“Less Bad” Isn’t Good Enough
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The case for lesser-evil voting boils down to this: when choosing between X and Y, rational agents who think that X is better than Y ought to choose X. The logic is unassailable. But even if we stipulate that, come November 2016, the winner of the presidential election will be either a Democrat or a Republican and the Democrat will be the lesser evil, it doesn’t follow automatically that rational citizens ought to vote for her. From a logical point of view, “better,” “less bad,” and “less evil” are interchangeable, but there is a practical difference. Better choices are less bad or less evil only when the alternatives are, or are thought to be, bad. Theologians and secular thinkers who don’t admit that God is dead sometimes distinguish “bad” from “evil” implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, invoking the religious connotations of the latter concept.