It goes without saying that at one time or the other we have all been victims of that old adage “20/20 hindsight”– the ability to clearlypick holes on past choices! Incidentally, the phrase was first used in 1962, when the British aeronautical journal, Flight International, noted “the newest expression in the US air transport business– namely, 20/20 hindsight”. While hindsight is a wonderful prism to critique the past, we cannot ignore the fact that inevitably, every choice is predicated on the situation being faced and the consequences of earlier choices. Moreover, it’s worth remembering that in choosing, as American lawyer and politician Joe Andrews so aptly put it, “the hardest decisions in life are not between good and bad or right and wrong, but between two goods or two rights”, which in some cases may well be choosing the lesser evil. Of course, it also goes without saying that the choices we make are to a great extent intrinsically moulded by our personalities, life experiences, ideological beliefs and preferences, and ‘primordial biases’.
