You, and a couple of other people, are stranded on a boat and near death by starvation There is no prospect of being saved in the foreseeable future. Your only chance is to eat someone. Will you pull straws, look for volunteers, pick the oldest, vote, … What is your pick? This is a classical question from ethics and many evils to choose from, not just two. If you follow the neat and popular quote by some Spurgeon – “Of two evils, choose neither”, you will all die. But hey, at least you will feel good about yourself for not killing that one person, while everybody is dying as a result of your choice.

For the start, in order to avoid unnecessary complications, let’s not use the word “evil” here. It is relative and depends on the values of specific people. Let’s just talk about options that we don’t like instead. If there were a cute pig and a goat on the boat, most people would not consider it a choice between evils anymore but rather just distasteful. That does not change the merit of the question and the necessity of the choice to be made though. Unless they were vegan, and it would be evil again.

If you find yourself in a bad situation, you will only have bad options to choose from. People have a tendency to automatically reject bad solutions even if they don’t deal in quotes, but simply on the grounds that they don’t like them. Somehow they believe that there will always be an option available that is great and nice with everyone being happy. Problem is that if a good solution indeed exists, it was not a bad situation to begin with. Perhaps the solution is hard to find. That makes the situation complicated. But not bad. If you are in a bad situation, then, by definition, you only have bad options. Not that the options are bad in every aspect, but they have some harmful components alongside the beneficial ones.

Now, you can either believe the fantasy that every situation has a good, happy solution. Or you have to admit that bad situations also exist and you will have to accept solutions that you do not like.

This has a far reaching consequence. No policy – from little daily choices to global policies and philosophies, can be rejected solely on the grounds of being bad in some way. Because if that bad solution is a response to a bad situation, it may still be the best one available.

There is a parallel in predicate logic (the system all our knowledge stands on) which also shows how wrong this wishful thinking is. It is not perfect, but quite close.

If a logical system is consistent – that is, no two pieces of information in it (neither any consequence and combination of them) can contradict one another –  it is always clear what is true (i.e. what is a part of that system) and what is false, or being outside of it. If you take any correct logical step within the system (such as induction), combining information and arriving at a new one, you will always get a correct, true outcome. If you want to show that something true is indeed true, you can always do it using those correct, logical steps. This corresponds to a good situation in life in which we can always find good plans that lead to good outcomes. If we want to reach our goals, we can always do that through good means, with no need to compromise.

But what happens when we introduce a single inconsistency, a single tiny flaw into the logical system? It is much worse than one would expect. The system does not become a little flawed so that we can just go around the issue and still find good solutions elsewhere, no. Any flaw, however small, opens the floodgates and everything that was false before, becomes true. Every bad thing and bad step becomes legitimate. If a life situation is bad, suddenly no purely good path exists and no bad move can be a priori ruled out. One bad solution can only be ruled out when we find a better one, and the better one will also be bad.

The refusal to see or understand this is why people so often end up in endless disagreements, unable to reach a solution, or worse, they make terrible decisions. In a bad situation, whenever someone proposes a solution, there are two possibilities. If it is a legitimate solution, it has to be, inevitably, bad in some way. Then the other side points out the flaw and rejects the whole idea. When their turn comes to propose something, it gets rejected by the former party for the same reason. Since no side is willing to accept that a solution to the bad situation isn’t going to be perfect, they will not get anywhere.

There is a nice line demonstrating this. “The left will waste money to ensure not one person in need is left behind, while the right will not spend anything if there’s a chance one undeserving person might benefit.”

The other possibility is that the proposed solution is just wishful thinking nonsense that is even worse, but it hides the problems and looks good. It then passes. And that is how politics is done.

The reality is that the world is one big bad situation. There are imperfections and inefficiencies everywhere. There may be specific, local areas where improvement is straightforward and without trade offs. But in most cases, any attempt to solve anything will have some downsides. If we want to perform any action, we need to accept that it will have some bad consequences and that alone should not stop us. It is inevitable.

That is even more true on the large scale of policies. Consequently, a policy cannot be refused solely because there is something bad in it. It can only be refuted by providing a better one, or at least by proving that a better one exists and can reasonably and practically be found, and therefore we should wait and look for it.

Libertarians and the Austrian school of economics make this mistake on the largest scale – in theory. They literally refuse any actions other than ones that are pareto-optimal. Which is a fancy word for actions that are perfect in every way, with zero downside and everyone happy about it. As I have shown, this is reasonable only in a flawless system or special, limited cases. In the real world, this theory is almost entirely useless.

How bad can things be? Similarly to the flawed logical system where suddenly every falsehood becomes true: if the reality is not perfect – which it never is – there is no limit (in theory, not in specific cases) to how bad even the best available actions may be. The worse the situation, the worse the best solution¹. Or stated in reverse – however dreadful a thing you can think of – a situation can (theoretically) exist in which this dreadful thing is still the best thing to do, and doing anything else will be the same, or even worse.

A further consequence is that in reality, circumstances may arise that will require doing something that really goes against our values. People usually have some limit of what they are willing to do. Many would refuse to kill a person, or hurt an animal. But what if we end up in a bad situation, the best solution of which requires us to do something of this sort? Doing it would be the best thing possible, and rejection would lead to something even worse. If we are in such a situation and uphold our moral limit, something even worse will have to be done, and we become responsible for the difference between the original solution and the worse one.

If you could kill ten year old Hitler, would you do it? Upholding the no-murder value is nice, but It would make you responsible for all the WW2 terrors.

Practically, this is a hard question, because there is always some uncertainty about the consequences and a hope that a good solution exists. The moral limits help to prevent a lot of errors that would happen if we go for the bad solutions too eagerly. But if the consequences are clear, there is no avoiding them. 

So in summary, I have shown that we need to be able to accept doing harm if we want to act. Now I will add some important points on what limits it has. And I will make the first point right here – accepting that doing harm may be necessary does by no means absolve us of responsibility for it.

A thing to note is that if offered two bad solutions, you should not automatically jump onto one because of what I wrote. It is good to look for other options and more so because people may present those two options on purpose as the “false dilemma fallacy” – trying to force you into making a wrong choice. Recently I saw a communist arguing that either you are a fascist, or you oppose fascism, and the only such opposition is communism. Fascism, or communism – make your choice. It never occurred to them that freedom exists. Or rather, they intentionally left that out.

The last point I want to emphasize is the responsibility. Yes, doing bad things and harm is inevitable. But we are still responsible for the action. This should not lead to the conclusion that we should not do anything, or that it doesn’t matter what we do. But rather that we need to learn to accept the responsibility and to carry that burden. If we get into a bad situation, it can’t be avoided and the best way is to deal with it head on. Learning this is a big part of growing up.

1. The degree of badness of the situation is the limit of how bad the best solution is. But until we know how bad the issue we are dealing with is, we can’t put any limit on it. ↩︎