I think this is closely related to the more colloquial concept of “necessary evils”. I always felt the term was a bit of a misnomer—we feel they are evils, I suspect, because their necessity is questionable. Actually necessary things aren’t assigned moral value, because that would be pointless. You can’t prescribe behavior that is impossible (to paraphrase Kant).
As a recent example, someone argued that school bullying is a necessary evil because bullying in the adult world is inevitable and the schoolyard version is preparation. In that case it seems there was a sort of “all-or-nothing” fallacy, i.e., if we can’t eliminate it, we might as well not even mitigate it.
Yeah, a lot of “second-best theories” are due to smallmindedness xor realistic expectations about what you can and cannot change. And a lot of inadequate equilibria are stuck in equilibrium due to the repressive effect the Overton window has on people’s ability to imagine.
I think this is closely related to the more colloquial concept of “necessary evils”. I always felt the term was a bit of a misnomer—we feel they are evils, I suspect, because their necessity is questionable. Actually necessary things aren’t assigned moral value, because that would be pointless. You can’t prescribe behavior that is impossible (to paraphrase Kant).
As a recent example, someone argued that school bullying is a necessary evil because bullying in the adult world is inevitable and the schoolyard version is preparation. In that case it seems there was a sort of “all-or-nothing” fallacy, i.e., if we can’t eliminate it, we might as well not even mitigate it.
Yeah, a lot of “second-best theories” are due to smallmindedness xor realistic expectations about what you can and cannot change. And a lot of inadequate equilibria are stuck in equilibrium due to the repressive effect the Overton window has on people’s ability to imagine.