Video games make morality so simple sometimes.
Choose to do one thing and your character becomes better. Choose another and your character becomes worse.
Life is full of these choices, of course. The simple fact of the matter is that most of us automatically choose one path or the other every time, without really thinking about it. Most small choices have an obviously morally correct choice, which is something we chose instinctively.
The big questions don’t really come up. Should I save the life of my enemy? Should I lie to someone rich for my slight monetary gain? These questions are certainly a bit more probing, but they’re not situations we often run into in real life.
Because most of us in the slightly positive area, there are few moral choices that actually come up in our lives that truly test our resolve and determine the life path we take. And, more often than not, those choices have no real effect on our lives past the event.
You get the bill at a restaurant and the waiter’s forgotten to put on a drink. It’s a tiny charge ($2, say), but the simple fact is that the bill is wrong and in your favor. Do you bring it up? Do you pretend to not notice? The morally correct thing to do is to bring the error to the attention of the restaurant, but in all practical terms, your choice won’t really matter.
Someone you’d rather not hang out with asks if you have plans. You’re fairly certain they’ll invite themselves along if you mention that you’re doing a group activity and you’d rather they didn’t. Do you lie? Is the better social choice different from the correct moral choice?
And in the end, does it matter? Of course it does. Society has laws and standards that punish those that make the wrong choices. But it also matters most of all to ourselves. We, more than any other person or establishment, face the consequences for any active choice we make. We’re forced to live with it the rest of our lives.
Like a simple video game system, our subconscious is keeping track, making marks every time we make a decision. None of us are perfect moral beings and none of us are totally corrupt moral demons, but we all have a pretty solid idea of where we think we stand on the spectrum.