To say that questions of morality are thorny and filled with gray when they aren't being hammered between stark absolutes is putting it mildly. Because of this there can be great drama when characters who represent a wide range of moral viewpoints come together or into conflict.

The strangest of these characters are those who espouse Blue and Orange Morality. These characters have a moral framework that is so utterly alien and foreign to human experience that we can't peg them as "good" or "evil". They aren't a Chaotic Neutral Unfettered, though they may seem to act terrifyingly randomly; nor are they necessarily a Lawful Neutral Fettered, because their understanding of "law" as a concept may not even be equivalent to ours. There might be a logic behind their actions, it's just that they operate with entirely different sets of values and premises from which to draw their conclusions. It's also worth noting that such cultures are just as likely to be something we'd find appalling as they are to be something we'd find benign and/or weird. They may also find us appalling, benign, or weird even if we don't see them that way, and although they are often likely to commit acts we would see as horrific, some are unusually benign. Either way they tend to act as if nothing were the matter. Because in their world/mind, that's just what they do. This trope is one of the trickier to pull off well, because Most Writers Are Human, and it's often hard to portray alien and truly foreign. Because of this, it's not uncommon for audience members to label these characters as Designated Heroes or villains due to human audiences often lacking the experience or knowledge that these fictional characters have. Audiences must remember that these characters are meant to be Morally Ambiguous.

This is similar to Values Dissonance, but the main difference is that societies with Values Dissonance can, at least on a basic level, generally measure one another by the same concepts of Good and Evil, or even Order and Chaos. With Blue and Orange Morality, the values are so foreign that such concepts can no longer be applied. They may not even know what these things are, or even if they do, may find them confusing or unworthy of consideration. That is not to say these characters are amoral or devoid of any sense of right and wrong, mind you, but that their ideas of right and wrong can't really be understood using the aforementioned concepts. Conversely, they may have these concepts, but apply them in vastly different ways— such as regarding motionlessness as the epitome of evil, or viewing exploration as an element of chaos. In short, Blue and Orange Morality isn't just about what a character(s) view as right or wrong, it's also about how and why they judge them as such.

Note that cases solely involving a misapprehension of facts and consequences do not count here, no matter how alien the reasons; if, for example, a race of aliens thinks killing is okay because its own members respawn within a day with no harm done, and mistake humans as working the same way, that doesn't mean they wouldn't balk at killing if they realized the degree of harm it causes to other creatures. In this case, they may be working by comprehensible moral standards and just gravely mistaken about the implications of their actions. This is not to say that trope can't still apply if the culture remains this way with no grasp of the reasons behind it. If, say, such a race of aliens really do exist, and really did come to believe killing is okay as a side effect of the reasons above, but don't apply this to their thought processes when killing, and thus, think just as little of killing mortals who don't respawn, then this trope can still apply.

Because of the inherently alien nature of this trope, the likely candidates for it are usually non-humans: The Fair Folk, who follow rules of their own making; Eldritch Abominations that are beyond comprehension; the more exotic Starfish Aliens; AIs and robots, especially when super smart and/or incapable of emotion; The Anti-God and God via Time Abyss and Above Good and Evil. Another candidate is the power of money or The Almighty Dollar. An individual human (or a single member of any species whose majority falls into darker morality) who operates on this is the Übermensch of Nietzschean philosophy (a human being who has developed their own Blue/Orange set of morals). A Nominal Hero may have this motivation as well. Moral Sociopathy overlaps strongly with this trope for obvious reasons, though this is not always the case.

See also these tropes, which include or are connected to this kind of Morality System: Xenofiction, Humans Are Cthulhu, Humanity Is Infectious (all often involving this), Insane Troll Logic (when the set of values is still rooted in our world but just doesn't make sense to us), Above Good and Evil, Affably Evil/Faux Affably Evil (they sometimes can come across as this), Even Evil Has Standards (when handled poorly or bizarrely), Evil Cannot Comprehend Good (less elaborate forms that resemble this in practice), Non-Malicious Monster (which occasionally requires this), and Obliviously Evil (when a villain thinks that their actions are acceptable or helpful). A common staple of the mindset of The Hive. When two sides go to war, and nothing will stop them except total annihilation, that's Guilt-Free Extermination War. If the character genuinely knows everything will turn out okay, allowing the plot to treat them as a good guy no matter how cruel, irresponsible, or inhuman this makes them by our standards, that's Omniscient Morality License.

See also Morality Tropes and Philosophy Tropes for other Morality and Philosophy Systems.

Not to be confused with Orange/Blue Contrast (though the fact that there's a contrast between those colors does help this trope's name make more sense).

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