One of the arguments I find particularly unconvincing — yet surprisingly widespread — is what can be called the “not as bad as” argument, sometimes referred to in formal logic as a relative privation fallacy. It appears constantly in online debates, political discourse, and everyday conversation, often dressed up as a reasonable counterpoint when it is anything but.
The argument takes many forms depending on the context:
- Religion is very influential in our society, but it’s nowhere near as dominant as it is in Saudi Arabia
- Trump behaves like a dictator, but he is nothing compared to Stalin or Mao
- Women are paid less than men in the West, but children are starving in Africa
- Women lack full equality in Europe, but women in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan have it far worse
At first glance, especially when applied to issues that seem genuinely connected — such as comparing the status of women in Western democracies to their status in deeply patriarchal theocracies — this line of reasoning can appear to carry some argumentative weight. It seems to be grounding a complaint in a broader context, which usually sounds like a responsible thing to do. But when you examine it closely, the logic falls apart almost immediately.
The Core Problem: Comparison Does Not Cancel Out Reality
The fundamental claim embedded in this argument is that you are not entitled to complain about, or work to fix, a particular problem as long as a worse version of that problem exists somewhere else in the world. To illustrate just how absurd this becomes when applied consistently, consider the following: Smoking is bad, but it is not as bad as climate change.
This example is deliberately exaggerated, but that is precisely the point. Does the existence of climate change somehow reduce the death toll from smoking-related illnesses? Does the scale of a planetary crisis make lung cancer less real, less painful, or less preventable? Of course not. The issue of smoking is the issue of smoking. It stands independently on its own terms. The fact that a larger problem exists in no way diminishes the validity or urgency of addressing a smaller one, especially when addressing one does not preclude addressing the other.
And this brings us to one of the most important rebuttals: in the vast majority of cases, solving one problem does not prevent you from solving another. Efforts to reduce smoking rates and efforts to combat climate change do not compete for the same resources, the same expertise, or the same political attention in any meaningful zero-sum way. The two can — and should — be pursued simultaneously. To use one as a reason to dismiss or delay the other is not a prioritisation argument. It is a deflection.
When the Same Issue Is Compared Across Different Contexts
The argument takes on a slightly different character when people compare the same issue across different countries or cultural contexts. The most common version of this goes something like: Yes, women in the West may experience sexism, but women in the Middle East suffer far more — shouldn’t you be focusing on them instead?
This version of the argument contains several distinct logical errors that warrant careful unpacking.
First, it constructs a false dilemma. It implies that caring about women’s issues in the West and caring about women’s issues in the Middle East are mutually exclusive — that you must pick one and abandon the other. But this is simply not true. Moral concern is not a finite resource that depletes when directed to one cause. It is perfectly possible, and in fact entirely normal, for people and organisations to care deeply about both.
Second, the argument misunderstands the practical realities of activism and advocacy. A feminist activist based in Germany or France is, for obvious reasons, far better positioned to influence legislation, cultural norms, and institutional practices in her own country than she is to reshape the political and legal structures of Saudi Arabia or Iran. This is not a failure of ambition or empathy — it is simply a recognition of where one’s efforts can be most effective. Demanding that someone abandon their local advocacy until they have first fixed injustices on the other side of the world is not a principled position; it is an unreasonable one.
Third — and perhaps most importantly — pursuing women’s equality in the West does absolutely nothing to prevent simultaneous advocacy for women’s rights in the Middle East. International human rights organisations, feminist scholars, journalists, and NGOs work on both fronts constantly. The Western feminist who campaigns for equal pay is not, by doing so, blocking the work of activists lobbying for the right of Afghan girls to attend school.
The Animal Rights Version — And Why It Exposes the Absurdity
Another common variation of this argument is the dismissal of animal welfare organisations: Why are you spending resources protecting animals when there are people suffering?
Set aside, for a moment, the fact that organisations dedicated to human welfare already exist in enormous numbers and are constantly seeking funding and support. The real question is: what logical reason is there to believe that protecting animals and protecting people are in direct competition? Why must caring about one require neglecting the other?
The answer, of course, is that they are not in competition. The existence of human suffering does not make animal suffering morally invisible, just as the existence of poverty does not make workplace discrimination acceptable. We do not operate in a world where every moral cause must wait in a queue until the one ahead of it is fully resolved.
As Seneca put it with characteristic precision: “To be good, it is not enough to be better than the worst.”
The “Matter of Priority” Objection — And Its Limits
At this point, a more sophisticated defender of the original argument might concede that we can care about multiple issues—but insist that it is still a question of priority. Resources are finite. Attention is finite. If we accept that some problems are genuinely more serious than others, shouldn’t we direct our collective energies toward the worst ones first?
In the abstract, this sounds reasonable. But apply it consistently, and the position becomes untenable almost immediately. If we must solve the biggest problem before addressing any others, then we cannot work on women’s rights until we have ended all armed conflicts. We cannot focus on armed conflicts until we have eliminated global hunger. We cannot address hunger until we have solved climate change. Nothing would ever get addressed, because there would always be a larger problem upstream demanding priority.
More fundamentally, this objection misunderstands how human society actually organises its problem-solving. There is no single global institution that addresses every issue simultaneously and allocates resources across all of humanity’s challenges from a single central ledger. The world does not work that way, and it cannot work that way. Expertise is specialised. Doctors who specialise in infectious diseases cannot simply pivot to solving geopolitical conflicts. Human rights lawyers focused on gender equality cannot suddenly redirect their skills toward environmental policy. People work on what they know, what they are positioned to address, and where they can make a genuine difference. This is not a flaw in the system — it is the system functioning as it must.
When the Argument Does Have Legitimate Force
It would be intellectually dishonest to suggest that comparisons of severity are never meaningful. There is a legitimate and much narrower version of this reasoning that applies in specific circumstances: when resources are genuinely scarce, finite, and cannot be stretched to cover multiple needs simultaneously.
The clearest illustration is medical triage. A doctor in a field hospital has only enough medicine to treat one of two patients: one with a broken arm, and one whose life is in immediate danger. The doctor must prioritise. This is not a dismissal of the patient with the broken arm — it is a rational allocation of limited resources in an acute situation. The broken arm still matters. It will still be treated when the immediate crisis is resolved.
This version of the priority argument is coherent precisely because it is grounded in a specific, concrete, realistic scarcity — not a vague philosophical claim that bigger problems should make smaller ones disappear from our moral attention. The doctor is not saying the broken arm is unimportant. She is saying, right now, in this specific moment, with these specific constraints, this is what I must do first.
This is a fundamentally different thing from telling a feminist campaigner that her work is irrelevant until the Taliban is dismantled.
The Takeaway
The “not as bad as” argument, in its common usage, is not a counterargument. It is a rhetorical manoeuvre designed to shut down discussion by shifting the frame of reference rather than engaging with the substance of a complaint. It tells people that their concerns are too small to deserve attention, which is almost never true, and almost never the real motivation behind deploying the argument.
When we engage with an issue, the intellectually honest approach is to evaluate that issue on its own terms: Is it real? Is it harmful? Can it be addressed? What would addressing it require? The existence of worse problems elsewhere in the world does not answer any of these questions. It simply changes the subject.
We should resist this deflection, recognise it when we see it, and keep our attention focused where it belongs — on the issue at hand, and on what we can actually do about it.
