“Matt, you are suffering from a disease of youth–you expect moral problems to have nice, neat, black-and-white answers.” -Robert A. Heinlein, Space Cadet
This quote expects there to be no black and white answers to moral problems. Instead, it implies that what we should expect from moral problems is grey answers. This is a widely held belief among people. However, the expectation is a flawed one. A grey answer is an answer that is a combination of black and white. So it is established that in order to have a grey answer one must have black and white answers. This begs the question “why choose the lesser good grey answer over the fully good white answer?” The most likely culprit is assuming that the white answer is an unattainable ideal not for this world, so we’re left with choosing between a set of grey answers in the real world. Yet, to say that there is no white answer in this world is to say there’s no white answer at all, creating a world where nothing is good, which defeats the purpose of morality (to achieve the good). One cannot have grey without white and black, and a white answer isn’t impossible.
A morally grey answer is an answer that assumes the existence of good and evil. To get to grey, one must have an evaluation of what is good and what is evil, then make an evaluation of what the middle would be. This means a person presumes there’s a higher morality, the good, that one ought to achieve, but, for some reason, this person chooses to do the lesser and compromise the good.
The most likely reason people presume that a grey answer is a valid answer is because they presume the good is an unattainable ideal, leaving people with only “grey” answers. This is putting morality into an otherworldly status. The person is imagining something that is impossible that they think would be a better answer to the moral problem, yet settling for a thing that can actually occur in the real world. If something is impossible for you to do, it cannot be a valid moral proposition, since you’re supposed to be able to actually carry out moral pronouncements, since morality is a guide to action. Things you can imagine to be aren’t valid moral pronouncements. If a morality isn’t connected to the real world, you have no reason to believe it’s moral. It must be an artificial construct. To create a morality and say that it is unattainable is a contradiction, the point of morality is to achieve the good.
Heinlein is presenting a popular sentiment about morality. Yet, what is hidden is his own theory of good that he betrays. Either his theory of good is wrong or his “grey” moral actions are.