On a more serious note. With aesthetic choices, it's pretty straightforward for me. I don't go to the classics expecting them to read like works from today. Of course they will be different in terms of narrative style, voice, etc. I approach such a text as a historical and sociocultural artifact. The content or the story is, to me, like historical fiction (which I enjoy, write, and teach.) Form is about literary tradition and lineage and not something I appreciate in the same way as I might appreciate it in contemporary works.
With moral/ethical issues, I have two personal litmus tests. And I'm sure these hold true for many literary translators. The first question is whether the writer is showing those questionable ethics or moralities in genuine or gratuitous ways. Meaning, are they necessary to the story and the plot? If yes, then I want to understand whether the writer is simply presenting the situations to us or shedding some new light on them.
If the text passes these two tests (and, generally, if we've chosen our original text well, it will), then I have to decide how much hand-holding I want to do with a contemporary reader. Generally, if we're dealing with a good writer's work, we shouldn't have to do much at all. And, as George Saunders often says, we have to trust that the reader is smart enough, perhaps even more intelligent than us. That said, I've sometimes added into the text what Jason Grunebaum (a Hindi/Urdu to English translator in the US) has called a "stealth gloss", which is about adding just enough information or context within the text itself that isn't intrusive or didactic. If there's no way to do that well, then I'll put something into a formal glossary.
Here are some interesting links:
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