The Lesser Evil

Summary

The Problem

‘The Russian Revolution and the National Socialist ascendancy in Germany are the two most important sources of evidence of moral philosophy in our time, as the French Revolution was for Hegel and Marx, and later to Tocqueville and for Mill. Although both revolutions produced, both in intention and in effect, a triumph on a gigantic scale, there are often remarked differences between the evil effects planned and achieved.’ This is an observation made by Stuart Hampshire, a keen philosophical connoisseur of the 20th century.

It is embarrassingly banal to say that these two historical events shook the world. But it is less banal, although true, to say that these two events created a change in the world order which had in turn grave moral consequences. Both paved the way to unparalleled murderous regimes (especially if we view Mao's regime as connected, even if indirectly, to the October Revolution).

It is injustice, not justice, which brings us into normative politics; despotism, not freedom. Moral political theory should start with negative politics: the politics that informs us on how to tackle evil before it tells us how to pursue the good. Stalin's Communism and Hitler's Nazism are perhaps the most glaringly dark examples, if I may be allowed the oxymoron, of evil. Thus negative moral politics should be informed by these two examples, and it should be able to provide us with the moral vocabulary adequate for coping with them.