Evil wins regardless

I came across this question which said

When there is evil in this world that justice cannot defeat, would you taint your hands with evil to defeat evil? Or would you remain steadfast and righteous even if it means surrendering to evil?

This was a brain twister because no matter how you look at it, evil still wins in the end. If you taint your hands with evil to win against the greater evil, you just end up becoming that evil. This question might seem far-fetched, but in our daily lives we are confronted with this question. Sure, it's not labelled as evil, or it's not at such a high degree, but there are times when we have to make choices like this.

A good example are the wars happening all around the world right now, in search of peace people choose to hurt each other, they chose evil to bring about the justice they desire for themselves. Other examples you have things like corruption, where people become corrupt in hopes they can make a change, leadership positions where you have to make tough choices. Or even something as common as police work, where taking lives is common place.

The limits of Justice

I won’t say justice is limited, but it certainly takes its merry time to act. Injustice takes the elevator while justice takes the stairs, even for things like karma, you do have to wait for a very long time. The thing with justice is that it operates under set rules and a predictable action, and has a hard time dealing with the creativity of evil.

When you have to bring someone to justice for example, it would take so much time to determine the culpability of that person and the right punishment. Meanwhile, evil gets its way in a matter of moments and is on to the next action. This slow nature of justice makes it much more desirable for people to use evil to seek justice for themselves because they simply don’t have the patience to wait any further.

The end justifies the means

This question is a moral dilemma, which means there isn’t necessarily a clear-cut answer. All answers lead you to a dead end, so it's much more of a circumstantial question where the answer varies depending on the particular situation.

Another way of phrasing this question is by asking, “does the end justify the means?” Sure, we can all agree that sometimes taking drastic means which will produce some great results is much more preferable, but there are other times when the results won’t be able to justify all it took to get there. Since you can’t determine that beforehand, you can't give a blanket statement like the end does justify the means.

Confusion

To fight evil without becoming it is the ultimate test of character. It demands that we ask not just what we want to defeat, but what we want to become in the process.

Sometimes, the greatest battles are not fought on the battlefield, but within the soul — where justice and morality wrestle in silence.

Thanks for reading ☺️