Utilitarian agendas provide a shield for unethical acts in the name of the greater good. Their approach to politics creates a constant state of exception which is counterproductive and justifies torture and necropolitics

If, as a friend recently suggested, we ought to construct a monument to our present political culture as a homage to the principle of the 'lesser evil', it should be made in the form of the digits 6-6-5 built of concrete blocks, and installed like the Hollywood sign on hillsides or other high points overlooking city centres. This number, one less than the number of the beast -that of the devil and of total evil- might capture the essence of our humanitarian present obsessed -with the calculations and calibrations that seek to moderate, ever so slightly, the evils that it has largely caused itself. The principle of the lesser evil is often presented as a dilemma between two or more bad choices in situations where available options are, or seem to be, limited. The choice made justifies the pursuit of harmful actions that would be otherwise deemed unacceptable in the hope of averting even greater suffering. Sometimes the principle is presented as the optimal result of a general field of calculations that seeks to compare, measure and evaluate different bad consequences in relation to necessary acts, and then to minimize those consequences. Both aspects of the principle are understood as taking place within a dosed system in which those posing the dilemma, the options available for choice, the factors to be calculated and the very parameters of calculation are unchallenged. Each calculation is undertaken anew, as if the previous accumulation of events has not taken place, and the future implications are out of bounds. Those who seek to justify necessary evils as 'lesser' ones, especially when searching for a rationale to explain recent wars and military expeditions, like to appeal to the work of the fourth-century North African philosopher-theologian St Augustine. Augustine's rejection of the principle of Manichaeism- a world divided into equally powerful good and evil - meant that he no longer saw evil as the perfect mirror image of the good; rather, in platonic terms, as a measure of its absence. Since evil, unlike good, is not perfect and absolute, it is forever measured and calibrated on a differential scale of more and less, greater and lesser. Augustine taught that it is not permissible to practise lesser evils, because to do so violates the Pauline principle 'do no evil that good may come'. But- and here lies its appeal -lesser evils might be tolerated when they are deemed necessary and unavoidable, or when perpetrating an evil results in the reduction of the overall amount of evil in the world. One of the examples Augustine gives for such an economy of lesser and greater evils is a robbery on a crossroads. It is to this crossroads that other theologists, philosophers and political theorists will return, to this day, when discussing the dilemma. In Augustine's logic of pre-emption, it is better to kill the would-be assailant before he kills an innocent traveler. A millennium later and the armies of Western Christendom passed through this ethicotheological needle-eye-sized loophole on their way to the catalogue of pillage and destruction that constituted the crusades. More recently, Pope Benedict has appealed to the lesser evil principle in a decree permitting the use of condoms in places inflicted -with high rates of HIV. Similar to the latter logic of contraception, some in the Vatican thought that implicit support of the government of Silvio Berlusconi, albeit plagued by sin, ridicule and corruption, might after all be considered as the lesser evil in protecting Christian values. In cases such as these, the economy of the lesser ev-il is always cited as a justification for breaching rigid rules and entrenched dogma; indeed, it is often used by those in power as the primary justification for the very notion of 'exception'. In fact, Augustine's discourse of the lesser evil developed at a time when the church had started to participate in the political government of its subjects and had acquired considerable financial and military power. Through the ages, the Christian church increasingly saw its task as keeping human evil to its minimum level. It pastorally ruled over a vast and complex intrapersonal economy of merits and faults -of sin, vice and virtue- operating according to specific rules of circulation and transfer, with procedures, analyzes, calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of a specific interplay between conflicting goods and degrees of evil. In his lectures on the origins of governmentality, Michel Foucault argued that, on the basis of this 'economical theology', the modern, secular form of governmental power has itself taken on the form of an economy.10 Lesser Evildoers The theological origins of the lesser evil argument still cast a long shadow on the present. In fact the idiom has become so deeply ingrained, and is invoked in such a staggeringly diverse set of contexts - from individual situational ethics and international relations, to