Heads I win, tails you lose

In general I believe that we humans have a desire to do what is right, or at least what seems right to us.  The notion that there is an explicit good and an explicit evil is in my mind a fallacy.  To deny the knowledge of evil would would render the good imperfect.  To admit the knowledge of evil, means the good truly knows the evil.  Either way, the good is imperfect and thus impure.  The inverse could be said of evil, a knowledge of good is required to be evil.  This is essentially the Taoist concept of yin and yang.

There is an old saying, that every coin has two sides.  Or as another states it, there are two sides to every story.  While we echo these expressions like parrots we seldom stop to consider their implied meanings.  They simply indicate that looking only at the surface reveals an act of pure good, or a heinous act of evil.  However, somewhere deeper you see that it's not so cut and dry.

Consider a man (lets call him Dave) who kills his brother (Mike), who came to confront him over an issue they'd been having.  Things escalated and Dave, the younger of the two, pulls out a gun and leaves a slug lodged inside the cranium of his closest kin.  A life is taken, and a young man spends his life behind bars.  Deservedly so, he is insane to resort to such an act of violence so quickly.  

Dave has committed an unspeakably evil act.  He was unreasonable and reacted so unexpectedly and with such furor that elder brother - who'd only come to talk - now lays prone on the dirt ground with a fairly large entry wound on his forehead.  Dave deserves severe punishment for such an act.

Except...  Mike had been making threats against his wife and children, and both men knew he was planning to carry them out.  That was the reason for the altercation, and the resulting action.  However the only two who know this are the deceased, and the one who was absolutely guilty of the murder.  He is imprisoned, but his family is now safe.

Who is the bad guy and who is the good.  Would you believe his defense?  Would you have leniency if you did?  Even in this very simple example, the lines are now blurry once you know the rest of the story.  This applies to many things in life - except we never get to know the rest of the story.   Humans for all of our values, have a tendency to make harsh and rather rash judgement against our fellow humans.  We are all-too-often ready to condemn, in spite of the fact that only a part of the story is known.  I know that if we could somehow drop the shoot (off at the mouth) first ask questions later mindset, we could find the deeper answers in so many things.