[Reader-list] "Lesser Evil"

[Jeebesh]

dear All,

Since the term "Lesser Evil" has come up in the list, it maybe  
worthwhile to think this trope through. Enclosed is a text by Eyal  
Weizman, an architect working btw Israel and UK. He has been  
investigating this mode of argumentation and thinking for a while now.  
Please do give this some attention.

best
Jeebesh

http://roundtable.kein.org/node/802

Eyal Weizman: 665/The Lesser Evil
Submitted by eyal weizman on Thu, 2008-08-07 17:33

A few months ago a friend sent me the following lines by the Italian  
comedian Beppe Grillo: ‘For a long time Italians have been in a  
[political] coma. We are always in search of the lesser evil. In fact,  
we should construct a monument for the “lesser evil”. A huge monument  
in the middle of Rome’.
If anyone ever asked me to build such a monument, in Rome or  
elsewhere, I would probably look for a high hill and place the digits  
665 (like giant Hollywood letters) overlooking the city centre—a notch  
less than evil, a counter displaying the fact that our society has  
become a calculating machine.

Indeed the principle of the ‘lesser evil’ has become so prominently  
identified with the ethico-political foundations of liberal capitalism  
(and its political system that we like to call democracy) and so  
firmly naturalized in common speech that it seem to have become the  
‘new good’. Commenting upon the comparative merits of democracy  
shortly after the end of World War II, Winston Churchill may have  
inaugurated this trend when he sardonically noted that ‘it has been  
said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those  
other forms that have been tried from time to time’. Since then, and  
increasingly since Soviet (and Third World) horrors began to be  
exposed a decade into the cold war, the projection of totalitarian  
horrors has been mobilized, beyond a frank concern for individual  
rights, to stop all search for a different form of politics. It was  
ultimately the mediated spectre of these atrocities that compelled the  
public to constantly weigh liberal disorder against the worse evils of  
totalitarian tyranny in favour of the former. In comparison to the  
horrors of totalitarianism, this inegalitarian and unjust regime was  
presented as a responsible ‘lesser evil’, ‘the best of all worlds  
possible’, and as a necessary barrier against regress to bloody  
dictatorships.1 This multifaceted political shift within the left was  
largely promoted by post-1968 western ‘radicals’ who switched the  
focus of their political engagement to criticizing left-totalitarian  
regimes across the second and third worlds, while arguing for the  
autonomy of civil society at home. The notions espoused by these  
largely French nouveaux philosophes—‘let’s hold on to what we have,  
because there is worse elsewhere’—demonstrated that for liberals  
‘evil’ was always somewhere else, lurking behind any attempt at  
political transformation.2

Hannah Arendt, the thinker who has done most to analyze and compare  
the political systems of totalitarianism, and whose work The Origins  
of Totalitarianism was most often mobilized in relation to this  
‘antitotalitarian’ shift in the left, saw the principle of the ‘lesser  
evil’ strongly at work, not only in the ‘making-do’ of liberal  
capitalism but in the way the totalitarian system tended to camouflage  
its radical actions from those yet to be initiated—the majority of  
bourgeois subjects needed to run things until a ‘new man’ was created.  
Writing about the collaboration and cooperation of ordinary Germans  
with the Nazi regime, mainly by those employed in the Civil Service  
(but also by the Jewish councils set up by the Nazis), she showed how  
the argument for the lesser evil has become one of the most important  
‘mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and crimes’. She  
explained that ‘acceptance of lesser evils [has been] consciously used  
in conditioning government officials as well as the population at  
large to the acceptance of evil as such’, to the degree that ‘those  
who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil’.3  
Against all those who stayed in Germany to make things better from  
within, against all acts of collaboration, especially those undertaken  
for the sake of the moderation of harm, against the argument that the  
‘lesser evil’ of collaboration with brutal regimes is acceptable if it  
might prevent or divert greater evils, she called for individual  
disobedience and collective disorder. Participation, she insisted,  
communicated consent; moreover, it handed support to the oppressor.  
When nothing else was possible, to do nothing was the last effective  
form of resistance, and the practical consequences of refusal were  
nearly always better if enough people refused. In her essay ‘The Eggs  
Speak Up’, a sarcastic reference to Stalin’s dictum that ‘you can’t  
make an omelet without breaking a few eggs’, Arendt pleaded for ‘a  
radical negation of the whole concept of lesser evil in politics’.4

In Arendt’s writings the principle of the lesser evil is presented as  
a pragmatic compromise and frequent exception to ‘common ethics’, to  
the degree that it has become the most common justification for the  
very notion of exception. It is in this seemingly pragmatic approach  
that the principle of the lesser evil naturalizes crimes and other  
forms of injustice, acting as a main argument in the state’s regime of  
justification—people and regimes tend to invent retroactive  
explanations for atrocious actions. Furthermore, Arendt saw the  
calculation and measurement of goods and evils, like statistical  
trends in the social sciences, as diminishing the value of personal  
responsibility. Once ethics is seen in the form of an economy, when  
issues are put into numbers, they can be changed and turned around  
endlessly. And lastly, the terms of the lesser evil are most often  
posed by and from the point of view of power. Using a formulation she  
conceived with Mary McCarthy, Arendt explained: ‘If somebody points a  
gun at you and says, “Kill your friend or I will kill you”, he is  
tempting you, that is all’.5

