The Hitler Test: How Do We Avoid Bad Ethics?

Let's say you're sold. You see why ethics is important. You agree that figuring out what's right and wrong matters. Great. Now what? How are we actually going to do it? Where do we start?

There are dozens of ethical systems out there, each with its own criteria for what makes an action right or wrong. They disagree with each other, sometimes radically. That's intimidating. But it turns out we don't have to evaluate all of them equally, because some of them can be eliminated before the real work even begins.

How Ethical Systems Work

Think of it this way. At any given moment, you have a range of possible actions in front of you. You could do any number of things. An ethical system gives you criteria for sorting those actions into two categories: the ones you shouldn't do (impermissible) and the ones you may do (permissible).

Picture it as drawing a circle. Everything inside the circle is permissible. Everything outside is not. Different ethical systems draw the circle differently. Some are more restrictive, leaving fewer actions inside. Some are more permissive, leaving more. The technical term for the set of actions an ethical system permits is its extension.

This framing is useful because it gives us a way to compare ethical systems without getting bogged down in abstract theory. We can look at where each system draws the line and ask whether the results make sense.

The Hitler Test

Here's the key insight: if anything is wrong, some things are clearly wrong. The Holocaust. Genocide. The systematic murder of millions of innocent people. If your ethical system can't rule these out, it fails. Not in a subtle, debatable, "reasonable people might disagree" way. It fails categorically. It's no longer a live option.

This is what I call the Hitler Test. If an ethical system draws its circle of permissible actions wide enough to include the worst atrocities in human history, that system is disqualified. We don't need to engage with it further. We don't need to refute its internal logic or find a clever counterargument. We just need to note that it produces a result that no sane person would accept, and move on.

And if there is genuinely no such thing as right and wrong, if no ethical system can rule anything out, then there's no point in doing ethics at all. The Hitler Test is the minimum threshold. It's the floor below which a theory isn't worth taking seriously.

This Is Not Godwin's Law

It's worth pausing to distinguish the Hitler Test from Godwin's Law. Godwin's Law is the observation that as an online conversation goes on, the probability of someone being compared to Hitler approaches 1. The problem with most Hitler comparisons is that they're false analogies. Just because two things are similar in one way doesn't mean they're similar in another. (As the movie Office Space puts it: "You know who else made people wear flair?")

The Hitler Test is doing something different. We're not comparing ethicists to Nazis. We're not saying that if your theory has one feature in common with Nazi ideology, the whole thing is tainted. We're saying something much more specific: if your ethical theory, applied consistently, cannot rule out the worst moral atrocities we know of, then it has failed at the most basic task an ethical theory is supposed to perform. That's not a rhetorical smear. It's a logical test.

A Case Study: Evolutionary Ethics

To see the Hitler Test in action, consider evolutionary ethics, the view that moral rightness is determined by what promotes evolutionary fitness. On this view, actions that help the species survive and reproduce are good; actions that hinder survival are bad.

The problem is immediate. Eugenics programs, forced sterilization, and the elimination of people deemed "unfit" all promote evolutionary fitness (or at least, they can be justified on those grounds). The Nazis explicitly framed their racial program in evolutionary terms. An ethical system grounded purely in evolutionary fitness cannot rule out these practices. In fact, it provides a framework for endorsing them.

That doesn't mean evolution has nothing to teach us about morality. It doesn't mean evolutionary psychology is worthless or that understanding our biological heritage is irrelevant to ethics. It means that "whatever promotes evolutionary fitness is good" fails as a moral principle, because it draws its circle too wide. It includes actions that any adequate ethical system must exclude.

Evolutionary ethics fails the Hitler Test.

What's Left

Once we've eliminated the ethical systems that can't clear this minimum bar, we're left with the ones that can. These are the live options: the theories that at least get the clear cases right. Utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, virtue ethics, natural law theory, contractarianism, and others all pass the Hitler Test (though each faces other objections we'll explore in future posts).

Among these surviving systems, we can then compare how they draw their circles. Where they agree, we can be relatively confident. If every plausible ethical system says that torturing children for fun is wrong, that's about as settled as ethics gets. The interesting questions arise where the systems disagree: abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, the limits of free speech, the ethics of wealth distribution. These are hard precisely because plausible theories, each of which passes the minimum threshold, give different answers.

This doesn't mean ethics is hopeless or that we can't make progress on hard questions. It means that the difficulty of these questions is genuine, not the result of laziness or confusion. If smart people following rigorous ethical frameworks still disagree, that tells us something about the complexity of the issue, not about the futility of the enterprise.

The Method

So the method of ethics, at the broadest level, looks like this:

Start with all the ethical systems on offer. Eliminate the ones that fail the Hitler Test. Among the survivors, examine where they agree and where they disagree. Where they agree, you have your answer. Where they disagree, you have your work cut out for you, but you also have the tools (the surviving frameworks) to do that work carefully.

This won't give you certainty on every question. But it will narrow the field, eliminate the clearly bad options, and focus your attention on the questions that genuinely deserve careful thought. That's not nothing. In fact, it's the only way to do ethics responsibly.