There are people who think since it’s morally wrong to kill innocent people it would still be morally wrong to kill someone to stop even more people from dying (the trolley problem, the atomic bombings of Japan, etc.).
What are the best refutations of this idea?
Wouldn’t a world where good people never performed an evil action to stop even worse evil and harm be an overall worse one where evil people could act with near impunity or lead to a collapse of civilization itself?
Maybe that the concepts of “good” and “evil” are meaningless abstract morale constructs? Not to say that it’s ok to intentionally act in an evil or destructive manner. But in following some arbitrary morale code it’s easy to get bogged down into a sort of circular reasoning trying to weigh different actions or inactions and whatnot.
Take the trolly problem for example. The argument is usually about whether it is worse to do nothing and let ten people die vs pulling the lever and killing one person. Whether one is more “evil” than the other is irrelevant IMHO. You are in a position to save one life or ten, I think you need to go with the outcome that produces the greatest benefit.
Similar logic to dropping a nuke on Hiroshima. If killing hundreds of thousands prevents an invasion that would kill millions and quickly ends a war that has already killed tens of millions, isn’t that the better outcome?
Another thought experiment I came across the other day:
Two people on a deserted island (or an alternative version where they are the last two people on Earth). Is it wrong for one to just up and kill the other and if so, why?
Who is there to judge the survivor?
What law applies?
This is itself a moral claim and the very subject of the discussion. Most people and philosophers agree with you regarding the trolley problem but most isn’t everyone.
I don’t want this to turn into a derail about objective morality and what determines good and evil but yes. It’s wrong to kill people for no good reason. The number of people in the world or the killer in question not being judged by someone else doesn’t make it okay. It’s wrong whether there’s two people in the world or trillions and it’s wrong even if somehow everyone thought it was okay to kill people for no reason whatsoever. The same goes for any number of other claims about truth, reason, logic, epistemic norms, mathematics, etc. that can’t be strictly empirically proven.
Well, that cuts through the Gordian knot, and is one way of settling this or any other question of morality.
But even if you do accept that actions can be “good” or “evil,” it comes down to why evil is evil—what overall system or morality or ethics you’re basing your valuation on.
To a strict consequentialist, what makes an action good or evil depends entirely on its consequences. That would mean that, if doing an “evil” action really does stop worse evil, if it results in more good or less evil than not performing that action, it is therefore an ethical action to take.
To a deontologist, on the other hand, an evil action is evil no matter what the consequences are. To someone with such a point of view, I don’t think there is a refutation like what the OP is asking for.
They can say this but how many would bite the bullet and say it wouldn’t be justified to hurt or kill even one person to stop the entire world from blowing up or some other extremely bad outcome? I will research this matter further.
The problem with “evil is acceptable to prevent a greater evil” is that it presumes that there’s no non-evil way to achieve the same end. The real world is sufficiently complicated that that’s almost never the case.
I’m not sure this rises to the level of “refutation”, but I think a valid concern is that when you’re considering doing an evil violence to a culprit to prevent worse awful things happening to a multitude of people, you might be wrong. You’re not infallible.
History is richly littered with people who did violence (or embraced or endorsed it) because they considered it to be the lesser of evils, where we stare in retrospect years later and think “not only was that not remotely justified, but the proposed justification was also an an evil outcome and this person was utterly wrongheaded”.
Inherently it is not possible to. It boils down to a moral code. If someone does not believe it’s ever acceptable to kill innocent people to save more innocent people then there is no argument that will change their mind. Any more than if someone’s moral code says it’s not a problem to kill innocent people they can be convinced it is by logical argument.
In practice I don’t think many people do actually think that. It generally boils down to the basic flaw in the trolley problem as a model of real life. Namely how do you know that pulling the lever will save more lives than it kills? Who told you that? What’s their agenda? E.g. in the case of Hiroshima, did it actually prevent the invasion of Japan? Were the US government actually convinced it was the only way to prevent it at the time?
That’s a good example of an evil action taken in hopes of preventing greater evil—but so are lots of actions taken in the course of fighting a war (if not on as large a scale), including a lowly soldier firing on an enemy combattant in the course of a battle.
The purpose of “just war theory,” as I understand it, is to try to lay out criteria by which we can judge when such actions are warranted.
Assume the non evil ways have already been tried and failed, have a ridiculously small chance of working or the dilemma has a short enough window of action that you have to decide basically as soon as possible like the trolley problem.
But that’s my point: You shouldn’t assume that. A moral code that only works for hypothetical situations, not for the real world, is a useless moral code.
True of course but it’s also true that the pacifist message of “no war is ever justified as it kills innocent people” has been used by pro-aggressor parties to make sure aggression goes unopposed (e.g. Europe and the US during the rise of the Nazis, pro-Putin agents during the invasion of Ukraine, etc)
But the same holds in reverse. If your moral code is based on the assumption that there is always, or almost always, a “non evil” method to prevent evil, it’s pretty useless if that assumption doesn’t hold up.
(emphasis added)
It’s the “IF” that’s the big problem.
In hypotheticals like the Trolley Problem, there’s never an “if”. Regardless of which action you take, you know with exactitude what the outcome will be. But in real life, we never have that level of certainty.
Sure, you can make an argument that Bombing Japan “probably saved millions of lives”, but we can never know for sure. And it’s that uncertainty that drives a lot of the “Don’t be evil even for good” opinions. What if you dropped the bomb, and then millions still die anyways? What if you drop the bomb, and then find out that Japan was about to surrender anyways? The universe we found ourselves in isn’t the only one that might have existed.
