That kept happening.

I had expected the argument to be black and white. Instead, my own experiences kept opening it into gray. The interviews uncovered motives, fears, loyalties, and contradictions I had not accounted for when the questions were abstract. Right and wrong had not disappeared. I had simply become less able to separate the moral question from the complicated person asking it.

An argument about human nature would reach a part of my life I believed I understood. The closer I looked, the less clean the division became between the capacity itself and the life that had formed around it. Instinct met memory. Love met fear. Strength met need. Loyalty met conscience. Ambition met limits. Faith met the things I had asked to carry its weight.

The title named the question I thought I was asking: What are human beings permitted to become?

The question assumed that our moral systems stand outside human nature and issue instructions to it. But morality is also something human beings make, inherit, contest, and revise. It carries wisdom accumulated across generations. It also carries fear, institutional interest, incomplete knowledge, and the temptation to turn one real good into the only good that matters.