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"The true interest of an absolute monarch generally coincides with that of his people. Their numbers, their wealth, their order, and their security, are the best and only foundations of his real greatness; and were he totally devoid of virtue, prudence might supply its place, and would dictate the same rule of conduct."
— Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter V
A subversion of the Even Evil Has Standards trope, when a villain averts the Villain Ball and refuses to do something abhorrent not because it is too horrible, but rather because it is too inefficient or ineffective, or there isn't much to be gained from it. He's tried kicking the dog or at least studied those who have. No matter the combination of dogs and boots, and he's investigated thoroughly, there just isn't any profit and one's toes tend to hurt after a while. Also, dogs sometimes manage to sink their teeth into their tormentors. What he does all depends on which option would serve his purposes best. Being evil for these types just means more options are available from which to choose.
Virtually any Villain with Good Publicity tends to be a master of this trope, especially one who is also Dangerously Genre Savvy. Villains With Good Publicity almost always have years of experience in earning the trust of their supporters, and are well aware that angering dog-lovers (among others) will not advance their cause and may hinder it. Even for those who don't happen to be Affably Evil, if any dog-kicking is deemed necessary, they will keep these acts of cruelty out of the public eye; how evil they truly are under cover of darkness must remain shrouded in darkness.
An obvious foil to Evil Is Stylish abiding villains (who will do the evil deed anyway), though some do manage to pair the two. Not to be confused with Do Wrong, Right, where an evil act is decried for being poorly executed. Compare and contrast Shoot the Dog, where a hero or anti-hero does a morally questionable act for pragmatic reasons. See also Cut Lex Luthor a Check, Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat, Stupid Evil, Sanity Has Advantages, and Bread and Circuses. Compare Evil Virtues, where a villain has good traits. The Noble Demon will probably attempt to justify his nobility this way, with varying degrees of believability.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- In Code Geass, viceroy Cornelia doesn't like elevens taking drugs because it damages productivity.
- Dutch from Black Lagoon runs illegal booze, slaves, guns and drugs. He does piracy when the delivery business goes slow. He does not, however, condone his employees running off Ax Crazy and taking out their issues by shooting at noncombatants when he's in a combat zone. Not because he gives a crap about their lives, but because he wants to know that his backup can be relied upon and stay professional.
- The Gandor Family in Baccano! stays steadfastly out of the drug trade, sticking with relatively less objectionable crimes like bootlegging and gambling. This is due to actual moral objections on the part of Keith Gandor, but the other two Gandor brothers, Luck especially, recognize that it's also because their relatively small organization is not equipped to compete with the larger organized crime families currently running drugs.
- The Maou in the light novel/manga, Maoyuu Maou Yuusha is an example of this, although she is more pragmatic than evil.
- Moo in the Monster Rancher anime captured Holly to use the Magic Stone to locate his original body, figuring he could destroy the heroes with it. They rescued her, but by that time he had gotten what he needed to know. Rather than let them find out where he was going or try and stop him in his humanoid form, he simply left them behind so they had no idea where he was.
- In Dragon Ball Z, Nappa and Vegeta (of the Saiyan race) are surprised that a Half-Saiyan/Half-Human Hybrid creates a much stronger warrior than either the Saiyans or humans alone. Nappa suggests that the two go to Earth conquer it, and use their women to breed an army of extremely powerful warriors. Vegeta shoots him down immediately—not because he was against the plan itself, but because it would be ridiculously stupid to breed a race of beings that would one day be far more powerful than you are yourself. Instead, he suggests they just go blow the planet up.
- This is the reason why Ginjo from Bleach told Tsukishima to stop Mind Raping Chad and Orihime. He has no moral objection to it, but destroying your hostages' minds means you can't use them as pawns. It's easier to just stick to Mind Control.
- Mayuri has shades of this too. He's outright worse than most of the actual villains, but he sticks to being the Token Evil Teammate because of this. Working for the Soul Society gets him: an officer position, funding, minions, supplies, etc. Working freelance gets you.. execution by the Soul Society. He's still committing all sorts of atrocities in the name of science, but at least this way, he gets paid for it.
