The Virtue of Selfishness Chapter Summary & Analysis - Chapter 9, "The Cult of Moral Grayness", Ayn Rand (1964) Summary

Chapter 9, "The Cult of Moral Grayness", Ayn Rand (1964) Summary and Analysis

In this chapter, Rand discusses the tradition of moral bankruptcy in Western culture and how it is perpetuated by the "fashionable" attitude that, concerning moral issues, there are no blacks and whites, only grays. Rand calls this the "cult of moral grayness", which allows individuals in a society to shirk their responsibility to identify the good and bad in a given situation. To make meaning in her discussion, she defines "white" and "black" in this context to mean "good" and "evil". She declares it a contradiction for people to say it is wrong or narrow-minded to think in terms of black and white, because without black and white, there can be no gray, as gray is a mixture of the two colors. To define anything as gray, one has to first identify what is black and what is white. Thus, when thinking in terms of morality, one must first identify...
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