It is important to note that when speaking about the political options  
available to people living in the postwar western states, Arendt was  
much less damning about the principle of the ‘lesser evil’. She  
implied that these options did include various forms of compromise and  
measure.6 In other words, she described the lesser evil as a false  
dilemma when faced with a totalitarian regime that itself has no  
concept of the lesser evil (totalitarians simply camouflage their acts  
as lesser evils), but as a part of the very structure of politics in  
the context of Cold War western democracies. Whether we accept them or  
not, the distinctions she implied point to a possible differend within  
the term, and could lead us to open up the concept further. The  
various historical and philosophical uses of the lesser evil idiom  
demonstrate that it meant different things to different people at  
different periods in different situations. There is a difference  
between masking an act of perpetration as a ‘lesser evil’, choosing  
the lesser of two evils and trying to make the world a little less  
evil while still pursuing a cause.
***
I would like to divide the use of the idiom ‘lesser evil’ into two— 
particular and general. The particular case is presented to a person  
or to a group of people as a dilemma between two (or more) bad options  
in a given situation. The general case is the structuring principle in  
an economy of ethical calculations, manifested in attempts to reduce  
or lessen the bad and increase the good. Both cases affirm an economic  
model embedded at the heart of ethics according to which, in absence  
of the possibility to avoid all harm, various forms of misfortune must  
be calculated against each other (as if they were algorithms in a  
mathematical minimum problem), evaluated, and acted upon. The  
principle of the lesser evil implies that there is no way out of  
calculations.
As a dilemma, the ‘lesser evil’ is presented as the necessity of a  
choice of action in situations where the available options are or seem  
to be limited. It is a dilemma in the classical Greek sense of the word 
—when each of the two options presented to the tragic hero necessarily  
lead to different forms of suffering. The dilemma implies a closed  
system in which the options presented for choice could not be  
questioned or negotiated. Regardless of what option is chosen,  
accepting the terms of the question leaves the (political) power that  
presented this ‘choice’ unchallenged and even reinforced. It is in  
accepting the parameters as given that the lesser evil argument is  
properly ideological. The dilemma, if we are still to think in its  
terms, should thus not only be about which of the bad options to  
choose, but whether to choose at all and thus accept the very terms of  
the question. When asked to choose between the two horns of an angry  
bull, Robert Pirsig suggested alternatives: one can ‘refuse to enter  
the arena’, ‘throw sand in the bull’s eyes’, or even ‘sing the bull to  
sleep’.7

The ‘Perpetrators of Lesser Evils’

The term ‘lesser evil’ has recently been prominently invoked in the  
context of attempts to moderate the excesses of western states, in  
particular in relation to attempts to govern the economics of violence  
in the context of the ‘War on Terror’, and in private organizations’  
attempts to manoeuvre through the paradoxes and complicities of human  
rights action and humanitarian aid. More specifically, the lesser evil  
has been most often invoked at the very intersection of these two  
spheres of action—military and humanitarian. In relation to the  
‘global War on Terror’, the terms of this argument were recently  
articulated in a book titled The Lesser Evil by human rights scholar  
and now deputy leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Michael  
Ignatieff. In his book, Ignatieff suggests that liberal states should  
establish mechanisms to regulate the breach of some rights and allow  
their security services to engage in forms of extrajuridical violence— 
in his eyes, ‘lesser evils’—in order to fend off or minimize potential  
‘greater evils’, such as further terror attacks on civilians of the  
western states. His conception of the lesser evil is presented as a  
balancing act because its flexible regime of exceptions should be  
regulated through a process of ‘adversarial scrutiny of an open  
democratic system’ and is thus also aimed to prevent the  
transformation, through the ‘temporary’ primacy given to the security  
services, of the liberal state into a totalitarian one.8 Ignatieff  
calls for the security officials of liberal democracies to become the  
‘perpetrators of lesser evils’.9 These postmodern perpetrators (the  
lesser evil should surely replace the ‘banality of evil’ as the  
contemporary form of perpetration of crimes of state) should weigh  
various types of destructive measures in a utilitarian fashion, in  
relation not to the damage they produce but to the harm they  
purportedly prevent. The calculation, however, is obviously most often  
about the suffering of somebody else.