- In Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force, Arnage and Veyron take on two other Eclipse infectees. The latter's willy-nilly attacks on innocents will be blamed on the Huckebein, who don't want the added attention.
- Death Note has Villain Protagonist Light Yagami who was willing to kill tens of thousands of criminals and other undesirables to further his ambitions. But he doesn't approve when his Bumbling Sidekick Teru Mikami, announced that Kira was going to kill lazy people as well. Light doesn't object to killing the lazy, he just hasn't decided yet if it's an effective method of imposing his reign.
Comicbooks
Film
Literature
Live-Action TV
Newspaper Comics
- In Dick Tracy, the final Big Boy Caprice story by Max Allan Collins has him trying to kill Tracy with a million dollar open contract on the detective. Eventually, the organized crime ruling committee, The Apparatus, confront Caprice and tell him that the contract must be canceled. In this case, this is not motivated by moral considerations, but as a matter of professionalism considering the fact that Tracy has learned about the mob contract on him and has taken personal control of the department's Organized Crime Unit to retaliate. The Apparatus knows that they can't afford to let Tracy come at them full bore and so they must take action.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40,000 has the Tau, who are (besides the Card-Carrying Villain that is Chaos) the only faction that do not have "All the aliens must die, sooner or later" as policy, and are willing to incorporate other species into the Empire - sometimes at gunpoint, but other times a species will willingly join the Tau.
- The Dark Eldar was made into this to explain how a bunch of Neutral Evil backstabbers were still alive after 20,000 years.
- Indeed, every faction in 40k are pragmatic villains; Dan Abnett pointed out that if Chaos really was a "nail a baby to your helmet" society as some claim they would simply collapse in on themselves and be destroyed within a week. As such, even the most villainous 40k factions must, by definition, have a functioning society. Since they can all threaten the Imperium to a greater or lesser degree, that means there must be people who can engage in pragmatic villainy. Any examples (from any race) that contradicts this can therefore be dismissed on the grounds of "every sufficiently large organisation has a bloody twit in a position of power."
- Blue and or black villains in Magic: The Gathering tend to abide by this.
Theatre
Videogames
- In Heroes of Might and Magic IV, after founding his own kingdom, the necromancer Gauldoth the Half-Dead gains a once-in-a-lifetime chance to invade his neighbouring nation while their armies are elsewhere and become the most powerful ruler in the world. Instead of doing this, he sends the invasion plans to the queen of said nation, telling his Number Two that whenever a necromancer gets too greedy, every living thing in the world allies against them. Instead, he's content on ruling his own little nation for all eternity, overlooked by everyone else.
- Caster in Fate/stay night refrains from actually outright killing the victims she drains because that would draw even more attention, too much to cover up with a story about gas leaks.
- The Illusive Man from Mass Effect goes out of his way to ensure his employees are kept comfortable for a long as they are able to serve him. Of course he'll still gladly sacrifice any of them if he thinks the potential gain from doing so is large enough. He also has no problem with Shepard recruiting a number of non-humans despite being the head of a human-supremacist organization, because he recognizes the simple fact that the Reapers are too great a threat for humanity to defeat on its own.
- This is also likely the reason Morinth wants to help Shepard stop the Collectors and Reapers.
- Commander Shepard can be played this way, as well. Although Shepard performs very few truly "evil" acts, a Renegade Shepard is ultimately concerned only with furthering his/her own goals. Thus, decisions such as stopping Saren, investigating human disappearances, saving Morinth (as opposed to Samara) and fighting the Reapers can be seen as pragmatic steps to his/her agenda. The myriad Renegade options available in ME 2 tend to ease an upcoming battle, even they're ruthless as all hell.
- Some of the Renegade events are Pragmatic Villainy (such as electrocuting Sergeant Cathca) others are simply common sense (and morally neutral, seeing as the people will die in the ensuing fight anyway).
