Irish Willow

The difficulty of recognizing them for what they are, as they unfold before us in the real time of actual experience, can make moral dilemmas more or less invisible as they happen. It's only later, in the controlled environment of retrospect, considering the carefully distilled pros and cons of debate, that we come to realise some of our direct encounters with the raw material of ethics. Perhaps this is just a long-winded way of saying that I've led a comparatively sheltered life, one in which many of those sombre questions of life and death that spark such huge controversy have been manifested more as topics for discussion than as immediate concerns, breathing the hot breath of immediacy on my neck. So, questions about capital punishment, euthanasia, just war (to take three examples) have, for the most part, been asked only in a ritual sense, a going through of possible responses, rather than finding my life violently contorted by their direct impact. They've not, in other words, occurred as real interrogations thrust upon me by events, bearing down upon my life with the massive tonnage of urgent actuality, catastrophically unavoidable, allowing no possibility of evasion through indecision or postponement.

 Like the vast majority of my fellow citizens, the cues of right and wrong that guide my conduct are largely the result of osmosis rather than of any consciously weighed-up series of decisions. They're the obedient echoes of custom, as reflected by family, friends, and society-at-large, not independent, self-conscious choices. In consequence, daily life is not fraught with much anxiety about good and evil. Instead, for most of the time I'm on automatic moral pilot - a state of being that has been responsible for allowing some of history's most appalling acts; a state which ought, perhaps, itself to be included in any list of ethical dilemmas confronting us. All this ruminative preface is intended to set the scene for an occasion when, quite unexpectedly, a moral dilemma was thrown right into my lap and recognized more or less at once for what it was, rather than only coming into focus later when I stopped to think about it.

 The circumstances were mundane, indeed mildly comical. So much so that I've often wondered if my interpretation is not just exaggeration, the inflation of a trivial misnomer into moral dimensions it doesn't really warrant. Readers must judge for themselves how to view the matter and consider how I should have acted (how you would have acted). Though I've always viewed myself as being more or less on the side of the angels and among those ranged resolutely, if unheroically, against the demons, my reaction in the face of this particular moral dilemma makes me doubt the sincerity and worth of such casually assumed allegiance. No doubt everyone likes to think they're aligned with the better side in any conflict. But between the camps of good and bad there's a massive wasteland of indifference, cowardice, and inaction, a moral no-man's land where I suspect, if truth-be-told, the vast majority of us are stationed..." Chris Arthur, "The Cullybackey Fox-Weasel" Irish Willow