Ignatieff’s conception of the ‘lesser evil’ is problematic even  
according to the utilitarian principles invoked. The very economy of  
violence assumes the possibility of less violent means and the risk of  
more violence, but questions of violence are forever unpredictable and  
undetermined. The supposed ‘lesser evil’ may always be more violent  
than the violence it opposes, and there can be no end to the  
challenges that stem from the impossibility of calculation.10 A less  
brutal measure is also one that can easily be naturalized, accepted  
and tolerated.11 When exceptional means are normalised, they can be  
more frequently applied. The purported military ability to perform  
‘controlled’, ‘elegant’, ‘pinpoint accurate’, ‘discriminate’ killing  
could bring about more destruction and death than ‘traditional’  
strategies did because these methods, combined with the manipulative  
and euphoric rhetoric used to promulgate them, induce decision makers  
to authorize their frequent and extended use. The illusion of  
precision, part of the state’s rhetoric of restraint, gives the  
military-political apparatus the necessary justification to use  
explosives in civilian environments where they cannot be used without  
injuring or killing civilians. This process, recalling Herbert  
Marcuse’s analysis of “repressive tolerance” may explain the way  
western democratic societies can maintain regimes of brutal military  
domination without this brutality affecting their self perception as  
enlightened liberals. Elevating, for example, targeted assassinations  
(Ignatieff considers targeted assassination to fall ‘within the  
effective moral-political framework of the lesser evil’)12 to a  
legally and morally acceptable standard makes them part of the state’s  
legal options, part of a list of counterterrorism techniques, with the  
result that all sense of horror at the act of murder is now lost. The  
lower the threshold of violence attributed to a certain means and the  
lower the threshold of horror implied in its use, the more frequent  
its application could become. Because they help normalise low- 
intensity conflict, the overall duration of this conflict could be  
extended and finally more lesser evils could be committed, with the  
result of the greater evil reached cumulatively.13

The Humanitarian Paradox of the Lesser Evil

 From this perspective it is possible to see that the discourse and  
practice of humanitarianism and human rights might paradoxically turn  
against the people it claims to help. When every soldier in what  
George W. Bush has called ‘the armies of compassion’ becomes a proxy  
expert in humanitarianism, humanitarian concerns could easily become a  
pretext to justify ‘neutrality’ with respect to a brutal conflict (as  
in Sarajevo) or an alibi for a political decision to mount a ‘military  
intervention’ against a sovereign state (as in Iraq).
Beyond state agents, ‘the perpetrators of lesser evil’ must also  
include nonstate organizations. Putting an end to human rights  
violations has become, increasingly since the 1990s, the platform that  
allows for the possibility of collaboration between NGO activists and  
western militaries. Beyond the fact that the moralization of politics  
through the terms ‘freedom’, ‘human rights’ and ‘liberal democracy’  
has led to a general depoliticization, the paradox is that human  
rights and humanitarian action can in fact aggravate the situation of  
the very people it purportedly comes to aid.

The paradox of the lesser evil impacts most independent  
nongovernmental organizations that make up the various systems in the  
ecology of contemporary war and crisis zones, in addition to the  
military and the government.

Lesser evil is the common justification of the military officer who  
attempts to administer life (and death) in an ‘enlightened’ manner; it  
is the brief of the security contractor who introduces new and more  
‘efficient’ weapons and spatio-technological means of domination and  
advertises them as ‘humanitarian technology’. Lessening evil is  
moreover the logic defining the actions of the subjects of this  
regime, who, sometimes assisted by human rights organizations, lodge  
petitions challenging the brutality of these means and powers. Lesser  
evil is the argument of the humanitarian agent as he seeks military  
permission for providing life substances and medical help in places  
where it is in fact the duty of the military in control.
This logic of the lesser evil somewhat obscures the fundamental moral  
differences between the various groups that compose the ecologies of  
conflict and crisis in allowing for the aforementioned moments of  
cooperation. Significantly, the western system of domination learned  
to use the work of local and international organizations to fill the  
void left by ‘dysfunctional’ Third World governments and manage life  
in their stead. Indeed, the urgent and important criticism that peace  
organizations often level at western militaries, to the effect that  
they de-humanise their enemies, masks another process by which the  
military incorporates into its operations the logic of, and even seeks  
to cooperate directly with, the very humanitarian and human rights  
organizations that in the past opposed it.

At the core of the paradoxes of the lesser evil is a tactical  
compromise that could deteriorate into a structural impossibility—one  
that would entangle the state and its opposition in a mutual embrace,  
making nonstate organizations de facto participants in a diffused  
system of government. In Slavoj Zizek’s words, the state thus  
‘externalizes its ethical self-consciousness in an extra-statal ethico- 
political agency, and this agency externalizes its claim to  
effectiveness in the state’.14 In this manner, human rights and  
humanitarian NGOs could do the ethical thinking and some of the  
ethical practice, while their state does the killing.

The spatial order of contemporary military power does not only emerge  
from a series of open acts of aggression, but through attempts at the  
moderation and restraint of its own violence.15 Recently, western  
militaries began using the vocabulary of international law, with the  
effect that human rights principles such as ‘proportionality’ have  
become compatible with military goals such as ‘efficiency’.16

The Government of Evil (in Souls)

