When the Lesser Evil Means Voting for Genocide

Ignore the shrill Democratic Party partisans — even if Donald Trump would be worse, you’re right to be outraged at Joe Biden’s enabling of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.

An Israeli tank, photographed in 2015. (Israel Defense Forces / Flickr)

Do left-wing voters have a responsibility to vote for Joe Biden as the “lesser evil” in a matchup against Donald Trump? Maybe. But before I get to that, indulge me in a digression in moral philosophy, which I think sheds light on the question from a less-explored angle.

If you’ve taken an undergrad ethics course in an Anglophone philosophy department in the past thirty years-plus, odds are you’ve read selections from Utilitarianism: For and Against, a published debate between J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams. Williams’s entry is a classic attack on utilitarianism, the moral theory that holds that the right action in any situation is the one that maximizes the sum total of pleasure or unhappiness in the world (and minimizes pain or unhappiness).

Opponents of utilitarianism have long pointed out that the theory seems to lead to absurd conclusions. It implies, for instance, that it could be right to inflict torture on one person if that would produce some small amount of pleasure for a sufficiently large number of others. But Williams criticizes utilitarianism from a different angle. He deploys two colorful hypothetical scenarios to show that expecting people to reason in a utilitarian fashion involves “an attack on [their] integrity.”

To give a taste of the argument, here’s one of the scenarios:

George, who has just taken his PhD in chemistry, finds it extremely difficult to get a job. . . . An older chemist, who knows about this situation, says that he can get George a decently paid job in a certain laboratory, which pursues research into chemical and biological warfare. George says that he cannot accept this, since he is opposed to chemical and biological warfare. The older man replies that he is not too keen on it himself, come to that, but after all George’s refusal is not going to make the job or the laboratory go away; what is more, he happens to know that if George refuses the job, it will certainly go to a contemporary of George’s who is not inhibited by any such scruples and is likely if appointed to push along the research with greater zeal than George would. . . . What should he do?

The answer, by utilitarian logic, is utterly obvious: George should take the job.

Utilitarianism and the Problem of Integrity

Williams’s main point here is not that this answer is necessarily wrong (though Williams himself thinks George should not take the job). His central point, rather, is that the structure of the utilitarian theory makes it impossible to see why George might find this decision monstrously difficult.

Utilitarianism says that people should always act so as to maximize overall happiness. But what is involved in happiness for a person? It means, at a minimum, their having certain desires satisfied; and among those desires will be deep commitments and projects that are central to the person’s identity and their sense of what is most important in life. These “ground projects,” in Williams’s parlance, include everything from personal relationships to religious creeds to intellectual and artistic pursuits to moral commitments. 

Such projects shape how we deliberate about our choices at the deepest level. They affect not just our conscious preferences, like whether I would rather have red or white wine, or whether I’d prefer to live in the city or the country. They determine what we see as reasonable or unreasonable, or realistic or unrealistic, options. Importantly, ground projects shape what we consider “unthinkable” — as most of us would regard murder or torture, and as George might, for instance, consider the prospect of helping make chemical and biological weapons.

What utilitarianism does, however, is ask us to treat any such identity-defining commitment as just one among many desires, to be weighed against all the desires of everybody who our actions might affect, given how we expect everyone else to act. That means we ought to be willing to relinquish those commitments on a dime if we find ourselves in a situation where doing so is necessary to maximize total happiness. But how, Williams asks, can we treat the projects that define our senses of self and what our lives are about in that way?

The issue here is not that utilitarianism fails to give special weight to our own ground projects in the overall happiness calculus, as some suggest. If you think of it that way, Williams argues, you’ve already basically conceded the utilitarian argument. The issue is that utilitarians can’t take seriously the idea ground projects structure our sense of self and how we go about making decisions, such that certain options seem to us beyond the pale, if we consider them at all.

This is the problem with the utilitarian treatment of George’s dilemma. George understandably finds the development of chemical and biological weapons abhorrent — and utilitarianism says that he must put that aside, because he can slow the creation of chemical weapons so long as he is willing to participate in their development. The only reason George might be tempted to act otherwise, the utilitarian says, would be a kind of irrational squeamishness or selfishness.

