On moral dilemmas
I was thinking about how easy it is to get anyone, even a good person, to end up doing or supporting morally reprehensible actions. It is very easy and happens very often. All you have to do is put those people in situations where they have to choose between an evil and a lesser evil, the so-called moral dilemmas, so that whatever they choose is ultimately harmful. I have noticed that many people end up falling into this trap, and end up supporting, for example, people, actions, political parties, systems, etc., simply because they represent the lesser evil from which they were able to choose. That really is a fallacious argument that tries to make us accept evil, simply denying the possibility of some good.
The reality is that those are not the only options, if we are in a situation where there are only bad options, it is always best not to choose any, that is also an option, it is much better to abstain from doing good, than to commit evil. Moral dilemmas are just complex justifications with which we deceive ourselves into believing that it is okay to do evil, but it is not, and no matter how much we fool ourselves, evil is always evil.
It is like the "trolley problem", the mental experiment in which a trolley runs at full speed, and on its way it will find five people tied to the track, however, it is possible to pull a lever to make the train change his journey, although without luck, because in this new way there is also a person tied. This dilemma is intended to make us change our perception to believe that killing a person is okay if with that we manage to prevent more people from dying, based solely on mathematical reductionism. Surprisingly many people believe that this reasoning is correct so they would choose to press the button and murder an innocent by actively participating in a bad deed. Things get a little more interesting when you rethink the problem so that this time you don't have to pull a lever to change the railway tracks, but you have to throw a fat person onto the train tracks t to stop the trolley and prevent it from running over the five people. In this new case, most people choose not to act because it is more direct and obvious that they would be committing murder. In this case, the same logic fails.
The objective of this dilemma is that we come to accept in a subtle way that the end justifies the means, and that any action is valid as long as it is for a greater good, thus we come to take the role of gods to decide whether other people should or not dying for a greater cause, which is often overlooked in answering the problem. This same way of seeing things has been used many times in history to justify all kinds of immoral acts, such as murder, war and destruction.
If we stopped trying to justify everything we do, we would realize that there is no valid reason to commit evil, even if this is the lesser of two evils, because evil is always evil, no matter how we see it. Furthermore, if we need to justify what we are doing, that's a good sign to know that we should not do it, because everything we know we should do does not need justification, we only justify something when we have reason to believe that we should not do it.
Remember that all the people who do evil find a way to justify it, we are not different.
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