Can Readers be Trusted with Moral Complexity?

I got into a vigorous debate on X recently that started with a categorical claim and ended with a confession. Author and Fellowship of the Indie Author community moderator Tyler Kirk opened with a seemingly straightforward structural principle:

If everyone in your book is morally gray, no one is.

— Tyler Kirk (@TAR_Kirk) December 21, 2025

I said it was utter nonsense.

By the time we’d worked through the argument, he’d retreated to something much more modest: “For me, if every single major character in a book feels morally gray to the same degree, then none of them truly register as gray. The category loses its meaning without something to measure against. This may come down to taste and individual reading experience.”

But those are fundamentally different arguments.

One is about how fiction works—a claim about necessary structure, applicable to all novels. The other is about personal reading preference—a description of what one reader needs to feel satisfied. The collapse from principle to preference reveals a fundamental question about where moral judgment lives in fiction: does it come from the author lecturing readers toward predetermined conclusions? From the text building scaffolding through contrast and implicit comparison? Or from readers engaging directly with the specific consequences the narrative presents?

Writers generally claim to reject the first model—didactic fiction where obvious heroes and villains, comeuppance plotting, or narrative commentary signals the Correct Moral Position. This is the realm of fables and propaganda, where the point is instruction and the story exists to deliver a predetermined message. Plenty of writers who claim to reject this still practice it unconsciously through their structural choices, but at least we can agree it’s not sophisticated literature.

Kirk was arguing for the second model: that moral complexity only registers when the story provides some baseline, some gradient, some way for readers to measure one character’s compromise against another’s. The text doesn’t lecture, but it builds the scaffolding for judgment. It provides clearer and murkier characters, better and worse choices, and trusts readers to use those reference points to navigate the ambiguity.

Without that contrast, he claimed, moral grayness flattens into uniform equivalence where nothing stands out and stakes blur.

What I practice, and what I believe sophisticated fiction actually does, is the third model: the reader brings judgment through engagement with specific consequences. The text presents what happens with enough precision that readers can see the texture of each choice, the particular costs it extracts, the systems that created the bind. The narrative doesn’t provide moral measuring sticks or virtue gradients. It renders human beings under pressure making choices that damage themselves and others, and it trusts readers to reckon with what that means and what it costs.

The judgment isn’t in the text’s structure. It’s in the reader’s confrontation with what actually happened.

Kirk’s position keeps collapsing because the supposed failure mode doesn’t manifest in practice. He cited later Abercrombie, Franzen’s The Corrections, and Sally Rooney as examples of “uniform grayness” draining the stakes, but those are critically acclaimed novels that worked for millions of readers. When pressed for examples demonstrating the structural failure he was theorizing, he admitted “I haven’t read Wolfe or Dunnett myself”—which means he’s defending a structural principle while acknowledging he hasn’t examined the primary counterexamples. He conceded that pulling it off “would require god-tier prose control.”

That’s not defending a principle. That’s admitting the principle doesn’t hold.

When pressed further, defenders of this position tend to redefine “contrast” so broadly it becomes meaningless. Any successful all-gray novel, they’ll argue, must actually have contrast—look, this one has unreliable narration, that one has varying degrees of consequence, this other has characters who are compromised in different ways. But these are exactly the craft techniques they initially dismissed as insufficient without a virtue baseline.

The goalpost moves.

“You need a less-compromised character for comparison” becomes “you need any form of differentiation”—which is just describing competent characterization. At that point, “contrast” means nothing more than “write distinct characters with specific consequences.”

Which was never in dispute.

I’ll acknowledge pulling it off is hard, but it doesn’t require superhuman writing skills. Yes, trusting readers to bring moral judgment requires a level of craft precision that’s genuinely difficult to sustain. You can’t rely on the safety net of a less-compromised character standing around to make everyone else’s failures more visible. You have to make each compromise land with specific weight—not just “this was bad” but “this particular cost registers differently than that other cost” through the granular details of what was chosen and what was lost.

So what does this actually look like in practice?

Consider a scene from Born in Battle where my characters face an impossible choice. Bennett—the protagonist and narrator—has discovered he’s trapped in a bootstrap paradox. An antagonist named Smoking Mirror will steal a time-manipulation artifact from Bennett in the future, then use it to travel back in time and begin kidnapping people across history, including Bennett and his entire unit. The cycle repeats infinitely. Bennett has found a way to break the loop and trap Smoking Mirror, preventing him from ever acquiring the artifact.

