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Does anyone else feel Brandon's missing out?


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I feel Brandon is almost shooting himself in the foot not using particular writing aspects, in particular:

  • Soft Magic(I know it pops up in some instances, but I would like a little more)
  • Evil victories, I honestly feel this needs to come up at some point in fantasy because everyone is starting to fall into the mindset that the hero's always win.

There are probably more, what would you like to see Brandon use in his writing?

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1 hour ago, Booknerd said:

I feel Brandon is almost shooting himself in the foot not using particular writing aspects, in particular:

  • Soft Magic(I know it pops up in some instances, but I would like a little more)

No. That would not be Brandon Sanderson anymore.

1 hour ago, Booknerd said:
  • Evil victories, I honestly feel this needs to come up at some point in fantasy because everyone is starting to fall into the mindset that the hero's always win.

Well, Brandon tries to get away from good vs. evil. A story ending in the defeat of the protagonist would be cool, though.

And I must say, Vasher is not a good guy. Let's face it, he is a murderer advocating censorship of scientific research. The Blackthorn is a tyrannical, racist aristocrat.

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Well that is technically the premise of the Final Empire :P Joking aside, we probably will get "less good side" victories but complete evil victories doesn't seem very Brandonesque

Soft magic, he seems to be dipping his toes into this with Surgebinding's more esoteric effects... who knows? We might get this yet

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When I want to see evil win I read a author like Joe Abercrombie. When I want to read about soft magic I read Riftwar. I love many authors and when I’m in the mood for a particular style I read them. I enjoy what Brandon brings to the table. 
 

Every author has something to nitpick about though. To answer the original post: for me I would like to see him tighten up the Stormlight Archives. I really started to notice this in Oathbringer but it’s starting to feel a bit bloated.

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I think the Old Magic is... maybe not really soft magic but a bit of a wild card regarding the rules.. they are not as obvious as with many of his other magic systems and I kind of enjoy this. It is just so different ^^

And letting evil win.. well for me it feels like Sanderson is taking a step back from the traditional good vs evil by making me think about what really makes someone good or evil? What does it mean to be evil? Are the Singers evil because they want to punish those they've suffered under? Was Ruin really evil? Did he even have a choice? 

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6 hours ago, Booknerd said:

I feel Brandon is almost shooting himself in the foot not using particular writing aspects, in particular:

  • Soft Magic(I know it pops up in some instances, but I would like a little more)

 

no thanks. i like the plot to make sense and be consistent. hard magic is one of the things i appreciate more about brandon.

Quote

Evil victories, I honestly feel this needs to come up at some point in fantasy because everyone is starting to fall into the mindset that the hero's always win.

No, thanks. If i want to get depressed, there's plenty of stuff in real life to do it.

Quote

There are probably more, what would you like to see Brandon use in his writing?

I want brandon to keep writing the way he has been writing so far. If I wanted brandon to write differently, i would not be a fan of his, but i would instead look for some other author.

5 minutes ago, Sishal said:

 

And letting evil win.. well for me it feels like Sanderson is taking a step back from the traditional good vs evil by making me think about what really makes someone good or evil? What does it mean to be evil?[to intentionally make the world a worse place. of course the exact boundaries are blurred, but i found this guideline to be very useful] Are the Singers evil because they want to punish those they've suffered under? [YES, they are needlessly spreading misery. those who are just trying to stay free are not] Was Ruin really evil? [YES] Did he even have a choice? [NO, but that's irrelevant]

brandon generally uses the "shades of grey" kind of morality, and it is the one i favor.

black and white feels too much a fake. reality is not black and white.

everyone is morally equivalent is often realistic, but then i won't have anyone to root for. no, just because someone is protagonist and has a viewpoint i won't root for him, nor will i accept his self-centric view. and i want to root for someone. see the part about me not wanting to get depressed

so, what works best for me is a clearly good side, with some flaws, and a clearly bad side, with some motivations that actually make sense.

