Sometimes There Is More Than Good And Evil
By: Thomas Blum
Tags: Ethics, Life Lessons, Series, Dilemma

When our moral compass abandons us

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

From early on, we learn that there are two categories into which we can classify our deeds and thoughts: good and evil. Our parents praise us for doing the right thing and punish us — in different ways — for doing wrong. The concept of this moral dichotomy is so deeply rooted, that we cannot imagine something that defies this basic scheme.

The Christian religion has done a lot to implement this system further. Everything and everyone is either on the side of God or on that of his adversary: the devil. After our death, we all go either to heaven or hell.

Our physical world is structured around this opposition: up or down, left or right, high or low, hot or cold, bright or dark — the list is nearly endless.

So one of the things that can genuinely, profoundly disturb us is when something happens that defies this principle. I don’t mean the instances where we try to convince ourselves that something we did or said lies in a “grey” area, like when we got a speeding ticket, and we tell ourselves: “The speed limit at this place is ridiculous, so basically I didn’t do something wrong.” In this case, we do know that we did something wrong because it was against the law.

Recently, I was watching “Absentia” on Amazon. The main plot of this series took me not only by surprise but left me thoroughly disturbed. The moral dilemma it put the main characters in was beyond my imagination.

Spoiler alert: if you don’t want to know what’s happening in the series, don’t read any further.

The story goes like this: a female FBI agent was abducted eight years ago and was declared dead after no traces of her could be found. At the time of her disappearance, she was married to another agent and together they had a small son. After some mourning, the widower married again. The stepmother is very tight with the boy. For him, she is his mother. Together, they are a caring and close-knit family with some dark memories.

Then one day the missing agent resurfaces. She has only fragmentary memories of the time she was held captive. The series is then dealing with her struggle to find out what happened. There are betrayal and corruption and a lot of surprising twists.

But that was not the stuff that disturbed me. I was (and am still) thinking about how unbelievably difficult such a situation must be for the four of them.

The husband didn’t abandon his former wife but had every reason to believe her dead. As a caring father, he wanted to go on in life and create a new family for his son. He is in love with his second wife, as much as he was with the first one. Does he have to decide between them? Wouldn’t that be terribly unfair to the woman he decides against?

On the other hand, the first wife was not responsible for the cruel fate she had to endure. It was not her fault that she became the victim of a major crime.

The second wife is also not guilty of anything: at the time she fell in love with her husband, he was a widower.

And last but not least, the son is brought into a situation where he has to decide between his two mothers. At least this situation is something a lot of patchwork families are acquainted with. But in most instances, the reason for the existence of multiple parents is a divorce that was based on a more or less conscious decision of adults. Here, not one of the actors did anything wrong or is responsible for the outcome.

Yet they all have to deal with this situation that puts them — and us — at a moral dilemma. There is no right or wrong decision, no good or evil way to handle this. However they decide, someone will suffer.

I am really grateful that I haven’t been put in this kind of situation yet. And I would like to hear what you are thinking: is there a solution that doesn’t hurt anyone?