I wrote recently about why we’re nice to people — a question my toddler asked that I couldn’t cleanly answer. That post ended with a provisional conclusion: we’re nice because of who it makes us, not because of what it gets us.
But here’s the problem with that answer. It still sounds clean. And the moment I started living inside it — actually making decisions with competing obligations pulling in different directions — the cleanness evaporated.
Here’s what I mean. Imagine you’re leaving a job. Not on your terms — you were pushed. You still have a few weeks. There’s unfinished work. Do you sprint to complete it for the people who pushed you out? Do you do the minimum? Do you follow processes you previously cut corners on, knowing the process itself will create delay?
Each of those choices lives in grey. The sprint is arguably noble but also arguably self-defeating — you’re subsidising the people who wronged you. The minimum is arguably fair but also arguably petty. The process-following is arguably correct but also arguably strategic. Every option has an ethical reading and a cynical reading, and the honest truth is that your real motivation is probably some mixture of both that you can’t fully untangle even from the inside.
This is where the philosophical frameworks are supposed to help. They don’t.
Kant says act only according to rules you’d want everyone to follow. Fine — but “always go above and beyond for employers who mistreat you” is not a rule anyone would universalise, and “always do the minimum when wronged” isn’t either. The categorical imperative gives you a test, but when every plausible rule has a reasonable objection, the test returns null.
Utilitarianism says maximise total wellbeing. But whose? Over what timeframe? Your family’s financial security versus your successor’s ease of onboarding versus the company’s operational continuity — these are incommensurable. You can’t add them up. The felicific calculus was always a fantasy, and real decisions expose this instantly.
Virtue ethics says be the kind of person a virtuous person would be. This is closer — it’s what I argued in the previous post. But it smuggles in the question: virtuous by whose standard? The Roman virtues included martial courage and civic loyalty. Confucian virtue centres on relational duty. The Silicon Valley version centres on radical transparency. Each would judge my situation differently, and none is obviously right.
The frameworks aren’t useless. They’re lenses — they reveal aspects of a decision you might miss. But they don’t converge on an answer, and anyone who tells you they do is either oversimplifying or trying to control you.
So what’s left?
I think what’s left is the discomfort itself.
There’s a strange inversion that happens when you sit with ethical grey areas long enough. The discomfort stops being the problem and starts being the signal. If you feel nothing — if the decision is easy, if you’re certain you’re right — that’s actually the moment to worry. Certainty in ethics usually means you’ve stopped looking at the parts that complicate your preferred conclusion.
The person who says “I owe them nothing, they pushed me out” has a point. But if they feel no tension saying it — no flicker of “but my successor will inherit this mess” — they’ve closed a door that should stay open. The person who says “I’ll document everything perfectly because that’s who I am” also has a point. But if they feel no resentment at all — no recognition that they’re doing unreciprocated work for people who don’t deserve it — they might be performing virtue rather than practicing it.
The grey is where the actual ethics lives. Not in the frameworks, not in the certainty, not in the clean narratives we tell ourselves afterwards. In the tension between competing legitimate claims.
做人 (zuòrén) — the Chinese concept I mentioned in the previous post — captures this better than the Western frameworks, partly because it doesn’t try to resolve the tension. It’s not a system. It’s a practice. You show up as a person, you face the situation, you make a call, and you live with the fact that the call was imperfect. The craft is in the showing up and the living with, not in the resolution.
My son will eventually ask harder questions than “why be nice.” He’ll ask why someone was unfair to him, and whether he should be unfair back. He’ll ask whether following the rules matters when the rule-makers don’t follow them. He’ll ask whether loyalty is owed to people who aren’t loyal to you.
I won’t have clean answers for any of them. The best I can offer is this: if the question feels easy, look again. The grey areas aren’t a flaw in the moral universe. They’re the whole thing.
P.S. The philosophers will object that I’ve caricatured their frameworks. They’re right. But the caricatures are how those frameworks actually function in real decisions at 11pm on a Thursday, which is the only context that matters.