1) The only options all have comparably undesirable (or desirable) consequences or aspects.
2) Nothing can effectively be done which will materially improve the situation.
3) Somebody else is an exclusive better choice to do that 'right thing'.
4) What appears to be 'right' within one set of considerations may not be so under another.
Have I induced terminal ennui yet?
Bill Clinton should have been removed from office in the opinion of many, including me. That would have been the right thing to do. Others obviously disagreed and they thought the right thing to do was to let him get away with everything illegal he had done.
No. Since it is impossible to always know what is the “right thing” to do, it is not possible to always do the right thing.
I firmly believe that at some level, we always know what the right thing to do in any given situation is, it is just that most of the time we choose not to do it. We blind ourselves to our true nature and then we bind ourselves to a false reality.
If you want to know why there is evil in the world, it is because we want evil in the world. We put it there, us. It is our choice. It is our decision.
Why we have made this decision, I do not know. Just like I do not know why so many times I choose to do the "wrong thing."
The inablilty to grasp this is the great failure of "liberalism" going all the way back to Pythagoras. Make that "unwillingness."
But man's tool for survival is his reasoning facility. Man can always make a rational attempt to understand his environment and act upon that knowledge to further his existence. This will almost always necessitate judging other men's actions as right or wrong. One must do this because it is almost impossible to do anything without interacting with other men in some fashion.
Many would have us believe that man is not fit to understand the environment in which he finds himself. All "truths" are subjective. What I view as right or wrong will be viewed differently by the next man and the next etc. Who can say whose version is correct?- therefore the concepts of good and evil are abstract. So anything goes. That is the philosophy of anti-life in which the Left is so intricately entwined.
But who can say this or that is right or wrong? Well, anyone. Anyone, that is, who is willing to use reason. We have to have a starting point, a basic tenet to work from upon which everyone can agree. We will never acheive that, but I think that a fairly large majority of people would accept that it is a good thing to be alive and that given the choice they would prefer to stay that way.
That's the starting point- Life. We can then go on to say that whatever enhances Life is generally good and whatever detracts from Life (or enhances the prospects of death) are generally bad/evil. You can work upwards from that tenet. Freedom is an intrinsic part of man and his well being. Freedom to think, to reason, to act. Freedom to pursue not only his base existence but happiness as well. Obviously, there is much ground in between the basic tenet of Life is good and the creation of a nation like the USA but everything can be weighed on the scales of a man's reason to build on this basic tenet.
You look around at the world. The places on this planet that are most inhospitable to man are not extreme natural environments like the summit of Everest, the frigidity of Antartica or even the Moon. Man using reason has made these places livable and even hospitable. The most inhospitable places for man are places where other men do not widely accept, indeed they outright reject the idea that man's rational facutly is competent to understand his environment.
The Taliban forbade anything but the most rudimentary education and look at Afghanistan. Babies are being raped in South Africa because of a superstitious belief that it will somehow cure the mysterious illness. People starve because they do not accept the basic tenets of science that would allow them to better transform their world to feed themselves. In the Middle East the willingness to accept another man's word that an unsubstantiated "paradise with virgins" awaits him upon death leads men to actually blow themselves to bits as well as killing others who did not share his belief.
It never fails to amaze me. The United States is a nation that has enjoyed prosperity unprecedented in all of human history. You would think that after two centuries of a proven example, people would stop and say "hey, maybe they're on to something." It's not just the US though. If even small steps in the general direction of safeguarding a man's freedom to live and interact are taken, prosperity- even if tempered- usually follows.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. But I think that man can always, if he so chooses, make a rational decision about things. Even if faced with two unnattractive or wrong choices, if one must choose then you pick the lesser evil and in that situation that is the "right" choice. And you can use the same tenet to decide. Even if neither option enhances Life at all, you can usually still say "which detracts from life the least?".
I realize there are gray areas that arise when one doesn't have enough information to make a rational choice. But you still should use reason and make the best choice you can with dignity and then have the integrity to live with the consequences of your actions, to include making restitution to another party if through your ignorance you wronged them. That's my opinion anyway.
My apologies at the several paragraphs I have taken to say a thing that others could probably state in a few concise sentences.
The question reminds me very much of a similar one posed in a college classroom to the (very impressionable) son of a friend of mine. The question was: Is there such a thing as a true altruistic action? And the professor pounded it into their heads that the answer was, of course, no. And as he knocked down every single instance offered (heroic rescue, mother's care, etc.) he managed to instill a sense of guilt about their innate self-centeredness.
Then when these kids felt sufficiently desperate for affirmation, the professor suggested that the way to prove their willingness to be truly altruistic would be to give up their right to personal property so that the state could distribute the wealth fairly and so that the environment would be saved from capitalistic predation.
Of course, those weren't the words he used. He was probably fluent in Daschlespeak. But it worked. After four years of this kind of "philosophy", my friend's son is an adamant (and joyless) socialist.
Ever since that revelating discussion, I've been highly sensitive to "human perfection" philosophical questions - ESPECIALLY if they originate in academia.
Oh, but someone has! Find out for yourself who that someone is, trust in him, and the hurt will disappear . . .
This is at the very core of the definition of what makes us human, and inevitably mortal. The other animals do not have this capacity.
By reflecting on what we did in any given set of circumstances and asking ourselves what we will do differently in the future, we achieve wisdom - the improvement of our moral code - and become better humans. We become closer to God.
In short, the answer to your question, "Is always 'doing the right thing' possible," the answer is no. We may think we know what the right thing is at the time, but in retrospect, it turns out to be wrong. When we come to that realization, adjust our philosophy accordingly, then do the "right" thing the next time, we have done the "right" thing. It's called Live and Learn.