Too often when we take a course in ethics, we are given for analysis moral problems of an altogether too dramatic sort. You are marooned in a lifeboat with four others and a limited supply of food and fresh water. Days pass on the briny deep. Food runs low, and water is at a premium. When is it permissible to eat the First Mate? Or, the city is under siege, surrounded by barbarians, and inevitably the demand is made. Release the king's daughter to the savage pleasures of the barbarian chieftain, or the city will be razed. What to do? The problem with such problems is that they suggest that most of us have never yet confronted a moral problem and are unlikely to do so in the future. If the moral life is made up of problems such as these, the moral life at best—or worst—would look like a line disturbed at rare intervals by pips of magnitude. But what goes on in the interim, in the interval between moral problems of the dramatic sort?
(Ralph McInerny, Ethica Thomistica: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, rev. ed. [Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997], 93)
