If you do what you should not, you must bear what you would not.

Actions arrive with consequences attached, and you do not get to choose the second half separately from the first. The part people quarrel with is always the outcome, never the choice that produced it, because by then the choice has been forgotten or explained away. Consent to the one is consent to the other. Knowing this in advance is most of what carefulness amounts to.

Before the next thing you are about to do that you would rather not describe out loud, name the worst plausible result and ask whether you would accept it as the price. If the answer is no, that is your answer about the action too.