The problem: breaking the loop means everyone Smoking Mirror brought to this world—everyone who exists because of this paradox—will cease to exist. Including First-to-Dance, Bennett’s seventeen-year-old adopted sister who’s standing right there during this conversation.

Sergeant Sanchez makes the utilitarian argument: “Breaking the loop returns everything to its natural order. All these people are anomalies. They’re not really real.” He’s not being cruel. His logic is sound—breaking the loop saves everyone who died, undoes all the kidnappings, restores what he calls “the true timeline.” It’s a grand slam solution. Everyone goes home. The dead live again. History returns to its proper course.

“Sarge, how can you say that?” Bennett asks. “Dance is standing right there!”

She is. Arms folded, watching them debate whether she should exist.

First-to-Dance articulates the counter-position with philosophical precision: “Breaking the loop introduces a moral dilemma. The temporal anchor ensures my world and my people continue to exist. Without it, all who Smoking Mirror abducted return to their worlds as if they’d never been here at all—even those who’ve died here. How many lives would be saved by reversing Smoking Mirror’s actions and how many lives would in turn be erased? Incidentally, how many who were brought here would wish to return? I know Nephi does not. I know the friar does not. It’s worth considering. But most importantly, who has the right to decree my existence isn’t worth saving? Perhaps I’m an anomaly in history, Sergeant Sanchez, perhaps I wasn’t meant to be, but I still exist. Cogito, ergo sum. I live. I love. I feel pain and joy. I’m as real as you, no? What has happened has happened and the dead are dead. Would you trade my life for theirs?”

The narrative doesn’t answer that question. Captain Brown scratches his eye instead of choosing sides. The uncomfortable silence stretches, flies droning in the heat. Finally Sanchez speaks: “Sort of feels like we’re playing god either way. And I apologize, First-to-Dance. I spoke harshly. Forgive a thoughtless old soldier.”

Dance smiles at him. Sanchez drops his eyes.

He apologized for his harshness. He didn’t retract his logic.

This is what Kirk’s framework can’t account for.

Both positions are coherent. Both are compassionate. Sanchez wants to save the dead and restore everyone stolen from their timelines. Dance wants to preserve everyone who exists now, including herself and her entire world. Neither is a villain. Neither is being selfish. They genuinely disagree about which lives matter more—the ones that were or the ones that are.

The moral weight doesn’t come from comparing these characters to someone more virtuous. It comes from the visceral specificity of the situation. Bennett has to look at his adopted sister—someone he loves, someone who lives in his household, someone real—while his sergeant argues she’s “not really real.” That physical detail grounds the philosophical problem without the narrative telling readers what to think. The flies drone. The silence stretches. Brown won’t judge.

The text refuses to resolve what readers must reckon with themselves.

Is Sanchez wrong? Is Dance’s existence worth the cost of everyone who died in Smoking Mirror’s abductions? The narrative voice doesn’t provide an answer because there isn’t a clean one. Fiction that trusts readers presents the dilemma with enough precision that they feel the weight of both positions, then lets them argue with themselves about where they land.

Kirk’s argument about “uniform grayness” causing moral fog describes a real failure mode, but misdiagnoses the cause. Fiction can absolutely lose traction by making everything feel equivalent—where “everyone’s complicated” becomes a license to avoid examining consequences, where all compromises blur together into a vague sense that nobody’s perfect and nothing much matters.

That’s bad writing.

But it’s not bad because the story lacks a virtue baseline. It’s bad because the writer hasn’t done the harder work of making each compromise land differently, of showing how this betrayal costs something irreplaceable that that other betrayal doesn’t cost, of rendering the specific texture of how different people fail under different pressures.

Consider the exchange between Dariush and Sarai in Godsbane about Shellycoat ethics. Dariush articulates the best version of the “necessary evil” argument: “We’re damned, and we may sometimes commit damnable acts. But we do it for a higher purpose, and with gravitas, acknowledging our acts for what they are.” He’s not a strawman. He’s lived centuries making these calculations. He genuinely believes this, and the logic is coherent within his framework.

Sarai’s counter is equally genuine: “Behîz me’šar nîst miâyad; âkhirân nîst bîhân râ barâbar mîkonad“—evil cannot produce good; the ends never justify the means.