attempts to govern the economics of violence in the context of the 'war on terror' and the efforts of human rights and humanitarian activists to manoeuvre through the paradoxes of aid- that it seems to have altogether taken the place previously reserved for the term 'good'. Moreover, the very evocation of the 'good' seems to everywhere invoke the utopian tragedies of modernity, in which evil seemed lurking in a horrible manichaeistic inversion. If no hope is offered in the future, all that remains is to insure ourselves against the risks that it poses, to moderate and lessen the collateral effects of necessary acts, and tend to those who have suffered as a result. In relation to the 'war on terror', the terms of the lesser evil were most clearly and prominently articulated by former human rights scholar and leader of Canada's Liberal Party Michael lgnatieff. In his book The Lesser Evil, Ignatieff suggested that in 'balancing liberty against security' liberal states establish mechanisms to regulate the breach of some human rights and legal norms, and allow their security services to engage in forms of extrajuridical violence - which he saw as lesser evils - in order to fend off or minimize potential greater evils, such as terror attacks on civilians of western states. If governments need to violate rights in a terrorist emergency, this should be done, he thought, only as an exception and according to a process of adversarial scrutiny. 'Exceptions', Ignatieff states, 'do not destroy the rule but save it, provided that they are temporary, publicly justified, and deployed as a last resort. '12 The lesser evil emerges here as a pragmatic compromise, a 'tolerated sin' that functions as the very justification for the notion of exception. State violence in this model takes part in a necro-economy in which various types of destructive measure are weighed in a utilitarian fashion, not only in relation to the damage they produce, but to the harm they purportedly prevent and even in relation to the more brutal measures they may help restrain. In this logic, the problem of contemporary state violence resembles indeed an all-too-human version of the mathematical minimum problem of the divine calculations previously mentioned, one tasked with determining the smallest level of violence necessary to avert the greatest harm. For the architects of contemporary war this balance is trapped between two poles: keeping violence at a low enough level to limit civilian suffering, and at a level high enough to bring a decisive end to the war and bring peace. Niore recent works by legal scholars and legal advisers to states and militaries have sought to extend the inherent elasticity of the system of legal exception proposed by lgnatieff into ways of rewriting the laws of armed conflict themselves. Lesser evil arguments are now used to defend anything from targeted assassinations and mercy killings, house demolitions, deportation, torture, to the use of (sometimes) non-lethal chemical weapons, the use of human shields, and even 'the intentional targeting of some civilians if it could save more innocent lives than they cost’. In one of its more macabre moments it was suggested that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima might also be tolerated under the defence of the lesser evil. Faced with a humanitarian A-bomb, one might wonder what, in fact, might come under the definition of a greater evil. Perhaps it is time for the differential accounting of the lesser evil to replace the mechanical bureaucy of the 'banality of evil' as the idiom to describe the most extreme manifestations of violence. Indeed, it is through this use of the lesser evil that societies that see themselves as democratic can maintain regimes of occupation and neo-colonization. Beyond state agents, those practitioners of lesser evils, as this book claims, must also include the members of independent nongovernmental organizations that make up the ecology of contemporary war and crisis zones. The lesser evil is the argument of the humanitarian agent that seeks military permission to provide medicines and aid in places where it is in fact the duty of the occupying military power to do so, thus saving the military limited resources. The lesser evil is often the justification of the military officer who attempts to administer life (and death) in an 'enlightened' manner; it is sometimes, too, the brief of the security contractor who introduces new and more efficient weapons and spatia-technological means of domination, and advertises them as 'humanitarian technology'. In these cases the logic of the lesser evil opens up a thick political field of participation bringing together otherwise opposing fields of action, to the extent that it might obscure the fundamental moral differences between these various groups. But, even according to the terms of an economy of losses and gains, the concept of the lesser evil risks becoming counterproductive: less brutal measures are also those that may be more easily naturalized, accepted and tolerated - and hence more frequently used, with the result that a greater evil may be reached cumulatively.