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13 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

 

brandon generally uses the "shades of grey" kind of morality, and it is the one i favor.

black and white feels too much a fake. reality is not black and white.

everyone is morally equivalent is often realistic, but then i won't have anyone to root for. no, just because someone is protagonist and has a viewpoint i won't root for him, nor will i accept his self-centric view. and i want to root for someone. see the part about me not wanting to get depressed

so, what works best for me is a clearly good side, with some flaws, and a clearly bad side, with some motivations that actually make sense.

The world is black and white, Hitler was Evil no one would say otherwise(unless you are really messed up,) A person is always good or evil some might be less evil, or good, and some might be in the prosses of changing, making a mistake doesn't make you evil, nor does unintentionally helping someone make you good, you can't do the wrong thing for the right reason, that is not the action of a good person. Feel free to debate the point, but that is my stance.

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4 hours ago, Ammanas said:

every author has something to nitpick about though. To answer the original post: for me I would like to see him tighten up the Stormlight Archives. I really started to notice this in Oathbringer but it’s starting to feel a bit bloated.

I personally would like the books to be longer I get through them in about a week.

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On 1/18/2020 at 11:26 AM, Booknerd said:

The world is black and white, Hitler was Evil no one would say otherwise(unless you are really messed up,) A person is always good or evil some might be less evil, or good, and some might be in the prosses of changing, making a mistake doesn't make you evil, nor does unintentionally helping someone make you good, you can't do the wrong thing for the right reason, that is not the action of a good person. Feel free to debate the point, but that is my stance.

Good and Evil do not necessarily show what kind of morals the person has. Not saying Hitler had acceptable morals, but as is pointed out, no one is entirely evil or perfectly good. Morality is hard to pin down based on actions alone. When we get the character's thoughts, then we can decide their motives and morals easier. 

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13 hours ago, GoWibble said:

Good and Evil do not necessarily show what kind of morals the person has. Not saying Hitler had acceptable morals, but as is pointed out, no one is entirely evil or perfectly good. Morality is hard to pin down based on actions alone. When we get the character's thoughts, then we can decide their motives and morals easier. 

Not being perfectly good doesn't mean you can't be a good person, if you try to help people you are a good person, even if you do mess up and on occasion hurt someone. What I'm saying is that the Idea that good and evil are 100%, and everything less is a gray middle zone is wrong, good and bad are like two bordering countries you can't be in this neutral ground you are either in one or the other. The blurring is an act of evil trying to excuse itself, the ends don't justify the means.

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5 hours ago, Booknerd said:

Not being perfectly good doesn't mean you can't be a good person, if you try to help people you are a good person, even if you do mess up and on occasion hurt someone. What I'm saying is that the Idea that good and evil are 100%, and everything less is a gray middle zone is wrong, good and bad are like two bordering countries you can't be in this neutral ground you are either in one or the other. The blurring is an act of evil trying to excuse itself, the ends don't justify the means.

But the thing is that people can move from country to country based on decisions. They don't live in Evil forever and don't live in Good permanently. This can give a sense of "shades of grey" as King of Nowhere pointed out. Brandon trys to keep out of making a character 'locked' in either country. Additionally, I think that there might be multiple countries in between that might say, for example, that the ends do justify the means. 

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2 hours ago, GoWibble said:

But the thing is that people can move from country to country based on decisions. They don't live in Evil forever and don't live in Good permanently. This can give a sense of "shades of grey" 

But they inhabit only one at a time, that's my point, you can change but that doesn't change the fact that morality is a binary system. A person can't be both good and evil.

 

2 hours ago, GoWibble said:

Additionally, I think that there might be multiple countries in between that might say, for example, that the ends do justify the means. 

That as I have already stated is an act of evil, blurring the line of morality allows evil to recover itself and pretend it is good. Stalin wanted Utopia a good end, but the means was murdering 20,000,000. Now tell me does any end justify that?

