Let's say you know a secret, and you tell people who can use the secret to harm good people.
Is there a difference between:
- Going to them proactively to get some money
- Telling them when they ask you right after they captured you
- Telling them after 24 hours of torture
It's wrong and harmful in all circumstances; but in the first case, it's doubly wrong, whereas in the last case, there are significant mitigating circumstances.
If this whole story had stopped at #2, you could say it's wrong, but there are mitigating circumstances. Risk of disease is fuzzy and far away; the physical and emotional rewards are right in front of your face. If you don't see any hope of improving the situation, it looks to you like your choices are:
- Come out and completely destroy your life, your wife's life, and your child's life
- Live in a loveless marriage, never enjoying romantic or sexual intimacy
- Enjoy romantic and sexual intimacy secretly, telling yourself that you're not really hurting your wife because you're being "careful" or whatever.
It's not right, but I can see how a person who experiences normal human empathy could choose #3. When I was younger I certainly made my fair share of stupid decisions in search of romantic intimacy (or more crassly, when the "little head told the big head what to do").
As we go down the line, the damage to others becomes greater and more immediate, and the alternative "right" behavior become less and less desolate. It therefore becomes harder not to conclude that he person either lacks empathy entirely, or have made massive efforts to suppress it -- either finding justifications to avoid looking at what's right in front of their faces, or just killing the feeling altogether.