FORETHOUGHT
We use projection to convince ourselves we know more about morality than we actually do.
Projection helps us avoid the painful admission of our own capacity for wrongdoing and harm.
By projecting onto morality, we create an illusion of moral clarity and superiority.
We reinforce that by having a moral God to worship who supposedly rewards and punishes us.
Moral deliberation forces us to face the complexity and ambiguity of ethical decisions.
Moral deliberation is a necessary evil because it exposes us to uncomfortable truths about our fallibility.
Projection acts as a psychological defense against the discomfort that moral deliberation reveals.
Despite its difficulty, moral deliberation is essential for genuine ethical growth and responsibility.
Therefore, projection and moral deliberation are linked: projection cushions us from moral pain, while deliberation demands we confront it.
Moral deliberation, as a necessary evil, challenges the illusions projection creates and pushes us toward honest self-reflection.
The problem is that if we are using an unavoidable evil to build morality on, others cannot seriously take us as moral agents.
Introduction
Good is often celebrated as a positive and desirable ideal, but in reality, it may be nothing more than a euphemism for a necessary evil—something we tolerate or even praise because it prevents greater harm. This essay explores how the concept of good is intertwined with the acceptance of unavoidable harm, and why celebrating good without acknowledging its complicated nature can be passive-aggressive, masking the difficult moral compromises we make every day.
What is a Necessary Evil and an Unnecessary Evil?
The lesser of two evils principle (or lesser evil principle) needs our attention. It is essentially that given two bad choices, the one which is not as bad as the other should be chosen. You select the lesser threat/damage over the greater threat/damage, even if the difference between them is slim.
The "No Win" Situation is a common one. There are two outcomes. No matter what you choose, one will be as bad as the other. So you choose one. You couldn’t win. A "No Win" is a Hobson's Choice. The Hobson's Choice is when you are given what seems to be a choice when actually only one option is offered! It is a take-it-or-leave-it situation.
The False Dilemma is a common problem. When you engage in black-and-white thinking, you fall into it. For example, if you say that all atheists are bad and Christians are good, you are failing to remember that many atheists are good and many Christians are bad.
Religion, however, is guilty of this false dilemma: "God as we know him is needed if you are to be a good person. So if you don’t accept him, then you are bad and harmful even if you do not know it." If morality then is a necessary evil, religion-based morality is going a step further. It slides from necessary evil to evil that is not necessary, and lies that it is.
Why everything is a necessary evil
Resources won’t last forever. Therefore, to give to one is effectively to take from somebody else.
I never know exactly why I do something. Nor do I want to. So what am I hiding from myself? It is something I think is harming.
Moralists offer two options in life.
One: to think of the consequences in a utilitarian fashion. You may murder one to save many.
Two: to stand by rules no matter what. For example, you are told you must not rape the neighbour even to save your family. [We will ignore this reasoning. 1. I should do evil so that good may come of it. 2. Thus, I should stand by absolute moral rules though I don’t believe in them. I should pretend I do just because I think it makes life choices easier. It avoids complete chaos. This is why a person acting virtuously and as if their moral obligations cannot be changed could still be utilitarian underneath it all. Nobody knows if anybody really is no utilitarian.]
Neither says harm must be avoided. Both say harm may have to be embraced.
We have to be in one camp or the other every minute of every day, for every action has good and bad consequences.
The problem of "necessary" evil
An evil being needed and unavoidable still can do untold harm.
When people get accustomed to necessary evils, they can get a bit complacent, and soon evils appear that are tolerated as necessary when they are in fact not necessary. Evils that people think are necessary but are not feed the normalization of harm and standing by as it is done.
Even religion recognizes that slippery slope, and yet it adds many of those supposedly "necessary" evils into the mixture. For example, a secularist may worry about saving two people at the cost of one. Religion can, in theory, worry about saving two people from sin, purgatory, Hell, or Satan.
The moral is to make sure you are not putting out ideas that make the slope even worse.
The principle itself is a necessary evil
The concept of the necessary evil is itself a necessary evil.
Consider how it would SEEM that the better choice is only 1% better than the alternative. There is no decent test for that. It is too easy to do the wrong thing on purpose, for the good thing is only slightly better and nobody might notice. It opens the door to people making excuses for choosing the worst evil.
"I didn’t know I had other options."
"I was emotional and had to act though I couldn’t think straight."
"It is up to each person to decide what the best evil is. Disagreement is unavoidable."
"Even if you think I meant to choose the wrong evil, you cannot prove it. You cannot judge for you cannot see into my heart."
You can say that even if what you did caused great harm, you thought it was the lesser of two evils, meaning that nobody then can call you evil. Being called and defined as evil is the only thing that deters bad people from evil. The concept of necessary evil leads to bad people not being judged, and if they are, it makes them feel they have the right to be mad at their opponents.
The lesson from all this is that we need to keep the need to make a choice between two equal evils to a minimum. If religion, for example, can be done without, it should be done without, even if it seems harmless. It is still going over the line by needlessly creating a need for choosing between two evils.
Conclusion
In conclusion, what we call “good” is often just the lesser of two evils—a necessary compromise rather than an absolute ideal. By celebrating good without recognizing this, we risk ignoring the harm that underlies our moral choices and enabling evils that are falsely deemed necessary. We must minimize these forced choices between evils and be honest about the complexities behind what we call good.