I don’t disagree with @griffin1977, don’t get me wrong. There are current officeholders who are damn lucky I lack means and opportunity, because I sure as hell have motive.
It’s just that it’s a moral perspective that for the sake of real honesty requires accepting the risk of being quite wrong in one’s moral assessment, and deciding to accept that risk, and hence the risk that one is becoming an evil person in so acting. Kind of an internal trolley problem, if you will.
The only reason we have cooperative societies is because we have the ability to punish people. If you take that away, cooperation breaks down.
They’ve tested this with game theory. If you take away the ability to punish cheaters, people stop cooperating together. The only reason we can live in a global society of 8 billion is because we have the ability to formally and informally punish people who do bad things. If you take that away and we go back to being solitary animals.
Bolton and Zwick (1995) conducted a controlled experiment using the ultimatum game, in which they systematically varied both the level of anonymity between players and the experimenter, as well as the players’ capacity to impose punitive measures. Their findings indicated that increasing anonymity led to a rise in the proportion of outcomes consistent with the Nash equilibrium, from 30% to 46%. More strikingly, when the capacity to punish was eliminated, the rate of Nash-consistent outcomes increased from 30% to nearly 100%. The authors concluded that the ability to punish accounts for deviations from the Nash equilibrium to a greater extent than anonymity.[11]
There’s a difference between “use force to stop evil” and “use evil against evil.”
A SWAT team may need to shoot a school gunman dead to save the kids and teachers in the school. Nothing evil about that at all.
“Evil against evil” would be more like “If you torture and rape someone in my family, I’ll torture and rape someone in your family so we’re even.” Which is similar to what some tribes in some locations of the world actually do. Or war crimes as retaliation for war crimes, etc.
I’ll push back on the premise and argue that often, the refutations are made because people want an excuse to justify their behaviors they know are wrong by setting up deliberately absurd premises. The arguments are less an attempt at getting at truth and more an attempt at feeling better about performing a moral failing they were going to perform anyway.
If you accept that Russia’s unjust invasion of Ukraine was “evil”, do Ukranians taking up arms and killing Russian soldiers count as an “evil”? Most people would argue not. But within the war literature, there’s a broad consensus that even in wars for a “just cause”, there are unjust acts: torture of captured soldiers, rape of civilian populations, weapons designed to maximize pain rather than achieve a war aim. And the justifications for why these things shouldn’t be done uniformly aren’t about the impact it has on the other side, but on the detrimental effects these things have on your own side. We see a fairly consistent strain across a broad sweep of military history over what is considered “moral” and “immoral” conduct during warfare where there might be disagreements over which actions precisely fall into which buckets but a consistent warning to avoid immoral conduct during war for purely instrumental reasons.
At the same time, we’ve seen over and over again, military leaders in the vein of Pete Hegseth who believe that all of these pesky rules of engagement are the reason why the military is losing and a “gloves off” approach is the genius insight to produce a winning military, using the exact same “we gotta do evil to those who do evil to us” arguments. So he’s bombing random boats in Central America and claiming they’re drug boats without verification and then deliberately killing the survivors so nobody can find out if their targeting is accurate or not and booting trans people out of the military etc. And the arguments against all this behavior isn’t that we should feel bad for drug dealers and go easy on them, but that it’s self-defeating.
You see this same strain in criminal justice thought: That we should have things like impartial trials, anti-corruption task forces in law enforcement, access to legal aid to the accused etc. and not fall into the easy seduction of mob justice or personal vendetta settling, not as a benefit of the “evildoers” in our society, but as a benefit for the rest of us. And the same arguments back of “well, yes, but this specific case deserves an exception because it’s a unique evil that deserves a unique evil response”.
I think it reduces down to two trivial resolutions: Either you designate certain behaviors as evil, ie: all killing is evil, in which case, it becomes trivial to concoct a hypothetical example where you 100% need to do an evil action in reaction to another evil action.
OR: You designate certain consequences as evil, in which case it becomes trivially true that it’s never right to do an evil action in response to an evil because if you can prove it was the right thing to do, then it definitionally is no longer evil.
But the special pleading for a 3rd response is because doing the right thing is hard and we don’t like to acknowledge our own moral failing so we try to feel better by arguing our case is a special exception to the rule.
I both agree and disagree. I disagree because the first thought that came to mind were elections, where your choices are constrained. There will always be some things that all sides support that you consider evil, and you will always have to vote for the lesser evil.
Now, yes, a lot of people will try to define that action as not evil due to the circumstances and consequences. But then that could apply to everything.
However, in actual practice, this argument is primarily made in situations that you describe. Where there is a less evil option, but they are trying to justify the action they took. When there really is no other choice, the argument is usually what I said above: that, in this case, the thing isn’t evil.
Because I would argue that you ultimately can’t do what the OP wants. Evil by definition is that which you should not do. To convince people to do something, you have to convince them they should. And if they should do it, then it is no longer evil. Everyone inherently believes that there are some things that they would normally consider evil but would not be evil in this certain circumstance.
You could then argue that the OP is asking “how do we convince people that an evil action isn’t necessarily evil in the face of this greater evil action?” But then the answer to that is situationally dependent. There is no overarching answer.
Hate to bring every thread back to a discussion if current US politics. But he’s hardly even pretending he’s doing evil for the greater good, he’s doing evil because it’s cool and pew-pew-pew stuff blows up and brown people die, oh yeaaaaah.