I would like to discourage applying “moral greyness” to Edelgard (by discouraging using “moral greyness” in literary analysis generally). Most of this is going to be theory about literary theory, not a discussion of Edelgard, because the facts about Edelgard are largely known and settled. I don’t think it’s productive to rehash one more time the arguments about whether act X or act Y of Edelgard’s is justified. What’s at issue is not her, it’s the theories of interpretation that are applied to her.
Morally Grey vs Morally Complex
So, let’s get to it. There is a difference between moral greyness and moral complexity. There are several models for moral greyness and moral complexity, and I can’t account for all of them.
At least for me, when a character is described as morally grey, it means that the character has mixed intents. They respond to both good and evil motivations in a meaningful fashion, beyond a hero’s ability to fail or misjudge or a villain’s ability to have good traits. E.g., a villain is not morally grey just because he likes dogs or defends his family. When he burns down an orphanage, he’s just evil: any good intentions or tendencies don’t really weigh against concrete, evil actions. What makes a character morally grey is how they “halt … between two opinions” or “serve two masters.” They willfully and knowingly do the right thing and the wrong thing. When they do the wrong thing, they are not trying to do the right thing but failing; they are doing exactly what they intend. And viceversa when they do the right thing. Moral greyness, then, tends to be impermanent in most characters.
Moral complexity, on the other hand, is what you have for difficult moral questions. A good person in a morally complex situation may not achieve good outcomes, despite good intentions. Less often considered is how an evil person, in a morally complex situation, may not be able to achieve the evil they desire. The litmus test I apply is this: a situation is morally complex if reasonable people could disagree about the right option.[1]
To better understand moral complexity, consider the law: executing the law is morally complex, no matter how wise or clever or studied you are. Most judges over criminal trials try to exercise lenience and harshness when each is appropriate. They try to recognize when a defendant is capable of or willing to reform and when they are not. Over the course of their career, they will all be lenient and harsh to some people who don’t deserve it. Or, to complicate it further, they will be lenient to someone who genuinely does deserve leniency, but that person will later abuse that leniency of their own free choice and seriously hurt someone. On top of all that, there’s a feedback loop: a judge may be tempted to be overly lenient or overly harsh if they’ve found success in leniency or harshness, or they may underuse one approach after seeing it fail. Which it should be reemphasized, both approaches fail regularly, because people are messy and deserve second chances, but it’s also not fair to victims to give people a chance to hurt people again, and there’s no perfect way to reconcile these two things without omniscience.
I believe that calling the law morally grey is inaccurate for one, but more importantly, it devalues the efforts, intents, and study of judges (a definition of moral greyness that includes this sort of thing is immediately overbroad in my eyes). The vast majority of judges in developed nations are trying to get the right results. The problem is that the right result is a matter on which reasonable people will disagree. Especially in the moment, before the consequences are known and knowledge is perfected.[2]
It’s worth mentioning here that moral complexity is not moral relativity: there are better and worse answers, and clearly wrong answers, and maybe even clearly ok answers, in morally complex questions. The complexity may be fact-specific, where it’s unclear how moral principles will apply to the specific people and circumstances involved, or it might be that the whole situation is gnarly and hard to resolve. But moral complexity presumes there are better and worse outcomes; it’s not just a wash between all the different options.
Now, just to be clear, moral greyness has its place in analysis. But it is a narrow one, limited. Moral greyness is overapplied and overused. Issues like politics, lawmaking, judicial decisions, and the like are morally complex and have resisted solutions for millennia—and will likely do so for millennia more. They are not, however, morally grey.
Edelgard Time
Edelgard is not a person of mixed intents. She intends to do what’s right. She largely rejects evil motivations like vengeance, even when they could technically coexist with her real motivations of reform and defense of the weak.
It is her lot that her choices predominantly lie in areas of moral complexity. She is a warmonger and a lawmaker: neither war nor law admit easy answers to its moral questions.[3] But the questions that law and war pose need to be answered; we cannot delay, as we can with science, until we have a “right” answer. There is an urgency to human suffering that requires us to act. There are also fundamental flaws in our ability to research and recognize right answers: it’s not clear that we could find the right answer even with an infinite delay. Most often, we simply must act, and it is only in the action itself that the answer becomes clear (if that; in these fields many questions will never be answered by mortal means).
The discourse around Edelgard’s actions is proof itself that she is in a morally complex situation, not a morally grey one. The debate is almost never whether she has good or ill intent, it’s about whether her actions were justified. And, I think the past years have made it abundantly clear, reasonable people can differ on that for pretty much everything Edelgard did. Edelgard is capable of misjudging and you may feel free to disagree with any given action of hers. What is incorrect is attaching evil intention to any misjudgment you decide she has made.
