You can check which way your leaning in the management screen. The costs are always the same. Example if your pure good, neutral will be 2500 and evil 10,000. If you stay in the middle both the others will be 2500. So you can check before researching to see which way your leaning. Hope that clears it up a little.  

Ive noticed that when im nuetral evil always costs more than good.

Also if you cant pay off the totall amout it will add a - amount for the next X years to your economy.

If you stay in the middle both the others will be 2500

i believe you will always lean towards good or evil, never exactly in the middle.
i have never seen both of them being 2500.

mystic it is definitely possible to be perfectly Neutral. You just start off as one of the Neutral races and pick only Neutral options whenever you get moral choices. It would be very difficult to get to perfect Neutrality from starting Good or Evil though, I think.

bigshotweb, if you looked at your economy screen you should have had a lease of 10cr. That's the 10,000cr for choosing Evil. Also, from what I have seen, your 2,000cr was wiped out, without any reduction in your debt. So, there is more of a cost than it appears ... although a 1,000 turn lease at 10cr a turn isn't exactly a hardship.

a ha!

i was wondering who the heck would spend 10K on a good ethical alignment. now i see it was just cause i was pretty evil in those games.

have to admit i've never seen evil cost 10K mua ha ha ha ha ha haa

You can help yourself out when it comes time to choose an alignment by thinking about it in advance and using it as a factor when selecting your race. Of course you can always pay the money, but usually you can avoid it.

All races start out with an initial alignment that gets modified by each decision you make in the moral (not morale) events.

If you want to be evil you can start out as anything and always take the evil choice. The only possible problem is if the galaxy is very small you may not get enough moral events to swing yourself evil if you started out as good.

If you really want to be good you pretty much have to start out good and take most of the good moral choices, or start out neutral and take *all* of the good choices. I'm not really sure what benefit being good is other than for the challenge.

If you want to be neutral you have a bit more flexibility. I like to start out with a "good" race whichs allows me to take a reasonable amount of the "evil" choices while still allowing me to end up neutral for free.

A races initial alignment is ranked from 1 (pure evil) to 99 (pure good) with 50 being neutral. The following are the initial alignments for each of the DL races.

Terran 50
Yor 25
Drengin 1
Altarian 99
Drath 75
Torian 75
Arcean 50
Korx 1
Iconian 75
Thalan 50
Custom 50

I play neutral often and I do it from any initial alignment. If you make enough good or evil choices, you'll eventually end up neutral. But it does mean you have to make choices you don't want to sometimes, such as a a major hit of some kind on a specific planet to raise your "good" side up some. I think we all have personal preferences as to what bonuses are more important than others. I tend to accept losing a chance on 20% or 50% or something to ships (aka the pirates event) if I need to raise my good side, as well as some other choices.

I tend to accept losing a chance on 20% or 50% or something to ships

This is a good point. I dislike the starship bonus thing because I don't want to commit myself to using the planet as a production center and it's usually more trouble than it's worth to have different quality ships from different planets.

On the other hand, I will *never* accept a moral choice that results in a morale penalty to a planet, it's just too painful for population control.

You should always balance the benefit of the "evil" choice with the penalty of the "good" choice, unless you're looking to go evil in which case you just always take the evil choice regardless of how small the benefit.