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1 hour ago, Booknerd said:

But they inhabit only one at a time, that's my point, you can change but that doesn't change the fact that morality is a binary system. A person can't be both good and evil.

 

That as I have already stated is an act of evil, blurring the line of morality allows evil to recover itself and pretend it is good. Stalin wanted Utopia a good end, but the means was murdering 20,000,000. Now tell me does any end justify that?

i didn't want to actually follow up that discussion, but now i have to.

because if your idea of grey is "stalin was aiming for utopia", well, of course that's stupid (and by the way, he probably wasn't, he just wanted power).

you want an example of someone fairly gray, take kelsier before he died. he killed people he didn't have to and his motives weren't the most sterling. then again, his motives weren't also really bad, he mostly fought bad people, and he made a better world.

take vin at the beginning. she was as decent as she could while being a thief, but still she had no higher goal than "do what it takes to survive". later she becomes fully good, but she certainly wasn't back then. i wouldn't call her evil either though, especially considering the kind of world she has to survive in

take egwene from the wheel of time. an arrogant brat and a bully who always wanted to be in power. an hypocrite who kept telling rand how is head had swelled big for not obeying moiraine all the time, right when she was disdaining aes sedai with 10 times her age and experience. a hero who willingly (she could have quit/run away many times) went to fight an evil much powerful than herself, helped those she could whenever she could, and committed self-sacrificed in the last battle.

but mostly, shades of grey means that even though you can tag most people as good or evil, most good people aren't perfectly good and most evil people aren't perfectly evil. breeze is a good person, but he's still a lazy edonist who expect others to cater to him. wayne is a good person, but besides being a kleptomaniac, he's still... wayne. he once broke into a home because he needed a lodging. while he did no damage and left some food, i doubt you'd be happy to discover that someone has been using your home while you were away. another time he tricked a boatman into bringing him where he wanted without charge, and other minor acts that are very annoying on the receiving end.

and on the other side you have rashek. he's certainly evil, but he was trying to fight ruin. when he ascended, he became cosmere-aware. he could have escaped scadrial, and he would have kept his power intact. instead he kept struggling with a voice in his head slowly eroding his sanity. or taravangian, who - despite your lamentations that ends don't justify the means - is certainly not stalin.

and speaking of end not justifying the means, this sentence, taken at the extreme it literally means, is absurd.

going by that concept, waging war on the nazis was wrong, because it hurt people. much better to let them take over the world.

going by that concept, any kind of criminal punishment is wrong. a verdict is never 100% certain, and you are guaranteed that any justice system, even the most fair and sensible, will end up condemning an innocent every once in a while. so, if the end does not justify the mean, then you should never condemn anyone, ever. of course this would result in social collapse, but condemning innocents is not justified by keeping order.

you should also not kill animals, they certainly did nothing wrong to deserve it. this includes swatting mosquitoes. or using any kind of pest control on crops. we should probably avoid walking around, the goal of going on with our lives does not justify the mean of accidentally swatting dozens of innocent bugs

for that matter, how do you decide what is an end and what is an evil mean to reach it? in the aforementioned justice example, is accidentally condemning some innocents an evil mean to the end of keeping social order? or is allowing for social disruption an evil mean to the end of avoiding the slightest bit of culpability? the way you phrase it changes everything.

putting taxes that hurt the working people to finance important public projects, inflicting punishments to criminals to keep crime in check, compromising your values in foreign politics to avoid a war - over a disagreement stemming from the other nation having different values than yours, in which they believe no less strongly -, forcing people to work to earn a living because you need someone to carry out some work, those are cases that can be phrased as "means to an end".

but i do not think you mean the sentence taken to that extreme. I assume you take a more reasonable interpretation. which means that ultimately you agree with me in having to choose between imperfect alternatives. You simply have a skewed concept of what "shades of grey" entails.

As for helping evil, sure, there is evil who attempts to hide in the blurred line.

