Response: a Good and Virtuous Nature May Recoil:* on Consorting With Evil to Do Good

Response: A Good and Virtuous Nature May

Recoil:

*

On Consorting with Evil to Do Good

SHANNON PRINCE†

ABSTRACT

David Luban asks how ethical people in government should respond when an

unethical regime comes to power, noting that Hannah Arendt argued that to stay

in such a regime supports it. I take the position that attempting to distinguish

between ethical and unethical regimes can be problematic because even regimes

deemed moral commonly commit evil. Thus, I argue that it is ethically permissi-

ble to serve in a regime that commits evil if certain conditions are met—if the

good that one seeks to do is urgent enough, if one will not lose one’s moral

clarity so as to confuse mitigating evil with aff‌irmatively committing a moderate

amount of it, and if one does not engage in both the bad and good acts of the re-

gime under the belief that the latter can cancel out the former.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 696

I. IF ONE HAS AN URGENT ENOUGH REASON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 698

II. IF BEING PART OF THE REGIME WON’T LEAD ONE TO

CONFUSE MITIGATING EVIL WITH PERPETRATING MODERATE

EVIL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 700

III. IF ONE DOES NOT ENGAGE IN BOTH THE BAD AND GOOD

ACTS OF THE REGIME UNDER THE BELIEF THAT THE LATTER

CAN CANCEL THE FORMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 702

* William Shakespeare, Macbeth, act 4, sc. 3.

† Shannon Prince is an attorney at Boies Schiller Flexner where she serves as a member of the Firm

Diversity Council. She is also a member of the Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics

Alumni Steering Committee, a Leadership Council on Legal Diversity Pathf‌inder, and the author of Tactics for

Racial Justice: Building an Antiracist Organization and Community forthcoming from Routledge. She grad-

uated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College with highest honors in Senior Fellowship, earned her doctor-

ate in African and African American Studies and her master’s in English from Harvard University Graduate

School of Arts and Sciences. She earned her law degree from Yale Law School. © 2021, Shannon Prince.

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