...I'm getting the feeling we're saying the same things differently, just differently enough to not realize it. I've had a lot of long arguments like that, where someone else and I were basically trying to convince each other of the exact same thing and neither of us realized it.
I know what you mean about debating something and then realizing that you both agree in your position but had expressed it differently, I've been there.
One case where I can see that we differed in expressing our views: In #4 you say that "As long as the issues are viewed as black and white, it either allows the justification of anything to achieve them (since anything that brings about the accomplishment of these white ideals would have to be white by virtue of bringing about the ideal)..." I was including this as a type of 'shades of gray' view, because it involves weighing something that would in itself be 'black' as a 'black' thing that is 'not black enough' to outweigh a 'white' thing and therefore worth doing in pursuit of the white thing. When I spoke of a 'black and white' viewpoint, I spoke only of it in the second sense that you discussed, not being willing to do anything that involves any action that is 'black'.
Here, I'm wasn't so much trying to support one view or another, but was pointing out that many people are expressing the "You have to view things in shades of gray, not in black and white" idea, but the only thing that they are saying on the subject is "Of course, it can be very dangerous to do so, you can end up committing atrocities by justifying them in pursuit of your goal" (again, you called this a 2nd type of black and white view, where something is considered 'white' in pursuit of a 'white' goal, or the ends justify the means', while I referred to this as part of 'shades of gray' because because it allows doing something normally bad in pursuit of something 'more good'; same thing but from your perspective the person justifying would be referring to something normally'black' as 'white' because of its role in achieving a 'white' goal).
Anyways, the way many people will express being for viewing things in 'shades of gray' rather than 'black and white' but only express that 'allowing yourself to do something wrong in pursuit of something right is dangerous' is concerning to me because a lot of times readers will say that they agree with an author's thoughts (like that you have to view things in shades of gray) without stopping to evaluate whether they have an intellectual reason for agreeing or they are just being agreeable. I guess what I wanted to bring out of this discussion is
why it is worth it to view things in shades of gray if it allows justifying 'wrong' things in the pursuit of something right.
If your only thoughts on the subject was 'viewing things in shades of gray can be more dangerous than viewing things in black and white' then you would be very foolish, what you've clarified in your last post is that you are not foolish, but that you have further thoughts on why 'viewing in shades of gray' is worth the risk. For one thing, you've included that you can mitigate the risk of allowing yourself to become as bad as what you are against by constantly weighing your methods, means, and consequences and ideals (6). Along with mitigating the risk, you assert that you can achieve more 'whiteness' ultimately by allowing methods that are 'not so white' (7). Therefore you've justified that in fact there is plenty of good reason for deciding personally that it is worth it to view things in terms of 'shades of gray'.
Now so far, I have not actually taken a position, only pointed out where your ideas fit in terms of one side or the other, but for the sake of discussion I can. (If you are enjoying this conversation as much as I am then we really should move it to its own topic at this point rather than continue to be off topic here indefinitely. I don't know exactly how the moderation is implemented here, is it too much trouble for a mod to move our series of posts to their own thread while leaving our comments here that are on topic?).
So far, we have in general terms defined 3 basic approaches to decision making in deciding what methods (or means) to take to reach ends(or ideals as we've mostly put it) (Let me know if you want to clarify/reword some of my way of expressing these 3 approaches:
1. Simple Black and White: This is a stricter view of 'black and white' as I've interpreted it from the beginning. It involves not being willing to do any action that you would consider wrong in order to achieve something right. From this approach, end
never justify the means, the means must be justifiable actions in and of themselves.
2. Ends Justify the Means: I considered this a type of 'shades of gray' but you considered it a type of 'black and white'. It involves saying that if you pick an ideal to be a 'greater good' it is worth committing any action to achieve it. From my perspective this was type of 'shades of gray' viewpoint, since it involves saying that a 'lesser black' is OK in pursuit of a 'greater white', though you considered this type of 'black and white since someone using this approach could say "if a 'white' ideal is worthy enough of pursuing, then methods that might in and of themselves be considered 'lesser black' methods are now 'white' methods because the the ideal they reach." As the name implies, as long as the End is a 'greater' good by the person taking the actions, then reaching those ends
always justifies lesser means that would otherwise be unjustified.