There is much more evil that hides underneath moral absolutism. You mentioned stalin and hitler, but they did not present their crimes as "means to a good end". No, they presented their crimes as justified ways to pursue and punish enemies of the state. they used moral absolutes to claim that those people were "evil", and acted accordingly. same goes for the crusades, the inquisition, or modern day islamic terrorists. in their distorted ideologies they do not claim that the world is grey and they are making sacrifices for a just cause. no, they claim, as you do, that the world is black and white, and since they clearly are white, anything different from them is black and ought to be righteously exterminated.

 never take moral relativism for defending evil. while it has brought some excess itself, it was born specifically as a reaction to the evils of moral absolutism.

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4 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

i didn't want to actually follow up that discussion, but now i have to.

because if your idea of grey is "stalin was aiming for utopia", well, of course that's stupid (and by the way, he probably wasn't, he just wanted power).

you want an example of someone fairly gray, take kelsier before he died. he killed people he didn't have to and his motives weren't the most sterling. then again, his motives weren't also really bad, he mostly fought bad people, and he made a better world.

take vin at the beginning. she was as decent as she could while being a thief, but still she had no higher goal than "do what it takes to survive". later she becomes fully good, but she certainly wasn't back then. i wouldn't call her evil either though, especially considering the kind of world she has to survive in

take egwene from the wheel of time. an arrogant brat and a bully who always wanted to be in power. an hypocrite who kept telling rand how is head had swelled big for not obeying moiraine all the time, right when she was disdaining aes sedai with 10 times her age and experience. a hero who willingly (she could have quit/run away many times) went to fight an evil much powerful than herself, helped those she could whenever she could, and committed self-sacrificed in the last battle.

but mostly, shades of grey means that even though you can tag most people as good or evil, most good people aren't perfectly good and most evil people aren't perfectly evil. breeze is a good person, but he's still a lazy edonist who expect others to cater to him. wayne is a good person, but besides being a kleptomaniac, he's still... wayne. he once broke into a home because he needed a lodging. while he did no damage and left some food, i doubt you'd be happy to discover that someone has been using your home while you were away. another time he tricked a boatman into bringing him where he wanted without charge, and other minor acts that are very annoying on the receiving end.

and on the other side you have rashek. he's certainly evil, but he was trying to fight ruin. when he ascended, he became cosmere-aware. he could have escaped scadrial, and he would have kept his power intact. instead he kept struggling with a voice in his head slowly eroding his sanity. or taravangian, who - despite your lamentations that ends don't justify the means - is certainly not stalin.

and speaking of end not justifying the means, this sentence, taken at the extreme it literally means, is absurd.

going by that concept, waging war on the nazis was wrong, because it hurt people. much better to let them take over the world.

going by that concept, any kind of criminal punishment is wrong. a verdict is never 100% certain, and you are guaranteed that any justice system, even the most fair and sensible, will end up condemning an innocent every once in a while. so, if the end does not justify the mean, then you should never condemn anyone, ever. of course this would result in social collapse, but condemning innocents is not justified by keeping order.

you should also not kill animals, they certainly did nothing wrong to deserve it. this includes swatting mosquitoes. or using any kind of pest control on crops. we should probably avoid walking around, the goal of going on with our lives does not justify the mean of accidentally swatting dozens of innocent bugs

for that matter, how do you decide what is an end and what is an evil mean to reach it? in the aforementioned justice example, is accidentally condemning some innocents an evil mean to the end of keeping social order? or is allowing for social disruption an evil mean to the end of avoiding the slightest bit of culpability? the way you phrase it changes everything.

putting taxes that hurt the working people to finance important public projects, inflicting punishments to criminals to keep crime in check, compromising your values in foreign politics to avoid a war - over a disagreement stemming from the other nation having different values than yours, in which they believe no less strongly -, forcing people to work to earn a living because you need someone to carry out some work, those are cases that can be phrased as "means to an end".

but i do not think you mean the sentence taken to that extreme. I assume you take a more reasonable interpretation. which means that ultimately you agree with me in having to choose between imperfect alternatives. You simply have a skewed concept of what "shades of grey" entails.

