Daily Inspiration Quote by Jerry Pournelle

Pournelle’s line flatters no one, least of all the person doing the choosing. It treats ethics not as a tidy checklist but as a psychological stress test: when the stakes are real, “right action” tends to feel like loss. You lose time, comfort, money, status, plausible deniability. The desire to avoid it isn’t incidental; it’s the signal. By making aversion the compass needle, he’s betting that our gut reactions are reliably self-protective, and that moral clarity often arrives dressed as inconvenience.

The phrasing is deliberately blunt, almost algorithmic: “any ethical situation” widens the net, “probably” adds a journalist’s caveat, and “the thing you want least” shifts the focus from external rules to internal resistance. That’s the subtext: ethics isn’t primarily about knowing the right principle; it’s about outwrestling your own rationalizations. The quote assumes that when people say “It’s complicated,” they often mean “I can talk my way out of paying the cost.”

Context matters. Pournelle wrote from a late-20th-century milieu where institutions were distrusted, incentives were visible, and public figures were routinely caught choosing convenience over duty. In that world, the moral failure is rarely ignorance. It’s compromise marketed as pragmatism. His rule-of-thumb is less a halo-polishing aphorism than a warning label: if your first impulse is to dodge, delay, delegate, or dilute responsibility, you’re already staring at the ethical choice.