What I mean is, do you essentially picture your vision of an ideal society, and then work backwards and ask what rules or principles would be necessary to make that the outcome? Or do you imagine your ideas of right and wrong, the role of government, the role of social norms, etc first, and then 'press play' on them in a sense, and see what society comes out and just accept the result as the byproduct of those principles?
Are right and wrong, the role of the State, the role of cultures, the responsibilities of the individual, and so on ideas you can imagine in their ideal form in abstract, independent from any specific implementation, or are they tools one uses to get the outcome they want, and if they do not achieve that outcome, you change or modify the tools so that you do get the outcome you want?
This right here is the problem. How do you know you had to abandon your principle to get the best outcome? Was there, 100%, no principled way of getting justice? Or are you sacrificing ultimate justice for personal expediency?
A lot of people have a hard time understanding that the principled best outcome is rarely personally satisfying and sometimes happens without you ever knowing.
That's the best you can get. You don't get to know. You rarely know the definitive outcome most important life choices before you have to make them. You don't know your business will succeed before you start it. You don't know that changing careers after your field starts shrinking and dying will work out better. You don't know the woman you choose to have kids with won't turn into a raging psycho when the menopause hits. The best you can do is be smart, be self-critical and take a stab with the best possible info you can have.
Either you chose to do your best regardless, or you choose to rot in hopeless mediocrity.