As for helping evil, sure, there is evil who attempts to hide in the blurred line.

There is much more evil that hides underneath moral absolutism. You mentioned stalin and hitler, but they did not present their crimes as "means to a good end". No, they presented their crimes as justified ways to pursue and punish enemies of the state. they used moral absolutes to claim that those people were "evil", and acted accordingly. same goes for the crusades, the inquisition, or modern day islamic terrorists. in their distorted ideologies they do not claim that the world is grey and they are making sacrifices for a just cause. no, they claim, as you do, that the world is black and white, and since they clearly are white, anything different from them is black and ought to be righteously exterminated.

 never take moral relativism for defending evil. while it has brought some excess itself, it was born specifically as a reaction to the evils of moral absolutism.

*claps*

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5 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

i didn't want to actually follow up that discussion, but now i have to.

because if your idea of grey is "stalin was aiming for utopia", well, of course that's stupid (and by the way, he probably wasn't, he just wanted power).

you want an example of someone fairly gray, take kelsier before he died. he killed people he didn't have to and his motives weren't the most sterling. then again, his motives weren't also really bad, he mostly fought bad people, and he made a better world.

take vin at the beginning. she was as decent as she could while being a thief, but still she had no higher goal than "do what it takes to survive". later she becomes fully good, but she certainly wasn't back then. i wouldn't call her evil either though, especially considering the kind of world she has to survive in

take egwene from the wheel of time. an arrogant brat and a bully who always wanted to be in power. an hypocrite who kept telling rand how is head had swelled big for not obeying moiraine all the time, right when she was disdaining aes sedai with 10 times her age and experience. a hero who willingly (she could have quit/run away many times) went to fight an evil much powerful than herself, helped those she could whenever she could, and committed self-sacrificed in the last battle.

but mostly, shades of grey means that even though you can tag most people as good or evil, most good people aren't perfectly good and most evil people aren't perfectly evil. breeze is a good person, but he's still a lazy edonist who expect others to cater to him. wayne is a good person, but besides being a kleptomaniac, he's still... wayne. he once broke into a home because he needed a lodging. while he did no damage and left some food, i doubt you'd be happy to discover that someone has been using your home while you were away. another time he tricked a boatman into bringing him where he wanted without charge, and other minor acts that are very annoying on the receiving end.

and on the other side you have rashek. he's certainly evil, but he was trying to fight ruin. when he ascended, he became cosmere-aware. he could have escaped scadrial, and he would have kept his power intact. instead he kept struggling with a voice in his head slowly eroding his sanity. or taravangian, who - despite your lamentations that ends don't justify the means - is certainly not stalin.

and speaking of end not justifying the means, this sentence, taken at the extreme it literally means, is absurd.

going by that concept, waging war on the nazis was wrong, because it hurt people. much better to let them take over the world.

going by that concept, any kind of criminal punishment is wrong. a verdict is never 100% certain, and you are guaranteed that any justice system, even the most fair and sensible, will end up condemning an innocent every once in a while. so, if the end does not justify the mean, then you should never condemn anyone, ever. of course this would result in social collapse, but condemning innocents is not justified by keeping order.

you should also not kill animals, they certainly did nothing wrong to deserve it. this includes swatting mosquitoes. or using any kind of pest control on crops. we should probably avoid walking around, the goal of going on with our lives does not justify the mean of accidentally swatting dozens of innocent bugs

for that matter, how do you decide what is an end and what is an evil mean to reach it? in the aforementioned justice example, is accidentally condemning some innocents an evil mean to the end of keeping social order? or is allowing for social disruption an evil mean to the end of avoiding the slightest bit of culpability? the way you phrase it changes everything.

putting taxes that hurt the working people to finance important public projects, inflicting punishments to criminals to keep crime in check, compromising your values in foreign politics to avoid a war - over a disagreement stemming from the other nation having different values than yours, in which they believe no less strongly -, forcing people to work to earn a living because you need someone to carry out some work, those are cases that can be phrased as "means to an end".

but i do not think you mean the sentence taken to that extreme. I assume you take a more reasonable interpretation. which means that ultimately you agree with me in having to choose between imperfect alternatives. You simply have a skewed concept of what "shades of grey" entails.