The common use of the term ‘lesser evil’ masks a rich history and  
various intellectual trajectories. What may otherwise seem to be a  
perennial problem endemic to ethics and political practice, a dilemma  
that simply reappears at every period anew in the same shape and form,  
in fact reveals something peculiar about each historical moment and  
situation. The different trajectories of the term cast different  
shadows on the investigation of the lesser evil as one of the problems  
of the politics of the present. What follows is not a sustained  
history of the concept but rather several of its paradigmatic moments,  
the beginning of a possible archive of probes into the lesser evil  
argument.
One of the trajectories of the concept of the lesser evil originated  
in early Christian theology and was secularized into the utilitarian  
foundations of liberal ethics. It formed the basis for the philosophy  
of ‘ethical realism’, differently formulated by George Kennan and Hans  
Morgenthau. Ethical realism traces its origins to St. Augustine and  
St. Thomas Aquinas and insists on some ethical constraints on states  
and military action. It sees the role of liberal states and especially  
that of the United States in the pursuit of moral goals such as  
‘freedom’, ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’. The destiny of the United  
States in particular and ‘the West’ in general is to fight  
radicalevil, whose traces could be found in any project predicated on  
an articulation of the idea of the ‘good’ (religious fundamentalism or  
communist egalitarianism).
One component in the idea of the lesser evil, however, has gone  
missing in its secularization. For the Christian fathers the  
toleration of the lesser evil, as I will later show, should be  
understood in relation to the religious telos of salvation. The  
immanent management of evil on behalf of the church was conceived as  
part of a quest for perfection which forms a necessary stage on the  
way to transcendence—the replacement of the earthly kingdom with a  
heavenly one. Unlike the teachings of the Christian fathers, the  
liberal striving for perfection is not a quest for eventual  
transformation. Without transcendence it is locked within a perpetual  
economy of immanence and could be better interpreted as a drive for  
the ‘optimization’ of the existing system of government.17
***
The vast extraterritorial institutional network of the ecclesiastical  
pastorate—the Church as it was formed and institutionalized from  
around the turn of the fourth century—dealt with the problem of the  
lesser evil in the context of the practical and intellectual problem  
of ‘the government of souls’. In his lectures on the origins of  
governmentality Michel Foucault analyzed the Christian form of  
pastoral power. ‘Economical theology’ sought to understand the  
management of both human and divine orders, each with its immanent  
order of execution. In relation to human action the divine management  
of evil is both general and particular, bearing on both the individual  
and society, the multitude of people in the flock. The Christian order  
thus operated by simultaneously individualizing and collectivizing— 
granting as much value to a single person as to the community and the  
multitude.18 Salvation—deliverance from the power and penalty of sin  
and evil and the redemption of the soul—must address thus all and  
each. This form of salvation is one of the aspects of general and  
particular providence. The pastor must account not only for the well- 
being of individual and community but for the totality of good or evil  
they perform personally and collectively.

Discussions of particular providence are organized around the question  
of choice, or of free choice—how to identify and pursue good and avoid  
evil. General providence, on the other hand, invokes a vastly complex  
intrapersonal economy of merits and faults—of sin, vice and virtue— 
operating according to specific rules of circulation and transfer,  
with complex procedures, analyses, calculations and tactics that allow  
the exercise of this very specific interplay between conflicting goods  
and degrees of evil.19

But Foucault does not explain how evil could be understood in terms of  
an economy. The source of this understanding is the teaching of St.  
Augustine. In early Christian theology evil is no longer seen as the  
equal opposite of good. In the course of his break from Manichaeism,  
St. Augustine stopped seeing evil as glamorously demonic but rather  
merely as ‘the absence of good’, a deficiency of being that has no  
standing by itself. Evil is relative and differential, an obstacle to  
perfection, that which stands between man and the good. Because evil  
is not absolute, demonic or perfect it is forever on a scale of less  
and more, lesser and greater.

It is through this conception of evil that St. Augustine addressed the  
problem of the lesser evil. For Augustine, the lesser evil is not  
permissible, as it clearly violates the Pauline principle ‘do no evil  
that good may come’. It could however be tolerated in certain  
circumstances. For the lesser evil to be tolerated the situation has  
to be defined in such a way that a possible resultant evil outcome is  
a necessary and unavoidable consequence of the performance of  
individual and collective duties.

In his economy of lesser and greater evils, it is better to tolerate  
prostitutes in society than to risk adultery, and it is better to kill  
an assailant before he may kill an innocent traveler.20 In this way  
the principle of the lesser evil is conflated with the concept of  
preemption, and Augustine’s rationale for preemption is one of  
justice. Even war could be just under certain conditions. Under the  
principles of just war, a war should be considered ‘just’ if those  
waging it do so with the intention of doing good or pursuing a just  
purpose (such as, centuries later, the crusades), or with a desire to  
reach peace rather than wage wars for one’s own gain or as an exercise  
of power. Furthermore, just wars must be waged by properly instituted  
authorities of organized arms.

It is thus not coincidental that the discourse of the lesser evil  
developed at a time when the Christian church acquired real appetite  
and the real ability to exercise political and military power.  
Augustine, a fourth-century Christian, was teaching at the time  
Christianity had acquired the power to govern larger societies, and  
tried to reconcile Christian pacifism with the world of politics and  
the obligations of Roman citizens.
Importantly, Augustine saw the lessening of evil as part of a general  
inclination to pursue the good and a quest for transformation. Unlike  
in the tradition of liberal ethics that invoked him, in Augustine’s  
teachings progress towards a lesser imperfection is not produced by or  
content with a lesser imperfection. Only the desire for perfection  
could destroy in the soul these aspects of the evil that defile it.21  
This progress—the lessening of evil—is the only way towards perfection  
and the ultimate transformation of the kingdom from earth to heaven.  
The individual must strive for the kind of perfection that would put  
her closer to God, overreach the earthly and thereby help transform it.

