Shades of grey....

It’s not that I don’t see the shades of grey, it’s that in many cases I see them up close, and I can see the little black and white dots that make up the grey.  And they are black and white.  I think it’s just that so many other people focus so much on the “big picture” that they lose sight of the details (wherein the devil lies).


Many people cannot see the trees for the forest.


To expound upon this, I also assert that a good does NOT “cancel out” an evil.  Life is not arithmetic. You cannot simply take the sum total of all the good and all the evil and that is what you either owe or are due.  When you accumulate good karma or bad karma, you must satisfy both before your balance is clean.  If I save a person from dying, that does not mean that I am now allowed to kill someone else.  Yet somehow people think that it’s ok to do a little harm here or there so long as the greater good is served.  Maybe, but only if it’s done because to not do it would cause a greater amount of harm, and even then, I believe that you must accept responsibility for the harm you have done.


So why all the fuss about details?  Well, the problem with doing something ill "for the greater good" is  that one can never foresee all the possible consequences of one's actions.  We must therefore accept the unintended consequences of our actions as a part of the price for pretending that there are shades of grey.