What race are you playing as? The different races start out with different ethical alignments. So you might have started out as evil and then moved yourself to neutral
I don't know what ethical allignment I started out as, all that I know is I started as a custom race using the Torian Tech tree and having the populist democracy and the super breeder super ability, therefore if I keep my approval hight My population can't be matched by any other race until far later in the game.
The only bad choices I made were the planet quality bonus's, The neutral choices I made kept me from being dramatically handicaped by choosing the good choice.