First Principles: Necessary Evil

As a matter of principle, I believe that telling someone what they must do, or what they may not do, is an evil act. I believe that forcing the course of someones life to a path someone else has chosen for them is evil.

I am, however, a believer in the concept of necessary evil.

Some acts, which would be entirely unacceptable in a perfect world, must be taken in the real world, to prevent a greater evil.

I think that this is an essentially unarguable point, except from the mental gymnastics crowd, who will talk themselves into believing anything (these people really creep me out). Of course, this leaves the door wide open to do anything, and claim it is 'necessary' by one justification or another. To provide extreme examples, the Nazi's talked themselves into believing that wholesale murder was right, the Soviets just talked themselves into believing it was needed; the difference is pretty academic to the people in the mass graves. And whilst the extremes are overused so much that it is hard not to just dismiss arguments based on them out of hand, it is worthwhile to look at what the extreme results of a philosophy are, to determine both whether it is a usable philosophy, and perhaps what steps are needed to keep it from moving to the extreme.

In the course of thinking about this, I have come up with a basic test to determine where an otherwise wrong act is acceptable.

1. Is there a real, provable need for action? Not something that can only be shown by complex verbal judo or double speak or emotional maneuvering, but something directly and plainly provable.

2. Will the act correct the need? No bait-and-switch fancy footwork.

3. What will be the other consequences of the act? There are always other consequences, it must be known that they are less damaging than what we are trying to fix. Certainly, the secondary consequences should be as minimal as possible.

4. Is this the least wrong solution available? This is not a simple decision, and absolute certainty is generally is usually not available, but it can often be seen that some responses are drastically worse than others.