As for helping evil, sure, there is evil who attempts to hide in the blurred line.

There is much more evil that hides underneath moral absolutism. You mentioned stalin and hitler, but they did not present their crimes as "means to a good end". No, they presented their crimes as justified ways to pursue and punish enemies of the state. they used moral absolutes to claim that those people were "evil", and acted accordingly. same goes for the crusades, the inquisition, or modern day islamic terrorists. in their distorted ideologies they do not claim that the world is grey and they are making sacrifices for a just cause. no, they claim, as you do, that the world is black and white, and since they clearly are white, anything different from them is black and ought to be righteously exterminated.

 never take moral relativism for defending evil. while it has brought some excess itself, it was born specifically as a reaction to the evils of moral absolutism.

To an extent your right my earlier Ends don't justify the means is however misrepresented in your post but I will move past that, you still persist with "gray" morality but have yet to show me a character that doesn't fall into one or the other you mentioned Kelisier killing people he didn't need to but forget that he was raised in a society where that was accepted, it wasn't right on any way but he has been tainted by years of corrupt, and outright evil living, no matter how good you are to start a human can't help but reflect if only slightly the attitudes that surround them. My point is that you can't find a character who isn't acrosed the boundary of good and evil no one is undefinable.

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57 minutes ago, Booknerd said:

To an extent your right my earlier Ends don't justify the means is however misrepresented in your post but I will move past that,

well, i did specify i was misrepresenting it by taking that sentence literally. because it's a sentence that many people are fond of using, but its literal meaning is not the one most people use. i guess i have a pet peeve against it because, in its literal form (the one that leads to insanity), it has inspired a few laws that make my life difficult. so, whenever the topic comes up, i always remind people "be careful, that sentence doesn't mean what you think, and it must be taken with a grain of salt"

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  My point is that you can't find a character who isn't acrosed the boundary of good and evil no one is undefinable.

well, for a grey character, different people would put them in different categories. i remember there was a thread once "is kelsier evil?", with people arguing on both sides.

but yes, i agree that everyone can be categorized on one side or the other. it's just that evil does not immediately equate to hitler, and good does not mean saint, and a lot of people sit close enough to the border that it doesn't really make much of a difference where you decide to draw the line.

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1 hour ago, king of nowhere said:

well, for a grey character, different people would put them in different categories. i remember there was a thread once "is kelsier evil?", with people arguing on both sides.

but yes, i agree that everyone can be categorized on one side or the other. it's just that evil does not immediately equate to hitler, and good does not mean saint, and a lot of people sit close enough to the border that it doesn't really make much of a difference where you decide to draw the line.

Exactly what I was thinking reading this thread. Everyone can be divided into either good or evil, but this absolutism only persists when there is only one perspective. The moment additional perspectives on morality are introduced, you start getting more and more definitions on where that boundary lies. Yes, that boundary will be concentrated in one area, and will likely follow a normal distribution. That doesn’t negate the fact that many people or characters will be defined as good by some and evil by others. And as you already mentioned, most people lie in the middle of this blurry region, which is why “gray” characters are a thing.

