Too often this option is presented by people who are deliberately manipulating you and causing you to think that you only have the two choices which each benefit them and neither you. Always consider who is offering this choice and why. The true lesser evil here is whatever you have to do to get out of the situation where this choice is being presented to you.
Yeah “lesser evilism” always supposes the choice is being made in a vacuum where there’s only 2 options and nothing can be done about it later, there will never be another choice.
Obviously if you were presented with two options and that was it. You would always pick the lesser evil.
Its a large component of my morality. Being basically a subcomponent of ethic of least harm. I mean armchair idealized morality is great but this life don’t always give you a good option.
It’s a manipulative fallacy. Humanity has the total ability to control its destiny within what’s physically possible. People presenting two options and demanding a choice of one discount every possibly out of an infinite set of possibilities except those two.
See: horse image
Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos
It’s highly context dependent.
In medicine, you face this question all the time. Will a surgery do more harm than good. Can I just leave that person suffering, or should I roll the dice with this surgery? It’s a proper dilemma to ponder. How about this medication that improves the patient’s quality of life in one area, but causes some side effects that are less horrifying than the underlying condition. Sounds like a win, but is it really?
In various technical contexts, you often find yourself comparing two bad options and pick the one that is “less bad”. Neither of them are evil, good, great or even acceptable. They’re both bad, and you have to pick one so that the machine can work for a while longer until you get the real spare parts and fix it properly. For example, you may end up running a water pump at lower speed for the time being. It wears down the bearing, moves less water, consumes too much energy etc, but it’s still better than shutting the pump down for two weeks.
In various technical contexts
You probably do this all the time without thinking much about it. For example, updating mains-powered devices without UPS. There’s a chance the power goes out and something gets screwed up.
Yeah. Roll the dice, hope for the best and all that. If power goes out, you could be looking at several days of troubleshooting, but it is unlikely to happen.
On the other hand, you could get that UPS, but that’s going to take time, and the server really needs those security patches today. Are you going to roll that dice instead and hope nobody tries to exploit a new vulnerability discovered this morning?
Either way, it’s pretty bad.
“lesser risk” is a lot different than “lesser evil”
so is “higher cost”
yeah I was unimpressed with those examples. usually its something where you have no real choice.
Yeah, but depending on where you live that would be a freak accident and not something worth considering. In my entire life I have never experienced a mains power outage, it’s not really a thing in Germany
Yeah, where I live it happens like once every two-three years, usually during winter storms so it’s easy to avoid doing it then.
In medicine you chose the best option not the lesser evil
The way I see it, that’s just different wording for the same thing. More patient friendly, for sure.
If there really are only harmful options, for sure choose the least harm. But you have to make sure that you’re not ignoring an option which involves no harm.
The problem really is when people assume there’s only two choices. If you dont like the choices, be creative and come up with something else.
I mean for most things there are almost unlimited choices. One can go mad in response to something. So just want to add to not assume there are only two effective choices and be creative to look for another possible effective choice. I mean if you find a new choice to avoid a choice that you can see will have the same result of the first choice then making the new choice is effectively the same as the other choice.
I’d caveat that if you didnt know the new choice would result in the same thing as the first choice, you still gained new knowledge by trying it out. We also can’t know all the answers all the time.
totally agree.
If you are in this position, it helps to remember a great suits quote:
You need a bigger gun
—Harvey Specter
gotta call their bluff eventually. otherwise you just end up with the “lesser evil” still being genocide.
It’s a farce.
There are never only two choices. It is impossible to actually construct a real world situation where in there are only two choices. Even in an elementary school, given a test with only on question on it and it only has two answers, you can eat the test, scribble on it, punch the computer screen, walk out, etc.
Even in prison with guards pointing guns at you and putting you in a position to do either A or B you have options.
However, the concept of lesser evil is a shallow abstraction of the real world experience of pragmatism. Amongst all of your options, what course of action leads to the most desirable outcomes?
This is a real thing. We do it all the time. People in positions of grave responsibility have to do it with consequences and constraints that are absolutely gutting. Let’s say the war has already started, well, now you have to make decisions about how to avoid losing the most strategically important objectives, even if that means people dying. In fact, the strategies employed in war force decision makers into these sorts of choices as a matter of course - an opponent knows you don’t want to make certain sacrifices and will therefore create pressures that trade off those sacrifices with strategic objectives. Sometimes it’s not even that they believe you’ll give up the strategic objectives but the delay you have when choosing will give them an advantage, or the emotional and psychological toll of being put in such situations repeatedly over a long campaign can create substantial advantages.
Lesser evil is rhetorical sophistry or mildly useful thought experiments when exploring the consequences of ethical frameworks in academia.
Its usually used by more evil evildoers trying to paint themselves as less evil than their (real or made up) opposition, while advocating for evil. I think its a desparation move by villains who got found out.
Or arrogance and hubris of villains in politics, painting themselves as the lesser evil while aligned with their opposition against the voters they hsve contempt for.
Hey you’re finally getting it I see.
Finally is not accurate, I have known this my entire life and for over 16 years have been evangela sizing about the need for better opposition politicians offering a new deal rather than plutocratic rot led by the most unpopular candidates they could possibly find. Unpopular and candidates not fit for the moment. Everyone knows they are being screwed if not by whom. It has long been clear either the Democrats channel that anger or the Republicans will. The Democrats refused so now the Republicans will. And those Democrats are blaming everybody else. But they knew the situation and refused to change their strategy written in 1990.
https://hexbear.net/comment/6470637
You’re the “western governments vs eastern governments” racist guy. Do you finally get that you were fucking wrong?
