What are the best refutations of the idea that evil shouldn’t be done to stop worse evil?

Great Debates
41

ST:TOS had it right with The Savage Curtain. The question is who benefits and at whose expense?

In the nearly 30 years I’ve been an RN, I’ve stuck a lot of needles in a lot of children. My coworkers come to me because I have skills, and kids I’ve taken care of before are usually glad to have me take care of them again, but God I hate making children cry. Now, if I did it because it gave me a boner, people should be appalled. But here’s the thing, that distinction is lost on an 8 month old, we both need humanity to judge it for us.

42

My emphasis
This is a false dichotomy that presupposes that people who won’t e.g. kill people, also won’t perform any other action to impede evil people. There’s a lot you can do without killing people, depending on the evil people you’re opposing.

43

I don’t think that anyone would argue that running into a street to pull a kid out of the way of a car, which means that you have technically jaywalked, is an evil so big that anyone would think about it in relation to preventing the murder of the child by the car.

But, to be more serious, I think the rule exists to warn against a snowballing effect. Once you start deciding to cut corners to “save the world”, you’re basically looking at a math equation where infinity is on one side.

Let’s say, for example, that we could cure cancer by doling out cancer patients to medical researchers, and they’re told to just “go for it”, using any techniques, cocktails, surgeries, or whatever to find a cure for cancer - without regard to how much they might maim or likely hasten the deaths of their charges. Overall, perhaps this initiative kills millions and millions of people before we get all the cancers solved and done for.

Millions and millions is a “lot” but if we assume 4% growth in the human population, year on year, expanding through the universe until in about 2500 years the energy output by all the stars in the universe becomes less than our species’s caloric needs, and then we assume that our numbers stay constrained by that limit until all the stars blink out in the heat death of the universe and our numbers shrink to zero with it, then there will eventually be about 10^61 humans (a bit over half a googolplex).

Pretty much any tiny reduction you can achieve in the death rate, the millions and millions that your murdered to achieve that cure will be vastly vastly eclipsed by the numbers saved.

If you could convince our descendants to go to the gym more regularly, you’ll save just micro-googolplexes of lives - a number so big that I can’t even use words that functionally mean something to you relative to tiny, insignificant measures like “trillions”.

While a half googolplex isn’t truly an infinity, for all practical purposes, there’s basically zero cost to any inhumane, murderous act as a percentile of the potential saintliness you can gain on the other side.

But, under that light, basically anyone can justify almost anything, so long as they’re convinced that they’re the person with just such an idea that could “save everyone”. The great odds are that most of those true believers are just crazies, with a delusion of grandeur allowing them to murder everyone they hate and fear.

44

Yes but there are circumstances where violence is the only truly effective/moral option and this may or may not involve innocent people being hurt in the process. That’s what the OP is about. Dropping atomic bombs on Japan to get them to surrender and avoid millions more casualties is an example of what I mean.

45

Let’s say I disagree that atom bombing cities was the only option there, and leave it at that.

46

^^^ This is what I was driving at earlier.

I’m not saying I reject the notion that you have to break some eggs to make the omelet, or drive the trolley over a few innocent people to prevent killing considerably more. I’m saying that whenever you justify your destructive actions you need to remain vividly aware that you might be one of those grandiose dangerous lunatics, or at least badly mistaken in your evaluation of the situation.

47

No it’s just assuming that those actions won’t always be as successful as a more forceful violent ones

That’s the point here IMO. If you genuinely believe that it’s fundamentally unethical to do evil to prevent worse evil, that’s an ethical system and no logical argument will refute it. But very few people actually think that. If instead you think it is justified but in practice there is always a “non evil” solution that will work as well as an “evil” one, that is a logical argument and a flawed one IMO.

There are clearly plenty of situations where the only possible way to prevent the worst evil, or try to, is to do something evil. The fact there are also situations where people make that claim when it’s patently false doesn’t change that. e.g. you are in charge of the Polish army in 1939, the only way to try and prevent the brutal occupation of your country by hideous autocratic regimes is to launch a forceful counterattack that will undoubtedly lead thousands of horrible deaths of soldiers under your command and civilians.

48

No. Even if not the most successful possible, they still counter the ‘near impunity’ bit.

And anyway, successful by what metric?

49

Except “most successful” in this context means “with the fewer terrible violent deaths”. And it is absolutely that there are cases where doing violent “evil” things will we prevent more terrible violent deaths than not doing them. So the logical argument that there isn’t is flawed one.

50

What does that have to do with the ‘near impunity’ part I was talking about?

51

Same logic holds. Your argument is there is never a situation where violent “evil” things will prevent an “evil” person doing evil things with near impunity, where just non violent “nonevil” things will not. And that’s trivially untrue.

52

And here’s why I call this argument semantic games.

Metrics seem objective but are so easily gamed that they’ve became a laughingstock within industries, the lazy route taken by people who substitute a mark on paper for intelligence and understanding.

Does any ethical argument apply at the most extreme examples? Is the Catholic Church still a viable organization after decades (probably centuries) of known, massive, quasi-sanctioned child abuse? What is one to make of the United States using never-tried atomic weapons against an enemy proclaiming it will fight to the death? Should that incident count more or less than genocide and slavery? Are armies ever truly necessary or can every dispute be settled diplomatically?

No absolutes exist. Context (what happened before) and consequences (what happened after) do. The best refutation of an absolute is a raspberry.

53

Bro, do you even know the meaning of impunity?

54

Let’s use it in a sentence: “you can sometimes act with impunity if you have a gun, a few hundred thousand Wermacht troops, or a brutal secret police force, as long as no one is willing to risk violence to oppose you”

55

Aah, like the British in India against Gandhi…

56

Which is a statement of an ethical values system. As such there is no logical argument that can refute it. Any more than saying “all ethics are based on the 10 commandments as laid down in the King James Bible” can be refuted by logical argument.

Most people don’t do that though, when arguing about the ethical nature of some act that allegedly prevented more evil than it caused. They don’t argue about the definition of “more evil”, be it civilian deaths or whatever. The argue about the facts, which can (in some cases) be refuted.

57

Again logical falacy. If you are arguing all swans are white, showing me a white swan doesn’t prove your case. Of course there are cases where evil was prevented without resorting to violence, and cases where people claimed violence was justified to prevent more evil when it clearly wasn’t. But that doesn’t mean its never justified.

Also plenty of Indian people will argue that actually Gandhis non violence actually did let Britian act with impunity and caused more evil in the long run. But that’s another thread.

58

Unless you define a “system” as “any hodge-podge of independent events” this is not a system. That’s a distinct difference.

59

Meh pot-tay-toe pot-tay-toe

60

Well, not quite, in the Trolley problem, you can also take NO action.

Right, the trolly problem is a silly useless hypothetical. The Bombing of Hiroshima isnt. But why pick that? Just because we used an atomic weapon? The bombing doubtless saved massive suffering and millions of lives. The other options were worse.

Or we can take the firebombing of Dresden- which did squat, and was- IMHO an act of unqualified evil (In the sequel to Inferno, Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris is in one of the lower reaches of Hell).