There is a fundamental flaw when most people talk about morality. The common assumption is that there are only two things to think about when talking about morality, a binary of right and wrong, good and evil. There are at least three main categories of actions (even in religious moral thinking): obligations, restrictions, optional, and two sub-categorizes under optional, preferred, and (for this post I'll say) discouraged. There is one additional category, the supererogatory, which covers all actions that are optional, but go beyond obligation (“above and beyond the call of duty”). There are three main things to consider about morality: the right (right, wrong, and optional actions), the good (what makes an action good or bad), and moral value (the value of a person, thing, or action).
A good action is good because it is an obligation. A wrong action is wrong because it is restricted. Anything that is neither an obligation or restricted is optional, but given the weight placed upon the moral value, optional actions may be preferred or discouraged. In fact, the value that we place on any given action may swing it out of the right or wrong category. Lying is wrong, but lying to save 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust is the very reason we consider Oskar Schindler a good person. His supererogatory act of lying to his own government and his own political party (for which he had been a spy), compounded again and again, was wrong, but the moral value that we place on life means that lying with the intent to save even one life, let alone 1,200, means that the lying becomes a least a prefered option, if not an obligation.
