Alexandr Solzhenitsyn on developing a point of view:

“In First Circle, the young diplomat Innokenty Volodin lived a life of prosperity and comfort. As the privileged child of a hero of the Revolution he had married into a prominent family and advanced in the Soviet diplomatic service. But he became alienated from it all: he “lack(ed) something: he didn’t know what” (p. 341).
Upon examining the old fashioned ideas of his deceased mother in her diaries, his perspective on life changed from one of an Epicurean pleasure-seeking to one of ethical regard. He developed a “point of view”: Up to then the truth for Innokenty had been: you have only one life.

Now he came to sense a new law, in himself and in the world: you also have only one conscience. And just as you cannot recover a lost life, you cannot recover a wrecked conscience [p. 345]

Moral choices are often the consequence of accumulated culture, happenstance or social institutions, and as such judging others’ moral choices must be done with compassion and humility. Solzhenitsyn contemplates rather extensively his rejection of an offer to join the Soviet internal police force, the NKDV, when he was a young communist in Rostov in the late 1930’s:

“The NKVD school dangled before us special rations and double or triple pay …
It was not our minds that resisted but something inside our breasts. People can shout at you from all sides: “you must!”… inside our head can be saying also: “You must!” But inside your breast there is a sense of revulsion, repudiation. I don’t want to. It makes me feel sick. Do what you want without me; I want no part of it …. Without even knowing it ourselves, we were ransomed by small change in copper that was left from the golden coins our great-grandfathers had expended, at a time when morality was not considered relative and when the distinction between good and evil was very simply perceived by the heart.” —

[Gulag Archipelago, p. 160].

This leads to a rather subtle and non-judgmental view of good and evil. Evil is very real and very wrong, but no human being is authorized to become too self-righteous in its condemnation: but for the grace of God go I.

In Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn says quite emphatically:

“So let the reader who expects this book to be a political expose slam its covers shut right now. If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: Know thyself!

“Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t.” [p. 169]

“To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of
Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.”