But if I’ve built my life and identity around certain commitments — e.g., having principles like “don’t kill the innocent” or “don’t participate in war crimes” — then resistance to giving up those commitments is not selfishness or squeamishness. It is the healthy human response to being confronted with a horrible choice: a choice, potentially, between holding onto my sense of who I am and letting awful things happen, or trying to prevent a worst-case scenario and giving up commitments that I think of as defining me at a deep level. 

That doesn’t mean we should never try to overcome our resistance, but it does mean we shouldn’t take it lightly, either.

Genocide and the Lesser Evil

I’ve been thinking about Williams because of the especially obscene variety of “lesser-evil” voting discourse that we’re being subjected to right now by Democratic Party leaders and high-profile liberal pundits. For months, President Joe Biden has essentially greenlit the Israeli genocide of Gaza, sending over $200 million in arms to enable the massacre just since last December. (The total value of weapons sent is almost certainly much higher; according to the Washington Post, “U.S. officials have briefed Congress on more than 100 other transactions that fell under a set dollar amount required for notification.”)

In response to the wave of righteous campus protests across the country in solidarity with Palestine that have faced fierce crackdowns from university administrators and police, Biden has smeared the protesters as violent antisemites. On Wednesday, May 8, as Israel continued to move closer towards a ground invasion of the city of Rafah in southern Gaza that international observers roundly predicted would result in mass deaths of refugees, Biden gave a bloodthirsty speech justifying Israel’s brutal war by claiming that the October 7 Hamas attacks were motivated by an “ancient hatred” of Jewish people. 

Many on the left, I think it’s safe to say, are disgusted. I’m certainly disgusted. But what’s especially grotesque is seeing Democratic partisans continue to righteously insist that the left vote for Biden; indeed, that protests or public criticism of the president are wildly irresponsible, because we have to prevent Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

Matthew Yglesias, as one might predict, has been particularly insufferable. “I’m just saying that if you want to beat Trump you should vote enthusiastically for his opponent. If you don’t want to, that’s up to you,” he tweeted last week in response to leftists upset with Biden’s continuing support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. (Yglesias’s pinned tweet is a photo of his Biden-Harris 2024 yard sign: “If you care enough about politics to concern troll and/or fight online about it, you should also care enough to earnestly tell your neighborhood which ticket you prefer.”)

Maybe it’s true that, at the end of the day, left-wing voters ought to choke back their disgust and vote for Biden. I think that is what I would do if I lived in a swing state rather than deep-blue New York (though I also think there are compelling strategic arguments as to why socialists or socialist organizations should not publicly support “the lesser evil.”) 

Even if the advocates of lesser-evil voting are right, though, there is something quite disturbing about the way liberals are hectoring the left about the need to vote blue in November. Democratic partisans aren’t content with making the argument that voting for Biden is strategically essential; no, we need to enthusiastically vote for Biden (and put up his yard signs!). It’s not enough to pull the lever come Election Day; we also need to refrain from protest and public disapproval, lest those expressions of dissent harm Biden’s chances.

It all feels very much of a piece with the utilitarian’s treatment of situations like George’s. All that matters for utilitarians is whether an action produces the best consequences, and voting for Biden rather than Trump may very well do that. Yet if you are a reasonably sensitive human being, with moral commitments of the kind most of us internalize — the kind of person who is horrified by the wanton slaughter of women and children — you should certainly not be enthusiastic to vote for Genocide Joe, let alone sing his praises. 

You would, I think, regard it as obscene and tragic if you really had to vote for this guy in order to prevent the election of someone worse. (And yes, to be clear, I do think Trump is worse.) You would do everything you can to express your utter disdain for the choice and try desperately to figure out how to break out of the lesser-evil trap in the future. (Last week, the Biden administration announced it would pause shipments of some weapons to Israel if it launched a “major invasion” of Rafah. While woefully inadequate, it does represent a big shift in policy — one that probably wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for public expressions of outrage with Biden over Israel and Gaza, precisely the thing that boosters like Yglesias want to silence.) 

I wish I better understood those who felt positively eager to vote for Joe Biden and to shame others into doing so. As for the rest of us, who are apparently facing a more difficult choice, I think Williams gives good advice: “To reach a grounded decision in such a case should not be regarded as a matter of just discounting one’s reactions, impulses, and deeply held projects in the face of the pattern of utilities . . . but in the first instance of trying to understand them.”