The general aspects of the problem of the lesser evil are also  
articulated in other theological discussions about the economic basis  
of divine government—the question of the origins and management of  
evil. It addressed the perennial question of theological philosophy:  
If God governs the world and if God’s economy is necessarily the most  
perfect one, how can we explain evil—natural catastrophe, illness,  
crimes?
In the context of his investigation of economia, a form of  
governmental power, Giorgio Agamben discussed one of the first  
formulations of this question by Alexander of Aphrodisia, a late  
Aristotelian commentator of the second century: God in his providence  
establishes general laws which are always good, but evil results from  
these laws as a collateral side effect. For example: rain is obviously  
a good thing, but as a collateral effect of the rain there are floods.  
Collateral effects—the bad effects of the divine government—are thus  
not accidental, but define the very structure of the action of  
government. Furthermore, it is through these collateral effects that  
the divine government becomes effective.

A millennium and a half later, in his Théodicée, Leibnitz attempted to  
resolve the same perennial question in a somewhat different manner.  
His intention is similarly to reconcile the apparent faults and  
imperfections in the world, which he does by claiming that the world  
is optimal among all possible worlds: ‘to show that an architect could  
have done better is to find fault with his work […] [if] a lesser evil  
is relatively good, so a lesser good is relatively evil’. Leibnitz  
unfolds a conception of God in the creation and management of the  
world as a mathematician who is solving a minimum problem in the  
calculus of variations. The world must be the best possible and most  
balanced world because it was created by a perfect God. God governs by  
determining and choosing, among an infinite number of possible worlds,  
that one for which the sum of necessary evil is at a minimum. In  
Leibnitz’s complex divine economy evil exists by definition at its  
minimum possible level. If evil is managed at its minimum level, then  
all evils are in fact always lesser evils. The statement that we live  
in ‘the best of all possible worlds’ was famously parodied by Voltaire  
in Candide when he has a Leibnitz-like character, Dr. Pangloss, repeat  
it like a mantra.

A Calculating Machine for the Reduction of Evil

Different aspects of the lesser evil argument were secularized into  
the modern articulations of ethics and politics. Foucault argued that  
it is on the basis of ‘economical theology’ that modern power—the  
government of men and things—has taken the form of an economy: ‘We  
pass from an art of governing whose principles were derived from the  
traditional virtues (wisdom, justice, liberality, respect for divine  
laws and human customs) […] to an art of governing that finds the  
principle of its rationality […] in the state’.22 He argued that from  
the end of the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century, the legacy  
of pastoral power was assimilated into the practice of government—a  
biopolitical form of power exercised upon a population to regulate and  
manage its health, felicity, reproducibility and productivity, while  
the pastoral power over the individual—particular providence—has  
evolved into disciplinary technology that subjectivises the individual  
in various institutions and buildings: the prison, the military  
barracks, the school, and the hospital.
Continuing Foucault’s work on governmentality and discipline and  
directly reflecting on the question of the lesser evil, the  
philosopher Adi Ophir has shown how the panopticon, beyond being a  
mechanism of discipline, control and subjectivisation, could also be  
interpreted as a closed system for the management and reduction of  
evils.23 Here it is necessary to mention that Bentham no longer saw  
good and evil as metaphysical categories, but rather as the sum total  
of good and bad things. He defined the task of government as  
minimising the bad things and maximising the good ones. This economy  
is at the centre of ‘the principle of utility’. The general aspect of  
the lesser evil argument is thus one of the forms by which the  
‘greater good’ expresses itself.
The panopticon, a closed system that regulates everything that flows  
in and out of it, is according to Ophir a mechanism whose purpose is  
to make the calculation (a kind of proto-computer?) and reduction of  
evils possible.24 The panopticon is designed to bring to perfection  
the consequences of every action undertaken within it. The observation  
and control of individual actions that the panopticon produces is the  
very condition that makes the calculus possible. The system is  
constructed in such a way that however much evil is put in, ‘less  
evil’ is guaranteed to come out. Although the machine produces  
collateral evil—and Bentham is clear that both punishment itself and  
the friction the machine produces are evil—it guarantees, so Bentham  
tried to convince his contemporary politicians, the reduction of these  
evils and of the pain of the treatment to the necessary minimum. Ophir  
thus interprets Bentham’s panopticon as a Perpetuum Mobile of utility,  
a precurser to a panoptical society that has in itself now become a  
machine for the calculation and reduction of evils; the very diagram  
of biomorality (the necessary counterpart to biopolitics) which is  
focused on the increase of happiness and the reduction of suffering.25

