Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

the beginning of a possible archive of probes into the “lesser evil” argument.
One of the trajectories of the concept of the “lesser evil” originated in early Christian
theology and was secularized into the utilitarian foundations of liberal ethics. It formed
the basis for the philosophy of “ethical realism”, differently formulated by George Kennan
and Hans Morgenthau. Ethical realism traces its origins to St. Augustine and St.
Thomas Aquinas and insists on some ethical constraints on states and military action.
It sees the role of liberal states and especially that of the United States in the pursuit of
moral goals such as “freedom”, “human rights” and “democracy”. The destiny of the
United States in particular and ‘the West’ in general is to fight radical evil, whose traces
could be found in any project predicated on an articulation of the idea of the ‘good’ (religious
fundamentalism or communist egalitarianism).
One component in the idea of the lesser evil, however, has gone missing in its secularization.
For the Christian fathers the toleration of the lesser evil, as I will later show, should
be understood in relation to the religious telos of salvation. The immanent management
of evil on behalf of the church was conceived as part of a quest for perfection which
forms a necessary stage on the way to transcendence – the replacement of the earthly
kingdom with a heavenly one. Unlike the teachings of the Christian fathers, the liberal
striving for perfection is not a quest for eventual transformation. Without transcendence
it is locked within a perpetual economy of immanence and could be better interpreted as
a drive for the ‘optimization’ of the existing system of government. 17
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The vast extraterritorial institutional network of the ecclesiastical pastorate – the
Church as it was formed and institutionalized from around the turn of the fourth century
– dealt with the problem of the “lesser evil” in the context of the practical and intellectual
problem of “the government of souls”. In his lectures on the origins of governmentality
Michel Foucault analyzed the Christian form of pastoral power. “Economical theology”
sought to understand the management of both human and divine orders, each with its
immanent order of execution. In relation to human action the divine management of evil
is both general and particular, bearing on both the individual and society, the multitude
of people in the flock. The Christian order thus operated by simultaneously individualizing
and collectivizing – granting as much value to a single person as to the community
and the multitude. 18 Salvation – deliverance from the power and penalty of sin and evil
and the redemption of the soul – must address thus all and each. This form of salvation
is one of the aspects of general and particular providence. The pastor must account not
only for the well-being of individual and community but for the totality of good or evil
they perform personally and collectively.
Discussions of particular providence are organized around the question of choice, or of
free choice – how to identify and pursue good and avoid evil. General providence, on the
other hand, invokes a vastly complex intrapersonal economy of merits and faults – of sin,
vice and virtue – operating according to specific rules of circulation and transfer, with
complex procedures, analyses, calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very
GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN