Groucho Marxism

The lesser of two evils principle, also referred to as the lesser evil principle and lesser-evilism, is the ethical principle that, when faced with selecting from two immoral options, the less immoral one should be chosen. The maxim goes back centuries and existed already in Platonic philosophy. These days, the principle is most often invoked in reference to lesser evil voting, a binary political choice under systems that make it impossible to express a sincere preference for one’s favourite. The concept of lesser evil voting can be seen as a form of the minimax strategy – ‘minimize the maximum loss’ – where voters, when faced with two or more candidates, choose the one they perceive as the most likely to do harm and vote for the one most likely to defeat them, or the ‘lesser evil’.

There are several problems with this strategy however. By settling for the lesser evil option, voters consistently reward a system that moves steadily to the right, which means the lesser evil of today may be as bad as, or even worse than, the greater evil of yesterday. It creates a Hobson’s choice which masks a lack of real alternatives, discouraging the development of radical movements that might represent public interests better. The strategy allows politicians to win without adopting progressive or popular platforms, relying on fear of the opponent rather than the merit of their own policies. It promotes a form of moral blackmail whereby citizens are pressurized to violate their own principles, which can lead to voter apathy and the erosion of political integrity.

Furthermore, the supposed lesser evils (e.g. Labour and the Liberal Democrats in the UK) often work hand in glove with the greater evils (e.g. the Conservatives and Reform) to protect the same power structures and economic elites, serving as a good cop, bad cop act that keeps the public in the dark about what is really going on behind the scenes. Ultimately, the lesser of two evils is still an evil, and continuing to vote for it means actively enabling harmful outcomes. Instead, we should work for independent political action and creating genuinely representative alternatives, rather than constantly settling for the lesser option. We should also remind ourselves that there is always the option of not voting for anybody at all.

It is not just in the political sphere where the lesser evilism principle is often invoked. It also gets trotted out whenever we try to highlight exploitation, injustice, or any other form of mistreatment we see going on in the world. ‘Well, that might be bad’, the response usually goes, ‘but at least it’s not as bad as X’, where X is some situation that either exists now, could potentially exist now, or has existed at some point in the past, that is deemed to be worse than the state of affairs we are highlighting. This is clearly a form of the lesser evil principle: the argument is that the situation we are complaining about is the lesser evil when compared to some other situation, and therefore we should just stop complaining about it.

The problem with this argument is that no matter how bad a situation is, it is always possible to come up with a situation that seems worse. Don’t like being forced to work 40 hours per week just to survive? Well it could be worse – at least you’re not unemployed! Don’t like being unemployed? Well it could be worse – at least you’re not being forced to work as a slave! Don’t like being forced to work as a slave? Well it could be worse – at least you’re not starving to death! Don’t like starving to death? Well it could be worse – at least you’re not dead! And so on. This response might be referred to as ‘shifting counterfactuals’: whenever you complain about a situation, a new counterfactual situation is invoked to make the situation you are complaining about seem less bad by comparison.

In a previous blog post I argued that we can only meaningfully evaluate a given state of affairs relative to another ‘reference’ state of affairs. This means that we need to first establish a counterfactual before we can make meaningful evaluations. What should this counterfactual be? I think the only logical option is to take as counterfactual the best possible state of affairs that could exist given the current state of technological development. Our existing economic system does not fare too well under this maxim. It is not difficult to conceive of socio-economic systems that would be vastly superior to modern-day capitalism in almost every respect. As the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel puts it: we live in a shadow of the world we could have.