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You're a member of the plucky rebels that are fighting against the evil empire that believes in X, an idea you find absolutely evil and abhorrent. The Big Bad Emperor is beyond your reach right now, but you can assassinate some of his most important supporters: Alice, Bob or Carol.
Alice is probably the better person between you two. She's smart, brave, loyal. There's only one difference: she sincerely believes that X is good.
Bob probably doesn't believe that X is good. Or that X is evil. He simply believes the side to be on is the one that is winning.
Carol probably doesn't believe that X is good. If anything, she probably finds it abhorrent, just like you. However, she is still doing her job and doing it well because otherwise she will be replaced by a true believer in X.
Which one of the three henchmen is the evilest? Which one should the plucky rebels assassinate first?If the answers to these questions are different, are the plucky rebels truly fighting on the side of good?
Alice, Alice. Bob & Carol can be reasoned with, persuaded, or manipulated: only Alice believes that X is an unambiguous good; this is, as you assert, "absolutely evil and abhorrent": it's irreconcilable. You simply need to kill enough Alices to trigger a preference cascade. To prevent the Evil Empire from ever reconstituting itself you'll need to be thorough and completely erase every "true believer" in X, but you can save cleaning up the incompetent and ineffectual ones until after your rebels have consolidated power. The true believers like Alice are the biggest threat -- as they're smart, once they start to lose they'll cloak their belief in X and make it hard to differentiate them from Bob and Carol, then secretly advocate for X in the shadows. Hopefully the "X" in question is something like Christianity in Edo Japan and you can just demand the Alices to step on or desecrate some sacred icon and kill them if they refuse.
Agreed. Bob is likely to defect if it looks like the Empire will lose (or that he himself might pay the cost), and Carol is likely to either begin sandbagging or resign entirely.
In terms of evilness? Well, as a true believer in an evil cause, that would again be Alice. But I would say she is still more virtuous than Bob, who's an opportunistic mercenary.
I would rather Bob be killed, and Alice survive to reconstruction as a matter of personal preference, but in terms of pragmatic effectiveness, she's got to be the target.
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