Doing sums with morality is very dangerous. But, what is the alternative? The answer is to not look at the right side of the equation but rather focus on the left.

In English:
Looking only at whether the sum consequences of your actions are good, looking only at the end, is dangerous. It is dangerous because it is very easy to loose sight of what evil you do, to ignore it and justify it, to normalize it and, over time, become accustomed to it. You must consider the consequences but you should not loose sight of the costs. If you must pick the lesser of two evils, you should still believe that what your are doing is evil.

In Rationality:
Good an evil are categories of action (or alternately a scale going from -100 to +100 but hey). Certain things are good and certain things are bad. Judging good and evil by the overall consequences can weaken the association between certain acts and their good/evil grouping. This can be bad as certain actions are usually evil and believing that they are not evil, even though that may not be true in one specific case, is not good as it increases the likelyhood of you comitting them when they are indeed the wrong choice.

In Academic style criticism of the greeks.
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Introduction

Decisions change us. Doing Evil corrupts us and it corrupts us all the more completely when we do not regret it. That is why the Tragedians grief filled method of decision making is preferable to Plato’s stark rationalism.

The Difference

What are the ethical views of the Plato? Plato believes in the existence of an absolute good, embodied by the form of justice and hence rejects moral relativism in all it’s forms. Importantly, he also understands there to exist a threefold distinction in the human soul between the reasoning, desiring and emotive parts. He believes that the world of forms and hence understanding of justice is best accessed through the first faculty of reason, the exercise of which allows us to behave morally and to rekindle the lost memories our soul has of the world of forms. Because of this, a Platonic approach to ethical decision making is to use reason and reason alone to assess the available options, the consequences of those options and how far each action is good based on how far it is in line with the form of justice. In cases where a difficult trade-off must be made, for example torturing one terrorist to potentially save a dozen innocents, the platonic decision maker should consider the options, make the best choice based on the information they have and then proceed without doubt or regret because the choice they made and the way they decided on it was in line with justice and hence objectively good.

The ethical views of the tragedians differ in two important respects from those of Plato. Firstly, the tragedians are not necessarily moral absolutists. They recognize that competing moral demands can exist, say those from different gods or those between family and state, and that in some cases these moral conflicts may well be insoluble. This is in contrast to plato whose form of justice is the only source of morality meaning all conflicts are soluble or, at the very least, have no superior choice making every choice a just one. Secondly and more importantly, in cases where a difficult trade off must be made the tragedians advocate not that the decision maker chooses the best, or least-worst option and is satisfied with their choice but rather see such satisfaction or lack of regret as a form of hubris to be avoided. The punishment of Agamemnon and Antigone is an example of this. For the Tragedians, a person who does evil, even if it is the lesser evil given the options available to them, has committed a wrong and should feel remorse for doing so.

The Corrupting Effects of Decision Making

There is a distinction between evil and badness. What is evil? Evil simply means assigning the wrong weighting to certain actions or goods. In other words seeing obviously heinous acts as acceptable or, alternatively, seeing them to carry less moral weight than they should do is evil. For example, a soldier who is forced to murder on daily basis, loses some or all of their understanding that murder is bad and hence goes on to undervalue the badness of murder when making moral trade-offs in the future has to some extent been corrupted and become more evil. This is different from badness in that a bad action may be in itself undesirable but is always wrong if the alternatives are sufficiently bad. For example, murder is bad but it may nevertheless be the right option in a situation where not-murdering would lead to the deaths a hundred others.

It is an inescapable fact of human nature that we are corruptible. That is why when making a difficult moral choice, we should do as the tragedians advise and feel regret and shame. The reason for this is that shame prevents or slows the the corruption which leads to evil. Doing bad things changes us. It desensitizes us to the horror of what we do. Torture enough and you are no longer shocked by the pain of others. It causes us to begin to construct justifications in order to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror. Beat your wife long enough, and you begin to believe that she deserves to be beaten. The decision making Plato advocates for requires that we should not feel remorse, shame or disgust for performing bad acts provided that they are justified. My contention is simply that when doing bad, feeling disgust or regret slows the normalization and justification which lead to corruption. Not doing so hastens this corruption, leading to future decisions where evil is done not because it is necessary but because the decision maker is corrupted enough to devalue the extent to which bad actions should be avoided.

An obvious response from Plato would be that the corruption I refer to is impossible. After all, a platonist is not guided by his emotion or appetites but rather by the rational part of their soul and hence their valuation of certain acts and understanding of what is moral and immoral is objective, based on knowledge of the world of the forms. The corruption I talk of may occur, but it does so not in the rational part of the soul but in the emotive or desiring part which anyone who follows Platonic ethics would not let control them. Hence this corruption is not a problem for Platonic ethics as it only applies to individuals who have failed to implement some of plato's most important advice.

The reason Plato’s response is unsatisfactory is that the distinction he makes between rational and irrational parts of the soul is not one which exists or can be forced to exist in reality. It is not possible for any human being, no matter how enlightened, to prevent their emotional state from leaking into and affecting their rational thought process. Like it or not the different aspects of our soul are inextricably bound together in a web of causal relationships. What this means is that either my criticism of plato, that his regretless decision making is more likely to lead to corruption, still rings true or, alternately, that Plato’s system is indeed invulnerable to corruption but then is by necessity so difficult to attain that it is totally out of reach of human beings. In both cases the Tragedians ethics seem superior, in the first because they lead to less corruption and hence less evil and in the second because they are actually practicable by human beings.