“The lesser of two evils” is a well-known and widely used idiom. It’s hard to put an exact date on when it was first coined, but some form of the concept is found in various places, including:
- The Ancient Greek proverb “between Scylla and Charybdis” which describes sailing through a narrow strait of water with two monsters on either side.
- Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” argues that a lesser evil or vice can be seen as “good” by comparison.
- Geoffery Chaucer’s 1374 epic poem, “Troilus and Criseyde”, features the phrase, “Of harmes two, the lesse is for to cheses".
- Thomas à Kempis’ amazing 15th-century textbook "The Imitation of Christ" contains the line, “Of two evils, the lesser is always to be chosen.”
My point here is that humans have been grappling with difficult choices for millennia. The phrase resonates with us today just as much as it did to these pre-Enlightenment or pre-Christian thinkers because it is a pragmatic moral framework to help us make more moral, wise, or safer decisions.
So, you can imagine my confusion when I read that the Mayo Clinic Nicotine Dependence Center’s medical director, Dr Jon Ebbert, suggested that there was no lesser of two evils when it comes to tobacco use.
The Mayo Clinic is a reputable institution. Its opinions and advice carry weight in America and across the globe. Most citizens have jobs to do and families to raise; they don’t have the time or inclination to dig into statements from medical directors. They need to trust that health authorities have their best interests at heart and a commitment to bringing them the best and most accurate information.
So, why would Dr Ebbert be so loose with the facts? Well, if you read his actual quotes from the article, it seems like the author of the piece is driving their own agenda.
In the article, Dr Ebbert suggests that there is no lesser evil between cigarettes, hookahs, and cigars. That’s the tobacco use he is referring to, i.e., combustible tobacco smoking. He also references e-cigarettes and utters the obligatory “we don't have enough longitudinal data to know whether those products are associated strongly with cancer.”
What he, or the author of the article, neglects to mention is the availability of smokeless tobacco products, such as snus, snuff, and chewing tobacco.
Study after study has shown that inhaling smoke into your lungs is where much of the damage from tobacco use is done. Even the most strident tobacco control outlets conceded that smokeless tobacco is less harmful than smoking, even if these statements are autocompleted with some variety of “but it’s still not safe!”.
The point is that even if we are going to say that all tobacco is evil, it's absurd to say that all tobacco is equal. Delivery mechanisms, preparation, and even the type and number of chemicals used vary from brand to brand or type to type. There is a clear hierarchy of harm in tobacco, with any kind of smoking sitting head and shoulders above smokeless tobacco or tobacco-free products.
So, if I indulge the author of the Mayo Clinic piece and accept that the definition of evil in this context is causing harm, and then we “follow the science” and accept that some tobacco delivery methods cause more harm than others, then it follows that some forms of tobacco use are more evil than others.
The Truth Initiative’s and the WHO's doublespeak were just the start of tobacco control’s war on language. Now, they are mangling idioms to float their propaganda.
The lesser of two evils is a decision-making framework that humanity cracked thousands of years ago. It’s embodied within the pragmatism of harm reduction. It’s not that tobacco control can’t wrap their heads around the concept; it’s that they don’t want to.
