Anonymous Asks (393)

“Is it biblical to choose the lesser of two evils?”

In the ancient Hebrew of the Old Testament, the word translated “evil” [raʿ] has two distinct meanings. One is wickedness, an ungodly moral choice made by a living being. The other is misfortune, a sad practical consequence of living in a fallen world, about which we often have little or no choice at all.

Two Kinds of Evil

We find an example of evil in the first sense in Genesis 13, where it says, “the men of Sodom were wicked [raʿ], great sinners against the Lord”. These worthless men made bad moral choices, offending God and hurting others. They were evil people.

We find an example of evil in the second sense in Ecclesiastes, where Solomon refers to the “day of adversity [raʿ]” and contrasts it with “the day of prosperity”. That’s misfortune. Unpleasant things happen. Human beings and moral choices may or may not have anything much to do with it, at least in any immediate way.

The distinction is important in answering our question helpfully. When we use an extra-biblical term like “the lesser of two evils”, do people generally mean wickedness or misfortune? I suspect it’s the latter.

Evil as Wickedness

When we speak of choosing the lesser of two evils, we are usually in a spot where all choices are undesirable in some way. That may be no fault of ours. It’s just the way this sad old world works.

For example, you take your much-loved aging dog to the vet and discover he is riddled with cancer. It has reached his organs and is giving him seizures every fifteen minutes. He has no quality of life. The “evils” involved in this choice may be two or more, but all your potential options are undesirable. Do you ask the vet to put your little buddy down? Do you take him home to watch him flop around spasmodically in distress until his body finally quits? Do you spend $25,000 on experimental cancer treatment that the vet says has almost no chance of success in an old dog? (Also, if you are like most people, you probably don’t have the $25,000 or even the means to borrow it.)

Unpleasant choices like this one confront us frequently. Most of the time they are not our fault. None of the options before you is necessarily sinful (though introducing a wrong motive or a bad conscience to the mix could change that), but none is really the outcome you want. You want your dog back, healthy and happy, and that’s just not going to happen. So now you have to choose what you believe will be the least unpleasant outcome for your dog. You do it with his interests in view, in good conscience, to the best of your knowledge, and you have to leave how it plays out with the Lord because the situation is almost completely beyond you. In circumstances like this, you make the most moral choice you can, but you will probably go home crying anyway.

Is that “biblical”? Well, it’s reality, so you try to act as consistently with scripture as circumstances and your knowledge of the situation allow.

Evil as a Bad Moral Choice

Now, I suppose there may be situations where someone might use the expression “the lesser of two evils” to describe a difficult choice that may have unpleasant consequences for someone, like continuing or breaking off an engagement with a man you just found out has been cheating on you behind your back. Some see a moral element in a situation like that, but I feel like “lesser of two evils” is not an accurate way to describe that sort of choice. You haven’t done anything immoral to cause his failure of fidelity. Holding him accountable is not right or wrong, just expedient. He may be upset. You will definitely be. You may feel horrible whichever choice you make. You may even have made foreseeable errors in judgment that got you in this position in the first place. But the choice to break off the engagement is not a moral imperative, it’s more a matter of prudence, pattern recognition and the exercise of good judgment. Letting him off the hook if he repents is not sinful, but neither is saying, “I’m afraid this permanently changes things for me.”

If there is a genuine “right” and “wrong” in the situation, the Christian must always choose the most God-honoring option available. But if a truly “right” (meaning biblical) choice exists for us to make, then we are not really choosing between two evils in the second sense, are we? We’re back to options that may be undesirable but not immoral.

David and Lesser Evils

When we ask whether such a choice is biblical, I suppose we may also be asking if the Bible provides examples of such choices and their outcomes. I can think of several, but one of the most obvious is 2 Samuel 24. David had numbered the fighting men of Israel, knowing he might well incur the judgment of God for doing it. He had sinned, he then repented, and God offered him three possible consequences, all of them “evil” in the second sense we have been talking about: (1) three years of famine; (2) three months of fleeing from his foes; or (3) three days of pestilence. Every one of these choices would affect not just David but the nation he governed in a major way, but he had no way to gauge which might be the “lesser”. Which choice might impact the fewest Israelites, cause the fewest deaths and the least long-term harm to the nation? He had no clue.

David punted on first down. I think it was a good choice. He answered, “I am in great distress. Let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is great; but let me not fall into the hand of man.” The Lord chose pestilence, and 70,000 people died. Scripture does not tell us what would have happened in the other two cases.

In that sense at least, choosing a lesser evil is definitely a biblical concept, assuming we have the ability to comprehend what “lesser” entails. There is almost never any guarantee of that.