Underpants, Overpants, Wombling Free AKA A Tricky Moral Dilemma Pertaining to Underpants

Morality is a notoriously tricky thing. For whilst some choices you have to make have a fairly clear right and wrong answer, there are other dilemmas to which the solution is unclear to point of being baffling. Indeed, sometimes it’s all but impossible to tell whether there even are right and wrong choices at all.

For example, every now and then I give away my old and unwanted clothes (I know, it’s very generous of me, but I like to think of it as a small gesture towards helping those less fortunate than myself to at least come vaguely close to aping my incredible sense of style). However, as I gather the retired garments together and put them into a bag I also wonder what should be sent to the charity shop/clothing bank and what should simply be thrown away. The main moral dilemma here is that of underpants. I appreciate, on one hand, that when you throw away a pair of pants it’s usually because they’re worn and soiled to the point of near destruction, but then I’m sure that a freezing tramp, when faced with a choice between spending a night on the streets in a torn pair of trousers and a jumper full of holes or doing so in the nude with opt for the former. Beggars can’t be choosers indeed.

So, if I were forced to make a decision, I would assume the same to be true of pants. Surely it’s better to have someone’s old and decrepit pants than to be forced to go commando? But I fully realise that this is morally dubious area, and that I really have no idea what the right thing to do is. When the prim, middle aged ladies who volunteer at charity shops open the bags of donations that have been left outside, do they recoil in horror if they discover one of them to contain an aged pair of undergarments, tut and go, ‘well, honestly! Do people really think we want their old pants?!’ Or is it a completely different situation? Is there an African village somewhere in which once a month the elders send their fastest and fittest runner to the nearest city, hundreds of miles away, in order to collect donations from a charity, let a week pass, then wait in anticipation when they see him on the horizon, their expectations growing all the time, only for him to arrive, crestfallen, and announce sadly, ‘there were… No pants...’?

So, it’s a tricky area, as you can see. I’m no closer to resolving it. There is one more thing to consider, and that’s that if clothes are not in a fit state to sell or give away the fabric can still be recycled. But into what, exactly?! Other clothes? Cloths? If that’s the case, would you really want to wear something made out of my old pants? Or clean the floor with cloths made out of my worn out undercrackers?!?! The mind boggles, and the public need to be told!!!