Says the brigading tanky stroking off Russia and China.
Your argument is too stupid to refute, only a total fucking moron would want China or Russia’s government, get the fuck out of here.
The concept of the “lesser evil” operates as a manipulative technique, much like the neoliberal slogan “there is no alternative” (TINA). In both cases, the spectrum of alternatives is artificially narrowed to create the illusion of fewer choices than actually exist. For example, while the United States has roughly fifteen multi-state political parties, the lesser evil strategy deliberately implies there are only two.
No, the First-Past-The-Post system + media polarisation makes it a two party system. If you had proportional election you would have more parties, because the rest votes don’t dissappear. The US election system is from the 1800s and outdated.
If you had proportional election you would have more parties, because the rest votes don’t dissappear.
The US election system is from the 1800s and outdated.
So, would the better option not be to fight for a better system or infiltrate one of the two parties and change it from within?
I think the biggest problem I have with the way the US has been working is that we just vote for the lesser evil and call it a day, thinking we’ve done our part. We’ve done all we can do. It makes things simple. It makes us feel good.
The real solution is a long, hard fight for change that will actually solve some of our problems. It involves convincing others, fierce public debate, and may result in violence. You will not be alone, but there will also be countless others who may not agree with your solution and will fight you every step of the way. Your opposition may be inspired by a genuine passion for a different solution. They may have an irrational fear of change. Some may simply benefit from the status quo and prefer to protect what they have than solve any problems for the rest of society. It’s so complicated and it’s just so much easier to offload that work to politicians.
Unfortunately, the most powerful among us know this and work as hard as possible to convince the politicians that they know better… or they just buy them out.
You are intentionally shutting out reality and choosing to believe that third party candidates are viable but they absolutely are not
You are intentionally shutting out the meaning of my comment.
Which is? If it’s not trying to convince people to piss into the void by voting third party, I’m all ears
The choice is rarely actually binary.
I could do it once. When the “lesser evil” decides their whole strategy is being the lesser evil and blackmail me with “if you don’t vote us the big evil will come” then I grow tired and issue a big fuck you to the “lesser evil”.
So, the worst thing happens but hurray for you because you didn’t let yourself feel bad about it?
Hurray because I choose to stir towards the good thing instead of one of the evils. People supporting big evil or small evil should be questioned, not me.
So, you’re going to skip over the whole ‘worst thing happening’ part?
No, but it’s not my fault.
Why it have to be responsibility of the people who doesn’t want the “lesser evil”?
Why is not responsibility of the people not wanting “the actual good thing”?
“No, but it’s not my fault.”
Sounds like what millions of Germans said after WW2.
Disengage
Back in the day, ex-slave Frederick Douglas had to choose between supporting a Presidential candidate who was for immediate abolition of slavery or helping a wishy-washy liberal who wouldn’t come out in favor of abolition. Douglas chose to support the liberal because Douglas thought the liberal had a better chance of winning the election. Douglas had to weight the odds and decided that it was better to have a President who might listen to the abolition cause than it was to be ‘moral’ and lose the election.
Perfect example since slavery wasn’t banned until the slave states straight up declared war on the free states. You’ll never get a wishy-washy candidate to oppose institutional violence. Only direct action will end injustice
You really should read up a bit more on the Civil War. Maryland was a slave state that stuck with the Union.
That’s not so much “lesser evil” as “achievable good”.
Tom-A-to, tom-AH-to.
Moral relativism is consequentialist nonsense, and like most consequentialist nonsense, easy to abuse to justify evil acts. I can’t agree to that.
Back in the day, philosophers would stand in the public square and debate any one as an equal.
Today, ‘philosophers’ hide behind specialized lingo only they understand.
And don’t say I could look it up. Einstein said that if a scientist couldn’t explain what he was doing to a five year old the scientist was a fraud.
Okay, five-year-old:
Doing good is important. Sometimes, you want do do a lot of good but feel like you can only do a little good. That’s okay! Do what you can.
Sometimes you may think it’s okay to be naughty, because you know other kids who are very naughty all the time. But it’s still not okay to be naughty, even a little bit.
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My father is going to beat up my mom if he finds out that she took his drug money to buy food.
Are you saying I shouldn’t lie? That it’s more important to tell the truth than to protect my mom from a beating?
False dichotomy, those aren’t your only choices.
Further, lying isn’t automatically wrong. Deceiving or otherwise inhibiting a hostile, evil entity is virtuous.
It’s often used misleadingly. For example, in an election in a de facto two-party system, it’s often said that you should vote for ‘the lesser evil’, but this presumes that your vote will decide the result of the election, which it clearly won’t. Thinking e.g. “the Dems winning would be the lesser evil compared to the Republicans winning, and I’m voting third party (or spoiling or even abstaining)” is therefore entirely coherent imho.
I would like to see it used more to describe political situations outside of the West tbh. When we talk about x regime, it should always be ‘compared to what’. But of course, no-one cares about ‘lesser evils’ in this context, which I think says a lot.
Thats how it is in our grayscale world
