Trolleys and Tribunals of Moral Dilemmas

As I wade through my sixties, most of the things in life seem non-binary, which is in stark contrast to my youthful days wherein my worldview was mostly seeing the world in sets of binaries.

- Smt. Sujatha Rao

The “grey” matters

Wasn’t the world meant to be that way with “Yin” and “Yang”, “Male” and “Female” etc., I would ask myself.

With a majority of application forms having introduced the “Other” column, in addition to the usual “Male” and “Female” columns, even the human gender, once considered to be an absolute binary item, is now an almost universally acknowledged thing as not being so.

I often wonder whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, only to be reminded that “good” as well as “bad” are relative and are often contextual, drawing my attention to the following words of Steve Pinker:

“Somebody who has a moral vision - who believes this is good and this is bad – is a problematic person. The world suffers from way too much morality.”

At the same time, I must admit that not being able to boil down things to a binary mode often irks me and makes me quite uncomfortable. This is because the urge to have “answers” to everything in life perhaps got drilled into me from the kind of conditional and judgment-filled upbringing most people from my generation had. It always felt good to put things in to neat little boxes marked either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ etc.