Let's say you live in Buenos Aires and have landed a job in New York City. You ask an American friend where you should live, in the city or in a small suburban town 30 miles away. She answers, "You'll have to pick the lesser of two evils. You could live in a congested, polluted, loud, unsafe place, or you could deal with long commutes and limited cultural activities." The choice seems like you can put your health and life at risk, or you can endure long train rides on weekdays and suffer from boredom on weekends. Your friend has not quite endorsed living in the suburbs, but she might as well have.
That's the choice Pope Francis laid out when asked about the coming United States presidential election. "You have to choose the lesser evil," he said. "What is the lesser evil, that woman or that man? Both are anti-life—both the one who throws out migrants and the one who kills babies. Both of them are against life." While the pope might claim impartiality about the outcome of the election, he in fact creates a false equivalence. He asks his audience to consider which is preferable: deportation, which he assigns to Donald Trump, or infanticide, which he links to Kamala Harris. Of course, we would rather deport someone than murder a child. In effect, he implies—no, asserts—that Donald Trump is the better choice.
As writers, we need to be aware of this logical fallacy. We must the check the equivalence of offered options. Every genuine option has at least one disadvantage as well as an advantage. We must avoid false dilemmas by fully exploring the depth of nonbinary situations. The pope, even from a perspective of, as he put it, "political morality," failed to do so.
