Real life is not only black, only white--or only grey as Jarvisimo suggests.
You are possibly right, and I agree that there could be black and white (since I believe in there being moral truths and natural law).
However, I do use the term grey because we are a species of observers, which television as a medium as opposed to written fiction (particularly in the first person) accentuates.
Since we only do observe one another, and interact through sensory elements, we can both never know the full mental state of another person (and therefore the reasons for their actions) nor the lie of the land outside our limited senses and collective information sources. We therefore judge people and situations based on limited knowledge and criteria. This ultimately sabotages all 'whiteness', and what renders the human condition into, for want of a better word, greyness.
All morally right decisions unfortunately come at a cost, which is why I say the real world is grey.
This can be macrocosmic, such as the people who do not receive aid from today's international charity actions, be it food sourcing, infrastructural development, disaster recovery, arms development, whatever. They are the cost of a direct choice between many options with limited resources & capital on the parts of aid providers (as well as the say of those contributing finances to aid organisations). The noble act cannot prevent some moral culpability for the suffering of some on the part of the distributers for choosing one group over another. Yet this is not to condemn aid providers or financial backers (with whatever conditions they choose), simply to accept the venial cost of human good.
Indeed, also the indirect costs of moral actions render noble or white actions grey (oh, I do hate these terms), be it in a vast action (such as the harm done to innocents through a justifiable UN intervention, such as Bosnia) or - for a microcosmic example - in choosing to help one friend, exhausting oneself and then being either later unable to help or not as able to help another friend or relative experiencing a worse crisis.
This is why I say that though there are moral absolutes, the human condition and the essential ... falleness of the world that prevents simple moral dualisms * render all decisions productive of some harmfulness to other humans, and therefore morally nebulous.
* If we believe that there should be a white-black system akin to that posited by traditional religion, or invented arbitrarily, as was/is perhaps done by traditional religion and done through legal development today.
poor Sisko
