Thats how it is in our grayscale world

Yes, always.

i just don’t vote won’t catch ME endorsing evil

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”.

Moral rules are not things to be blindly followed, but rather are useful guidelines to avoid screwing things up. They are “the manual,” they are “standard operating procedure,” they are there for a reason and you can deviate from them, sure, but you’d better have a damn good reason, or you can expect it to blow up in your face.

Virtually everyone seems to have this all twisted up. On the one hand, you have people who always try to follow SOP, even if there’s good reason to deviate from it. On the other hand, you have people who see that there are situations where SOP doesn’t apply, so they just ignore it altogether. Both of these approaches are foolish and lead to making mistakes.

The trolley problem is a thought experiment specifically designed to be an exception to the otherwise reasonable SOP of “Don’t kill innocents.” But you don’t make a rule from the exception. You don’t go around treating, “The ends justify the means,” or “It doesn’t matter how many people I have to sacrifice in persuit of the greater good,” as your new SOP, just because you saw a thought experiment where the old SOP doesn’t apply.

The whole reason moral guidelines are necessary is because the mind if fallible and prone to making mistakes. Our emotions, or our desire to fit a particular identity, may get in the way of good decision making. For example, the use of torture post-9/11 was driven by hatred, a desire for revenge and domination, and a desire to embody the image of the Jack Bauer antihero, willing to do whatever it takes to keep people safe. I’ve read reports of NSA torturers walking out of torture sessions while visibly erect. It was driven by, well, evil. This “ends justifies the means” mental framework makes it all to easy for hate or other emotions to hijack reason. Of course, in reality, this torture never produced any useful information, and in at least one case caused a previously cooperative informant to clam up.

Likewise, if a problem can be pushed out of sight and out of mind, it can easily be ignored or rationalized away. This is the case with liberals and the Palestinian genocide. When something is far away, when it affects people who I don’t know, then psychologically it becomes much easier to write off anything that happens - even moreso if you are operating on the framework of, “Any cost to achieve my aims.” But these situations are where moral guidelines are more important than ever. It is fundamentally unacceptable to act on willful ignorance of the suffering caused by one’s actions, to say, “This makes me feel guilty so I just won’t look at it or think about it.” This is another way in which one’s mind can compromise their reason and better judgement.

That’s also what’s at play, at least imo, when people continue to eat meat despite knowing about the cruelty involved in that industry. When we see someone beat a dog, we are horrified, we are outraged, we are moved to act to stop it - because our empathy extends to the pain the dog feels. But cows and pigs can feel pain just as a dog can, which means that rationally, we should be equally horrified at the conditions those animals are kept in. But those practices are always kept out of sight and out of mind, and the mind has powerful forces, like the force of habit, that are capable of compromising reason and good judgement.

When people try to convince me of things (especially things like torture or genocide) based on them being “the lesser evil,” to say it goes against SOP is an understatement. It’s like asking me to dance a waltz on the raised forks of a forklift. Now, maybe some set of circumstances exists in which standing on the raised forks of a forklift makes sense, like maybe it’s the only way to escape a fire. But I’m never going to accept that this is just a normal or generally acceptable way of doing things.

The rules are there for a reason and you shouldn’t deviate from them without a very good reason and the majority of the time that people think they have a good reason they are wrong.

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.

I think of it as the food I must eat.

I am to hunger and I am to eat, I am to end something’s being in order for me to be.

Best I can do is reduce the damage I induce. Eat just enough and waste little. Regardless I did an evil and now that something is no more.

I must have reverence for the harm I induce. To apply this into politics, harm will always happen - best you can do is fixate on the interests that are dire and do your part to reduce the harm in other avenues. The world is so interconnected, that almost every action has a negative - we are often just oblivious for we can only see our part.

When it comes to politics, it’s dangerous thinking that got us in this hellhole in the first place. It proved to anyone getting into politics that you can be a massive shit stain, but just be a slightly smaller shit stain than your opponent and people will support you to no end. Alternatively you can be the exact same level of shit stain as your opponent, but say things in a nicer way or just not at all and get the same results.

I personally have refused to accept this outcome since the only thing it leads us to is a slower death. I’d rather put my time and effort into supporting those that keep us alive even if most refuse to support that decision and call it idiotic.

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.

The choice is rarely actually binary.

Choosing the lesser evil is the cornerstone of our great democracies!

gotta call their bluff eventually. otherwise you just end up with the “lesser evil” still being genocide.

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.

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.

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.