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16 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

i didn't want to actually follow up that discussion, but now i have to.

because if your idea of grey is "stalin was aiming for utopia", well, of course that's stupid (and by the way, he probably wasn't, he just wanted power).

you want an example of someone fairly gray, take kelsier before he died. he killed people he didn't have to and his motives weren't the most sterling. then again, his motives weren't also really bad, he mostly fought bad people, and he made a better world.

take vin at the beginning. she was as decent as she could while being a thief, but still she had no higher goal than "do what it takes to survive". later she becomes fully good, but she certainly wasn't back then. i wouldn't call her evil either though, especially considering the kind of world she has to survive in

take egwene from the wheel of time. an arrogant brat and a bully who always wanted to be in power. an hypocrite who kept telling rand how is head had swelled big for not obeying moiraine all the time, right when she was disdaining aes sedai with 10 times her age and experience. a hero who willingly (she could have quit/run away many times) went to fight an evil much powerful than herself, helped those she could whenever she could, and committed self-sacrificed in the last battle.

but mostly, shades of grey means that even though you can tag most people as good or evil, most good people aren't perfectly good and most evil people aren't perfectly evil. breeze is a good person, but he's still a lazy edonist who expect others to cater to him. wayne is a good person, but besides being a kleptomaniac, he's still... wayne. he once broke into a home because he needed a lodging. while he did no damage and left some food, i doubt you'd be happy to discover that someone has been using your home while you were away. another time he tricked a boatman into bringing him where he wanted without charge, and other minor acts that are very annoying on the receiving end.

and on the other side you have rashek. he's certainly evil, but he was trying to fight ruin. when he ascended, he became cosmere-aware. he could have escaped scadrial, and he would have kept his power intact. instead he kept struggling with a voice in his head slowly eroding his sanity. or taravangian, who - despite your lamentations that ends don't justify the means - is certainly not stalin.

and speaking of end not justifying the means, this sentence, taken at the extreme it literally means, is absurd.

going by that concept, waging war on the nazis was wrong, because it hurt people. much better to let them take over the world.

going by that concept, any kind of criminal punishment is wrong. a verdict is never 100% certain, and you are guaranteed that any justice system, even the most fair and sensible, will end up condemning an innocent every once in a while. so, if the end does not justify the mean, then you should never condemn anyone, ever. of course this would result in social collapse, but condemning innocents is not justified by keeping order.

you should also not kill animals, they certainly did nothing wrong to deserve it. this includes swatting mosquitoes. or using any kind of pest control on crops. we should probably avoid walking around, the goal of going on with our lives does not justify the mean of accidentally swatting dozens of innocent bugs

for that matter, how do you decide what is an end and what is an evil mean to reach it? in the aforementioned justice example, is accidentally condemning some innocents an evil mean to the end of keeping social order? or is allowing for social disruption an evil mean to the end of avoiding the slightest bit of culpability? the way you phrase it changes everything.

putting taxes that hurt the working people to finance important public projects, inflicting punishments to criminals to keep crime in check, compromising your values in foreign politics to avoid a war - over a disagreement stemming from the other nation having different values than yours, in which they believe no less strongly -, forcing people to work to earn a living because you need someone to carry out some work, those are cases that can be phrased as "means to an end".

but i do not think you mean the sentence taken to that extreme. I assume you take a more reasonable interpretation. which means that ultimately you agree with me in having to choose between imperfect alternatives. You simply have a skewed concept of what "shades of grey" entails.

As for helping evil, sure, there is evil who attempts to hide in the blurred line.

There is much more evil that hides underneath moral absolutism. You mentioned stalin and hitler, but they did not present their crimes as "means to a good end". No, they presented their crimes as justified ways to pursue and punish enemies of the state. they used moral absolutes to claim that those people were "evil", and acted accordingly. same goes for the crusades, the inquisition, or modern day islamic terrorists. in their distorted ideologies they do not claim that the world is grey and they are making sacrifices for a just cause. no, they claim, as you do, that the world is black and white, and since they clearly are white, anything different from them is black and ought to be righteously exterminated.

 never take moral relativism for defending evil. while it has brought some excess itself, it was born specifically as a reaction to the evils of moral absolutism.

Thanks. You did it better than me. 

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