I refuse to choose between these positions for the reader.

The structure is: Dariush’s view is coherent. Sarai’s view is coherent. The consequences of each will unfold across the narrative. Readers must weigh them.

This gets misread as moral relativism by readers who expect the narrative to signal who’s right. But I’m not claiming both positions are equally valid; I’m claiming both positions are genuinely held by intelligent people grappling with impossible situations, and part of the work of fiction is letting readers discover what they believe by watching themselves react to that conflict.

Fiction is how we practice moral reasoning without real-world stakes. If I guide readers to predetermined conclusions, I’m not trusting them to think; I’m training them to receive instruction.

That’s propaganda dressed as literature—moral pornography that offers the same hollow satisfaction as its sexual counterpart. You get to feel virtuous by identifying against obvious villains and aligning with obvious heroes, experiencing the rush of righteousness without the difficulty of actual moral reasoning.

You learn nothing about the texture of moral failure or the genuine difficulty of making choices in systems designed to break you.

Kirk isn’t entirely wrong about what he’s observing. Some readers genuinely need the text to provide more guidance. They need clearer heroes, more obvious villains, structural cues about who to root for and what to condemn. That’s a legitimate reader preference, and there’s nothing inherently superior about preferring maximum ambiguity. Different readers want different things from fiction, and that’s fine.

What I resist is the claim that this preference represents a structural necessity—that fiction requires virtue baselines to maintain moral weight, that stories without them inevitably collapse into relativistic fog.

The evidence doesn’t support that claim.

The novels Kirk cited as failures are commercially and critically successful. The novels I cited as counterexamples—Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns—are celebrated precisely for their moral complexity without virtue baselines. Severian helps torture a woman to death and Wolfe writes it with clinical precision; the moral judgment comes from readers confronting what actually happened. Lymond’s choices destroy people and Dunnett writes the aftermath without excusing it; the weight comes from seeing the specific damage. Jorg is a mass murderer and rapist and Lawrence makes the specific texture of his violence land with consequence; the horror registers without needing someone pure standing in the corner for contrast.

If Kirk’s principle held, these should be failures.

They’re not.

They’re exactly the kind of morally complex fiction that works without the structural elements he claims are necessary. Which means the issue isn’t structure—it’s craft. It’s the precision required to make consequences distinct, systems visible, costs particular.

This approach matters to me not just because it’s more realistic or artistically satisfying, but because of what’s at stake for readers.

Moral agency. The capacity to navigate complexity without needing external validation for every judgment. The experience of discovering your own values by watching yourself react to genuine dilemmas rather than receiving pre-packaged conclusions.

When I refuse to provide that scaffolding—when I present Dariush and Sarai as equally coherent and let readers choose, when I let Bennett’s unit debate Dance’s right to exist without Brown declaring the answer—I’m treating readers as moral agents capable of independent thought rather than students waiting for instruction.

That’s harder on readers. It asks more of them. Some will resist that demand, and that’s their right. But for the readers who engage with it, who sit with the discomfort and argue with themselves and discover what they actually believe by feeling their own reactions—that’s the experience I’m writing toward. Not to tell them what to think, but to make them think. Not to resolve moral questions, but to make those questions feel urgent and real and genuinely difficult in a way that lingers after the last page.

The beautiful irony is that this approach—trusting readers with moral complexity, refusing to do the judging for them—is itself a moral stance. It’s a claim about human dignity and intellectual agency.

It says: you’re capable of handling this. You don’t need me to hold your hand through the hard parts. You can look at what people do to each other and to themselves under pressure, you can sit with how complicated and compromised and tragic it all is, and you can figure out what you believe about it without me telling you the answer.

Maybe that’s too optimistic. Maybe I’m asking too much.

But I think readers are smarter and more capable than they’re often given credit for—especially young adult readers—and I think the fiction that treats them as such, that refuses to infantilize them with moral clarity, is the fiction that actually respects them enough to let them think for themselves.

That’s what I’m after: not moral fog, not relativism, not “everyone’s flawed so nothing matters,” but genuine complexity rendered with enough precision that readers can feel the weight of each specific failure, can see the distinct textures of different moral compromises, and can sit with genuine dilemmas without needing the text to resolve them.

And when they close the book, they know something new about themselves—not because I told them what to think, but because they watched themselves think it.