The Road to Utopia is Paved with Lesser Evils

Lesser evil arguments are not only articulated from the point of view  
of Power but also in relation to attempts to subvert and replace it.  
An interesting example is provided in the discussion about the  
shortening of the working day in Marx’s Capital. Unlike the  
revolutionary and militant communists who protested the drift towards  
a timid, reformist politics of choosing the lesser evil, of making the  
kind of compromises with capital that may divert the struggle from the  
absolute ideal of communism, Marx thought that the winning of the ten- 
hour day was a huge victory for the English proletariat. The ten-hour  
working day reduces the duration of evil, but ‘normalises’ and  
regularises exploitation. According to Marx, on the other hand, a ten- 
hour day allowed fourteen hours of non-work, in which ‘the laborer can  
satisfy his intellectual and social wants’ and which would allow the  
proletarians to organize and continue fighting. Marx’s argument was  
that this lesser evil gives the proletarians the space to build an  
organizational platform, the consciousness and experience needed to  
take over the means of production. It created the productive forces  
capable of generating a sufficient surplus to enable socialism and the  
proletariat to continue fighting and build something better.26 His  
ultimate aim was still of course to abolish the state. But advanced  
capitalism was not only seen as a lesser evil compared to ‘primitive  
manufacture’, it was also a transformation that made a better world  
possible. Marx saw the struggle for the shortening working day as one  
corridor, potentially opening into future struggles: ‘the limitation  
of the working-day is a preliminary condition without which all  
further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive’. 
27 Paradoxically, as we now know, the greatest expansion of British  
industry occurred after the deal for the normalisation of the working  
day.

Similarly, at different times, Lenin, Kautski, Luxemburg, Trotsky (!)  
and Gramsci grappled with the problem of fighting for compromised  
gains here and now on the one hand while also fighting for a better  
world on the other. At various points they stood for tactical  
struggles for immediate gains, advocating trade unions, whose function  
was to win a better deal for workers in an exploitative system; but  
none of them thought that trade unions were all that was possible, and  
none of them were satisfied with simply winning a better deal in this  
exploitative system.
Tensions between evolutionary and revolutionary Marxism were  
articulated differently in relation to different historical moments:  
throughout his World War I polemics against the social patriots, Lenin  
emphasized the difference between various periods and trends:
[U]nlike yesterday, the struggle for socialist power is on the order  
of the day in Europe. The socialist working class is on the scene as a  
contender for power itself. This means: There may still be ‘lesser’  
and ‘greater’ evils (there always will be) but we do not have to  
choose between these evils, for we represent the alternative to both  
of them, an alternative which is historically ripe. Moreover, under  
conditions of imperialism, only this revolutionary alternative offers  
any really progressive way out, offers any possibility of an outcome  
which is no evil at all. Both war camps offer only reactionary  
consequences, to a ‘lesser’ or ‘greater’ degree.28

The debate articulated by Marxists in different periods was about how  
political transformation should be brought about: in an evolutionary  
fashion—a step by step approach along a trajectory of improvement (a  
kind of Darwinian evolution by which the reign of the proletarians is  
a historical necessity)—or rather in a revolutionary manner, with a  
fast and decisive break with the past. In other words, Marxists in  
various periods asked whether change arrive through the reduction of  
pain – do things become gradually better until they become good, with  
the danger that with the reduction of pain society should become  
content and complicit? (In which case pain should be seen as a self- 
disciplining device). At one of the ends of the spectrum in which the  
lesser evil argument occupies the middle are the utopian absolutists  
who believe that every possible gain at present is insignificant in  
light of the essentially compromised state of the world. Part of the  
structure of this argument is found the principle of the politique du  
pire—the politics of making things worse in order to hasten political  
change—or the theory of dolorism, which sees pain as a spiritual  
experience that allows people to see reality more clearly. The danger  
was of course that things simply get worse and worse. In fact Marxists  
used these approaches alternately, in a tactical manner, in different  
periods and situations.

The lesser evil argument was articulated in another way by Herbert  
Marcuse in the context of discussions regarding the Marxist attitude  
to the danger of fascism:
Compared with a neo-fascist society, defined in terms of a  
‘suspension’ of civil rights and liberties, suppression of all  
opposition, militarization and totalitarian manipulation of the  
people, bourgeois democracy, even in its monopolistic form, still  
provides a chance (the last chance?) for the transition to socialism,  
for the education (in theory and practice) and organization to prepare  
this transition. The New Left is therefore faced with the task of  
defending this democracy? Defend it as the lesser evil: lesser than  
suicide and suppression. And it is faced with the task of defending  
this democracy while attacking its capitalist foundations.29
Marcuse saw bourgeois democracy, with its freedom of speech and  
association, with space for self-organization (of, for example,  
workers and women) as a lesser evil to dictatorship in as such but  
also inasmuch as it would provide a real opportunity for its  
subversion and eventual transformation. ‘Defending democracy while  
attacking its capitalist foundations’ is an articulation of a  
necessary paradox: could one simultaneously defend democracy in its  
liberal form against the encroaching evil of fascism, all the while  
attacking its foundations?