Anyways, I am content to call Edelgard a hero and to say she did nothing wrong. Not because she “objectively” did the right thing in every circumstance, but because she always sought to do the right thing and took steps to do so. And, not only did she try to do the right thing, she tried to be the kind of person who can recognize the right thing even in complex situations, by studying law, history, and philosophy.[4] She repeatedly asks the player to be a person “swayed by [her] words and deeds,” because that is where the proof is.[5] Not in framings, not in perspectives, not in outcomes, and certainly not in “Red Emperor” tropes and comparisons within Fire Emblem, but in what she has sought out to do; what she has envisioned and intended, as proven by words and deeds.
A hero isn’t someone I agree with on every issue; they’re someone I trust to fight for the truth. And that’s what Edelgard does and that’s what she’s about.
Further Theory That Isn’t Required But At The Very Least Is Something I Believe And Find Useful
Mixing is the problem: good and evil don’t mix quite like lights and darks do in painting. Moral greyness is like the worst of videogame choice design. In most “light vs dark” games that leave the choice to the character, like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or Mass Effect, good actions weigh directly against bad ones. But we all know it’s ridiculous to say someone who commits genocide and then saves an orphanage is morally neutral.
Yet, this is the idea that moral greyness tends to propagate: weighing good against evil. And, while it’s true that people do both good and evil, good actions and evil actions are incommensurable, incomparable. You cannot add triangles to the number five. You cannot mix good actions and evil actions.
To illustrate, I turn to the genre noir, a genre which happens to suffer greatly from being described as morally grey. Noir protagonists tend to start out with mixed intents. Much of what’s good in the genre is that it’s willing to depict goodness in people who do bad things. So that would make them morally grey. But the point of noir is the darkness: it needs its protagonists to love the dark more and to end in the darkness. Noir is not a genre of moral relativity or ultimate greyness: if it were so, it would lose its impact and force. Noir needs the darks to be darks and its lights to be lights, because its meaning is created by contrasting the two, not by confusing them.
It is not even clear that you can “add” good to good or evil to evil. People are not permanently good or evil in any way. Good people can abandon their past, as can evil people. A good person can remain good in an evil system, even when that evil system forces them to do evil. And viceversa. The same tragic backstories can equally justify a heroic tale of overcoming and a villainous tale of succumbing. We try to create good and evil identities, but identity is an ephemeral thing. Not just for characters, but for ourselves and all humanity. We can seek to preserve good and evil intents, but we cannot reach a point where our good and evil are unchangeable.[6]
Anyways, and in conclusion, please take care, stay safe, and may your intentions be pure.
Footnotes
[1] Now, you can still do evil in a morally complex situation by choosing a harmful option that reasonable people would not choose. If you want a good reputation coming out of moral complexity, you need to choose one of the options that could be reasonably motivated by goodness. But that’s not the scenario we’re dealing with.
[2] I will note that some people use moral complexity to disguise evil intents. They will intentionally seek evil outcomes but use the complexity of the matter to claim that their intents were good and abuse the theories of well-motivated people to justify their actions and minimize the harms. But this is still morally evil, rather than morally grey. And, it must be emphasized, an evil person abusing a good person’s theory to achieve evil doesn’t mean the theory is wrong either. The theory may still be a good one, because an evil person will not execute it properly and will only imitate the appearance of the theory, rather than the substance. In short, the substance may still be quite good. Rejecting the theory because it was exploited may well cut you off from a sizable portion of truth.
That being said, I do believe that you can usually distinguish between genuine people and fakers if you are close enough to them. Not 100% of the time, since we all misjudge, but I would not say that moral complexity makes good and evil indistinguishable.
[3] Note that I use warmonger in a literal sense and not the normal pejorative one here.
[4] This is what sets Edelgard apart from the rest of the cast for me. Every character tries to do the right thing at least sometimes. However, Edelgard more than anyone else studies morality to increase how often she makes the right call. Especially in governance, it is not enough to desire the right thing: you must refine your understanding as well as your intentions. As Christ said: “Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”
[5] Edelgard’s focus on words and deeds evokes these passages for me: number one and number two. Much of what I have written here, not just the one section, is motivated by these passages, too.
[6] I’d recommend reading these two criticisms of identity: one by the Argentine author Borges and another by the transcendental Ralph Waldo Emerson.