Okay, I have another suggestion for trying to determine how we decide what is "right" - or at least, a couple of situations to offer up that I would be interested to see people discuss.

A friend told me that when she goes shopping, she always takes a few chocolate-covered almonds out of the bulk bin to eat on her way around. She told me this a propos her boyfriend being shocked by this behaviour. What she then said to me: "I mean, come on, if that's the worst thing I do in my life....what's the harm?"

I have to confess I was shocked too - but then I got to thinking how almost everyone "steals" during his/her life. Which of us has never made a personal photocopy at work, for example? I know I've done that, and of course rationalised it away somehow.

At one place I used to work, a theatre, I was told that the janitorial staff didn't put spare rolls of TP in the loo because...believe it or not...people STOLE them. I am wondering who on earth can justify to herself (this happened in the ladies', not the gents') stealing a whole roll of loo paper, while attending a theatre production? I mean really. Gimme a break.

Yet how is that different from the illicit photocopy or handful of choccie almonds? which were both justified away by the respective perpetrators.

Wow....I just picked up Gail Godwin's The Good Husband, hoping to find the bit about stealing, and the book fell open at it. Curious synchronicity....(maybe synchronicity is always curious!):

"...unless you checked the answers you did because you felt those were the right ones, the ones I would expect you to check."

"No, I just checked the ones that were the truth."

"Ah, the truth," he said, putting a mysterious spin on the word...."Look, why don't we take a look at a specific question and I'll show you what I'm getting at."

The question was, "Have you ever stolen anything?" Alice had checked the box marked "no," without hesitation.

"Almost everyone, at some time in their lives, has taken something that wasn't theirs...some little thing...maybe just someone else's pencil. Something that hardly seems worth remembering."

...

"No, I'm sorry, but I haven't. I'm sure I would remember it if I did. It would bother me."

(p284 in the Ballantyne Books paperback ed., 1994)

Perhaps that's really what it boils down to? that how we know what is right, is by how our conscience nags at us when we have done something wrong. But then that poses the question: what is a conscience and how is it formed? which is perhaps the same question as "how do we know what is right?"

Let us go in peace to love and serve the board.