Evil does not take sides
The hardest, and the most significant choices we make are those that involve good and evil. Those are also the choices that signal the clearest who we really are.
There is no getting away from moral considerations in our everyday interactions. Many of our choices have moral implications, from whether we purchase the fairtrade soap or coffee rather than the cheaper standard variant, to whether we tell our boss a little white lie to explain our tardy arrival rather than the truth (we hit the snooze button). Often, such moral choices escape the usual economic approach of trading off costs and benefits. Instead, they are reflected in a moral hierarchy of our values and corresponding rules, stacked in order of increasing importance on top of one another. This allows us to maintain a fundamental belief that we all have: we are morally good people. Not perfect, perhaps, but certainly good. We know that stealing is bad, but we also need to feed our family. If, one day, we face the choice between not stealing and pinching some food to keep our family alive as a last resort, we may find that the latter takes precedence over the former: “Thou shalt not steal” is trumped by “Thou shalt not let your family starve to death”, if we face a binary choice between the two.