3. Weighed Shades of Gray: This is a stricter view of 'shades of gray' as you've interpreted it from the beginning. It involves not only acknowledging that some things are 'less good' or 'more good' and 'less bad' or 'more bad', but constantly weighing those when making decisions. It allows doing things that would by themselves be 'a little black' in pursuit of a 'greater white' goal, but the constant weighing ensures that you are always coming out 'more good than bad' and never end up becoming as bad as what you are trying to avoid. In this case the ends justify the means
only if the means are kept as 'little bad' as possible in pursuit of the ends
and the means are never allowed to become as bad as the end that is trying to be avoided.
Now, provided that those 3 approaches are adequately clear, I can, for the sake of discussion, take a position to provide a counterpoint to your point. I think we both agree that position 2, Ends Justify the Means, is a poor method of decision making, in that it too easily allows abuse of justifying your actions; but I will argue that Simple Black and White (option 1) has plenty plenty of merit that justifies it as a better option than your position of Weighed Shades of Gray (3). From now on, I'll only refer to them by the names I have given them rather than their number to avoid confusion when I refer to your numbered points, feel free to suggest alternate names for these three approaches if you think another name is more appropriate to express the approach.
Taking your statement 1 further, we can assume that rather than just having ideal 'appear' black and white, a person can have sorted out their entire beliefs on what is good and right vs. what is bad and wrong and furthermore is capable of deciding how bad and how good each thing is relative to the others. Lets assume that this person has already rejected Ends Justify the Means as too risky because it is can too easily allow him to unintentionally become in his actions than what he is trying to prevent; but this person is still up in the air as to whether he should view things in terms of Simple Black and White or Weighed Shades of Gray. It is important to this person to decide which approach to take with the decisions in his life because he recognizes that he as an individual is capable of much good (and he wants to do so) and there is a lot of bad in the world to oppose and outdo.
Though it is a philosophical difference, I will say I don't except your statement #3, I would say that a 'white' ideal/goal/end is still white (and a black one still black) in and of it self; that you must not say "a white ideal reached with methods both black and white is not truly white" but just that "that white ideal was reached through white and black means." You'll notice that I said 'white and black' rather than 'gray' because I would like to expand your your #2 statement by adding a definition: 'Gray' can refer to a series of methods, some white and some black. From the Weighed Shades of Gray perspective these individual methods can be 'less or more white' or 'less or more black' so that a series of methods of varying 'shades' can have an 'overall' shade to compare to an ideal to say 'is this series of methods, with some things that are 'less bad' worthwhile to accomplish this goal?" For a White or Black perspective however 'less' and 'more' mean nothing, a method is either white or black, there is no gray; and if a series of actions to reach a goal needs to have even one 'black' method in it, then it is not worth pursuing to reach the 'white' goal.
Here is where I'll disagree with you: I disagree with the assumption in #2 that in practice white ideals can be reached only with methods that are 'gray'. There are plenty of things that can be accomplished through only doing good things, there are plenty of ideals that can be reached and even if you limit your immediate effects with small good things they can have lasting impacts causing greater good things later. I will concede that there are certainly some goals, perhaps even a majority of goals, that can only be accomplished by involving some bad actions along the way and therefore become impossible to a person following the Simple Black and White approach, but I argue that if our theoretical person decides to follow the Simple Black and White approach, even though he has to decide that this makes several goals impossible, he still has plenty of goals he can continue to approach and reach through white methods.
On the other hand, if our theoretical person follows the Weighed Shades of Gray path, he risks doing more harm than good. Even though we have assumed that he knows what he believes to be right and wrong and that he knows how they compare to each other as 'less or more right/wrong' he still may be incapable of weighing the complexities of a large situation with so many different aspects and therefore endless options that all must be weighed against each other (as you have conceded, the endless prospects become mind-blowing); and because he may not be capable of fully weighing all of his actions and their consequences against his ideals he may end up doing more harm than good.
