genuinely see people as morally broad, as containing powerful good and bad, and not just achieve the simulacra of moral breadth where you know about the bad bits, but push them out of sight in the name of muddling along. Minimizing neither the explosive good nor evil that can coexist within one person is tricky- it goes against the habits of cognitive dissonance reduction- but I hope it is possible.
(1): Where I refer to a ‘nihilism of tolerance’ I do not want to give the impression that there is something nihilistic about being kind to wicked people, on the contrary, in a better world, even the worst people would have friends. I merely think it’s important to be clear-eyed about the fact that some deliberate deeds are abominable, are not just part of the ‘rich tapestry of human experience’, but are abhorrent. There’s a kind of ‘we’re all sinners down here’ approach that treats, say, premeditated murder, as just another regrettable quirk. We can recognize the moral complexity of murderers, and offer them support and companionship while recognizing something has gone very morally wrong.