***

The problem articulated by Marcuse are somewhat relevant to the  
political predicaments pertaining to different kinds of contemporary  
non governmental activists: being intransigently in opposition to the  
neoliberal global order and market hegemony, for example, while, at  
the same time using their (infra)structures, and even momentarily  
cooperating with their institutions. Negotiating this paradox—and  
‘negotiation’ could only merit its name if it seeks to bring together  
incompatible positions— must be the most important challenge to these  
contemporary activists. How to engage in practiced of “lesser evil”,  
but seek to mobilize the effect of these actions in the service of  
larger political claims; how to work from “inside” systems while  
simultaneously seeing beyond them, even precipitating their end?
Obviously, the argument that the principle of the lesser evil is  
dangerous because it may produce more harm is a contradiction as  
blatant as saying that it is a lesser evil to avoid the lesser evil  
argument.30 I am also not suggesting that the horrific spectacles of  
‘greater evils’ should be preferred to the incremental damage of  
‘lesser’ ones, that the violence of the present conflicts should be  
made (even) more brutal in order to shock a complacent population into  
mobilizing resistance (the threshold of the “intolerable” is elastic  
enough to make most people easily accommodate and domesticate a sense  
of an ever worsening reality); rather, that opposition and resistance  
must dare to think beyond the economy and the calculations of violence  
and suffering that liberal ethics touts forward. Dealing with the  
political ethics of the lesser evil could be articulated by bypassing  
the closed economy that a particular “dilemma” presents with an  
insistence on the expansion of the limits of the problem in both space  
and time – the former by seeking to identify more extended and  
intricate political connections leading to the issue at stake and the  
latter by looking further into the future.
More about the predicament of contemporary non governmental  
organizations I hope to articulate in later versions of this text. The  
installation 665/The Lesser Evil in Manifesta7 seeks to start  
unpacking this problem by presenting some of the histories and  
contemporary tactics of such attempts and the humanitarian and human  
rights activists caught up in dilemmas and struggling, successfully or  
not, to liberate themselves from a mutual embrace with the very  
organizations they vehemently oppose. Many of these activists clearly  
realize that it is counterproductive to accept the myopic pragmatism  
of the lesser evil, one that leaves a given mode of government intact,  
and seek ways to go beyond these actions. Their contemporary  
deliberations reflect historical ones.
Strategically planned or spontaneous action would always inevitably  
put activists on the ground within an arena of political struggles in  
compromising situations that can easily deteriorate into a  
counterproductive complicity, but these forms of practice must look  
for ways to, simultaneously and paradoxically, challenge the truth  
claims and thus the basis of the authority of the powers they both  
cooperate with and confront – the very regimes that placed their bulls  
before us and then asked us to choose the lesser of their two horns.

This text originates in discussions around an ongoing programme of  
workshops, lectures and films exploring the structure of the lesser  
evil argument that I run together with Thomas Keenan and Eyal Sivan. I  
would like to thank Alberto Toscano for his useful comments.