Furthermore, there is always the possibility of failing to achieve your goals. Following Simple Black and White our theoretical person may say "I have to do these five actions in order to reach my goal; though some of them may not actually do any good on their own, none of them are bad." If, three actions into it the person fails, then their actions may or may not have a lasting good, but at least they have done no bad (no harm, no foul). If our person, on the other hand, takes the Weighed Shades of Gray approach he can say"Instead, I can pursue this other goal, it requires five actions as well, an #2 and #4 are slightly bad but necessary, and reaching my goal would be a lot more good!" But if he fails to achieve this goal along the way, he is stuck living with the consequences of the harm done through #2 with nothing good to show for it.
Therefore, even knowing right and wrong and trying ones best; human fallibility makes Weighed Shades of Gray a cause of too many problems in this world when Simple Black and White can only serve a just cause.
It's ok though, I don't think I've had a discussion that's made me think this much since my friend and I tried to solve the dichotomy paradox.
OK, so I know that at this point I'm even going off-topic of our off-topic conversation, but I think this part is actually pretty easy to handle. The dichotomy paradox is easy enough to solve by recognizing that Zeno's problem here is that he assumes two contradictory things: He assumes that a space is infinitely divisible and that an infinite number of actions is not possible. That these two assumptions allow you to reach a conclusion that is impossible is a strong suggestion that at least one of these assumptions is false. The assumption that is more obvious as a falsity from a modern perspective is that one cannot accomplish an infinite number of tasks in his sense of the word: After Zeno's time but before Calculus was developed mathematicians were able to demonstrate that an infinite series can converge to a finite limit and Calculus has shown us it much more simply and with very elegant proof thereof. Even in his time, without these proofs, the dichotomy paradox is one of his least confounding; there reaching a particular position in space fits within his definition a 'task' and he says that a given length can be infinitely divided into sub-lengths and I move from Point A to Point B along that length then there is no reason to suppose that I did not just pass through an infinite number of sub-points along the way so his maintaining that you cannot accomplish an infinite number of tasks is not only baseless but absurd.
Furthermore, his other assumption, that a given length can be infinitely divided, may in fact be false itself. It feels uncomfortable to us to view this 'digital' possibility of reality, but we certainly do not know enough about how reality (life, the universe and everything) works to definitely conclude that it does not function in this way; the more we study the incredibly small the more we see the matter and energy that makes up our universe behaving in this way: Energy is given off not just as analog waves of infinitely divisible amounts but also as specific quanta of energy; even light, which has no discernible mass spends far to much time behaving as a particle, in specific quanta that are not divisible. Quantum mechanics may ultimately lead us to the conclusion that though we think of lengths as being infinitely divisible (Sure, if I can have something that measures a meter, I can have something that measures in half a meter, or a quarter of a meter, or 1/8 of a meter and so on) it may be at some level no longer divisible, that all things that exist exist in specific quanta of dimensions and move about in space in specific quanta of distance, from a tiny position to a tiny adjacent position without being 'in between'. Heck, discovering the Planck length as it relates to other quantum aspects of matter already suggests that spacial dimensions are just as subject to quantization as other aspects of matter and energy.
Now that this so called 'paradox' is solvable by both philosophical reason, deduction and modern mathematics; as well as the other paradoxes of Zeno (many of which are really just different thought experiments that describe the same idea, and are all subject to mathematical solutions) is not to say that Zeno was flat out wrong. That is to say, many of his ideas were not only very influential to subsequent philosophers (along with his teachings from Parmenides) but are still very relevant to philosophical discussion. That is to say, though his so called paradoxes fail to support Parmenides' philosophy of unity and that all distinctions, dimensionality and motion are merely illusion; the fact that the paradoxes can be debunked does not disprove the philosophy either. When Parmenides discussed his doctrine of truth one "What is, is. What is always has been. What isn't, isn't. What isn't never will be." he not only reached a conclusion of the Law of Conservation of Energy in a philosophical context, but he brought up questions of metaphysical change that are still grappled with by philosophers today; so my saying that Zeno fails to support these ideas with his paradox is in no way meant to suggest that both he and Parmenides were anything less than great thinkers for what they have studied and brought about.
