Licence to one is licence to all

Dave and Mikhail had an argument on Mikhail’s apparent ‘hypocrisy’. After seeing Mikhail kiss his girlfriend, Dave said to Mikhail:

“If you hold that you do not wish to look at women, ‘naked’ in the form of pornography or even display because it is depraving to a woman’s dignity , it makes the woman, an object of expression, one that tries to show her as a mode of pleasure and gratification which contradicts the way we look at our own mothers and daughters. But you then kiss your girlfriend. Where does your sense of depravity go? Surely kissing a girl is using her as an object of pleasure. You don’t restrain yourself with her but take pains with depravity in movies and pictures. “

Mikhail understood Dave’s obvious annoyance. Mikhail replies:

“Without getting into concepts of love, I would try to reach to a different argument. One of license. To act against something is a ‘continuous choice’. If I fail at one, I make again a choice to act against another. If I fail at one, in one domain I can still stop myself because I still have a choice, every time, it is a choice. To say that I kissed a girl and so there is no point to struggle against movies is to think that I have no choice at all because I made one wrong choice. I did not give up my ideology did I? I did not give in to the ‘ideology’ of depravity but only to depravity. That is, the temptation to the pleasure of depravity that I not so much have to ‘act’ against but ‘struggle’ against (As man is sinful by nature thus I can never really ‘act’ against but struggle against the same). Thus what was seen was a lack of courage, a fall in battle, I can stand up again against the war. My lack of courage should not be seen as a license to lack of ideology and throw in the towel in all other places. I do not get the license because I fall to temptation. It is only an opportunity to test the character of my ideology. My ideology is not dismissed because I fell. I struggle against it because it is not right[depravity]. My failing did not make it [depravity], right/OK but only showed that it is hard to do what is right. My ideology is intact until I think it is not right. I do not fall because momentarily, I think it[depravity] is right/OK and allow myself. I only fall because it is hard and I could not fight for what is right. If you tell me I have no right anymore to struggle against any other forms of depravity is for me to accept that they have all turned right(depravity) just because I fell in one instance. Lack of courage nails my choice(of going with depravity or otherwise) but my ideology provides me more choices to choose courage and itself.