Notes
1. Alain Badiou has been the strongest critic of this notion: ‘If the  
lamentable state in which we find ourselves is nonetheless the best of  
all real states […] [If humanity] will not find anything better than  
currently existing parliamentary states, and the forms of  
consciousness associated with them, this simply proves that up to now  
the political history of men has only given birth to restricted  
innovations and we are but characters in a pre-historic situation […]  
[that] will not rank much higher than ants and elephants’. See Alain  
Badiou, ‘Eight Theses on the Universal’, in Theoretical Writings, ed.  
and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004),  
237. Renata Salecl introduced Badiou’s work to the discussion in a  
workshop titled ‘Lesser Evils’ organized by Thomas Keenan, Eyal Sivan  
and myself at Bard College in February 2008. Presentations were given  
by the organizers and by Adi Ophir, Ariella Azoulay, Simon Critchley,  
Joshua Simon, Olivia Custer, Renata Salecl, Karen Sullivan and Roger  
Berkowitz. Salecl introduced Badiou’s ideas through a reading of an  
interview in two parts Badiou gave to Cabinet Magazine before and  
after 9/11 (http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php).  
Salecl added new doubts of her own: ‘not even knowing what good and  
evil are, how can we choose and calculate? When evil is so enjoyable,  
what does ’lesser evil‘ mean?’
2. For Badiou, according to Salecl, evil is when one lacks the  
strength to search for the good. The politics of the lesser evil give  
up on the event, renounce the drive. At the Bard workshop, she asked:  
‘Is there a new theory of the good ready to fight the self-contents of  
liberalism?’
3. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken,  
2005), 35. In his presentation to the workshop, Roger Berkowitz  
presented Arendt’s argument against the ‘lesser evil’ in the context  
of her thought on judgment, as part of what she identified as ‘the  
crisis of judgment’.
4. Hannah Arendt, ‘The Eggs Speak Up’ (1950), in Essays in  
Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed.  
Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 270–284; see especially 271.  
Arendt claims that Stalin’s ‘only original contribution’ to socialism  
was to transform the breaking of eggs from a tragic necessity into a  
revolutionary virtue.
5. Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken,  
2005), 37. (I think)<> sorry no – can we remove the note?
6. In an article on segregation in southern schools, after making her  
readers understand she was against all forms of racism, she voiced  
scepticism about federally enforced integration, claiming it  
politicized the educational system, which she believed should be  
immune to such forces, and insisting that the survival of the Republic  
may require that the battle line be drawn somewhere else. Hannah  
Arendt, ‘Reflections on Little Rock’, Dissent 6, no. 1 (1959): 45–56.
7. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York:  
Bantam, 1974).
8. Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of  
Terror (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
9. Ibid., 152.
10. In the Lesser Evils workshop at Bard, reading Ignatieff’s book,  
Thomas Keenan pointed to the impossibility of calculating evils.  
Rejecting the notion of grades of violence, he used a Derridean  
formulation when he argued: ‘is not the slightest violence always  
already the greatest violence?’ He pointed as well to the fallacy in  
the supposed difference between qualitative and quantitative judgment  
on evil, asking whether the quantitative cannot cross a threshold and  
become qualitative itself.
11. Adi Ophir, The Order of Evils, section 7.100 as well as 7.2 and  
7.3. See for example 7.335.
12. This under the following conditions: that they are ‘applied to the  
smallest number of people, used as a last resort, and kept under the  
adversarial scrutiny of an open democratic system’. Furthermore,  
‘assassination can be justified only if […] less violent alternatives,  
like arrest and capture, endanger […] personnel or civilians are not  
possible, and] where all reasonable precautions are taken to minimize  
collateral damage and civilian harm’. Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil, 8,  
129–133.
13. It is this principle that guarantees, paradoxically, that all  
‘greater goods’ could necessarily become ‘greater evils’. Health  
economists have a chilling and interesting version of this economy of  
calculations, a ‘value of statistical life’, or VSL, to cope with what  
some of its proponents see as the following conundrum: the ‘prevention  
of every possible accidental death would be intolerably costly in  
terms of both money and the quality of life’. See Nina Power and  
Alberto Toscano, ‘The Philosophy of Restoration: Alain Badiou and the  
Enemies of May’, forthcoming in Boundary 2.
14. Slavoj Zizek, In Defence of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 349.
15. Michel Feher, ‘The Governed in Politics’, in Nongovernmental  
Politics, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone, 2007), 12–27, esp. 21.
16. David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International  
Humanitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 235– 
323, esp. 295.
17. Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, Ethical Realism: A Vision for  
America’s Role in the World (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006).
18. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the  
College de France 1977–1978, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham  
Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 164–173. The immanent  
disorder exercised by the pastorate was ‘an art of conducting,  
directing, leading, guiding, taking in hand, and manipulating men, an  
art of monitoring them and arranging them…an art of taking charge of  
men collectively and individually throughout their life and at every  
moment of their existence’ (173).
19. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population.
20. Augustine thought that prostitutes should be tolerated ‘because  
they fulfil a similar function in society to that of the cesspool in  
the palace’. Speaking through Evodius, Augustine says: ‘It is much  
more suitable that the man who attacks the life of another should be  
slain than he who defends his own life; and it is much more cruel that  
a man should suffer violation than that the violator should be slain  
by his intended victim’ (118, De lib. arb. I.v.12)<>. In her  
presentation for the Lesser Evils workshop at Bard, Karen Sullivan  
presented Augustine’s teachings against lying as one of the only cases  
in which a compromise for the lesser evil is not even possible. ‘A lie  
is an offence against truth, perversion of speech’, and the imperative  
against it should in no case be breached, even to save innocent  
people. Having such universal effect, lying is worse than killing; the  
latter is tolerated under certain conditions of the lesser evil  
principle.
21. Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (Florence, KY: Routledge,  
2001), quoted in Peter Paik Yoonsuk, ‘The Pessimist Rearmed: Zizek On  
Christianity And Revolution’, Theory & Event 8, no. 2 (2005). Karen  
Sullivan made a similar point in her discussion of Augustine.
22. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 163, 183.
23. Adi Ophir in the Lesser Evils workshop at Bard.
24. Bentham’s preface to the Panopticon opens with a list of the  
benefits to be obtained from this inspection house: ‘Morals reformed— 
health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public  
burthens lightened—economy seated […] all by a simple idea of  
architecture’.
25. Bentham believed the panopticon could correct itself instantly.  
Ophir to the contrary observed that ‘closed systems which are run by  
imperfect agents and in which the costs of exit are high tend to  
produce greater rather than lesser evils…’ The term biomorality comes  
from Zizek, In Defence, 50.
26. Engels argues for the positive effect of the deal for the ten-hour  
day on completely different grounds: ‘Were the Ten Hour Day Bill a  
final measure, England would be ruined, but because it necessarily  
involves the passing of subsequent measures, which must lead England  
into a path quite different from that she has traveled up till now, it  
will mean progress’. If English industry were to succumb to foreign  
competition the revolution would be unavoidable.
27. Karl Marx, Capital, http://www.bibliomania.com/2/1/261/1294/frameset.html 
. See ‘The Working Day’, especially sections 6 and 7.
28. Hal Draper, ‘The Myth of Lenin’s “Revolutionary Defeatism”’, http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1953/defeat/chap1.htm 
.
29. Herbert Marcuse, Towards a Critical Theory of Society, vol. 2
(Florence, KY: Routledge, 2001), 169. Joshua Simon’s contribution to  
the Lesser Evils workshop at Bard was a reading of Marx’s Eighteenth  
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where he made similar points about  
Marxism’s relation to Fascism.
30. In the Bard workshop, Adi Ophir compared this to Bentham’s own  
statement: ‘“The principle of utility, (I have heard it said) is a  
dangerous principle: it is dangerous on certain occasions to consult  
it.” This is as much as to say, what? that it is not consonant to  
utility, to consult utility: in short, that it is not consulting it,  
to consult it’. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of  
Morals and Legislation (1789), ch. 1, ‘Of The Principle Of Utility’.
31. Feher, Nongovernmental Politics<>, 21.