- The Agency of Hitman normally go after criminals and the like due to the fact that people pay more for world stability. Also, Agent 47 prefers not to kill anyone not his target, since collateral damage isn't professional and it creates the risk of more witnesses.
- This is the reason why "professional" pirates in EVE Online hate the more Griefer-like rat bastard ones. A professional pirate will trap your ship and make you a simple offer - pay them or your ship and capsule will be destroyed. If you pay up, they'll let you go, otherwise they blow you up and loot your wreck. The rat bastards will do the same thing, except if you pay up they destroy you and loot your wreck anyway. The professionals hate the bastards because they make people far less likely to pay up, which is far more reliable profit than looting wrecks (as what survives a wreck is random). Quite a lot of people in Eve refuse to ever pay ransoms for their ships simply because they don't believe in "honest" pirates any more.
- "The Practical Incarnation" is the name for the most evil of your previous selves you encounter in Planescape: Torment. Everything he did had a practical use, even if it ultimately resulted in horrible things like convincing a woman he loved her so her very soul would stick around and act as an oracle for him. He even leaves you with some very good, easy-to-follow instructions, so much the better to make sure you can carry on his work even after his death.
- Mr. House of Fallout: New Vegas is not a nice man and freely says that he desires to become the region's dictator (he prefers "autocrat"), but he has no interest in power without a purpose and his plans for the Mojave would certainly benefit mankind as a whole. Likewise, he's merciless in dealing with people who have earned his ire or even have a chance of standing in his way, but in personal interactions he's usually just sort of condescending, not showing any overt malice.
- Father Elijah, a fanatic whose behavior edges pretty close to Complete Monster territory, actually had some pretty sensible policies during his time as the leader of the Brotherhood of Steel, including obtaining beneficial technology such as farming equipment and trading such technology with wastelanders in order to gain their support. Elijah doesn't care about wastelanders and is happy to sacrifice them if needed, but was smart enough to recognize that the Brotherhood was too small and insular to survive without support from their wastelander neighbors (a fact which even his much more moral successor completely missed).
- The Khans, a group of raiders act more the "professional" pirates of the EVE Online example above.
- "Good" choices in Overlord are often framed as this. For instance, after retrieving a village's stolen food supply, you're given the option to take it to feed your horde—but giving it back to the villagers instead increases their productivity (represented in-game by a higher respawn rate for the sheep you kill to feed your basic troops.)
- In Portal 2, GLaDOS ends up thinking like this at the end of the single-player campaign.
The best solution to a problem is usually the easiest one. And I'll be honest. Killing you? Is hard.
- In the Deus Ex Human Revolution "The Missing Link" DLC, you can find an email from the evil base commander where he claims he was informed that his subordinates are raping their female prisoners and demands that they stop or face harsh punishment...because this decreases the chance that they survive the horrific surgical procedure that turns them into Hyron Drones.
- Flameth in Dragon Age, especially Dragon Age 2. Kidnapping and eating children? Like I don't have anything better to do with my time.
Webcomics
- In the Order of the Stick prequel series Start of Darkness, Xykon says he will not do any scheme of kidnapping virgins because "it's like giving a guy who doesn't know carpentry a hammer and expecting him to build you a house". He also thinks that destroying the world is a stupid idea, because if he did that, what would he have left to rule? "I like the world... I'm certainly not about to destroy it unless I get really, really bored."
- His entire philosophy is when style fails, fall back on this trope.
And now I see that planning doesn't matter. Strategy doesn't matter. Only two things matter: Force in as great a concentration as you can muster, and style. And in a pinch, style can slide.
- During a story arc in the main series, an imp suggests that Vaarsuvius use some virgin's blood as a spell component, to which Vaarsuvius replies that virgin's blood is difficult to acquire on an uninhabited island in the middle of nowhere.
Vaarsuvius : This is reprehensible, depraved, and most importantly, highly impractical given our current location.
- Tarquin, who claims to be Above Good and Evil, runs the Empire of Blood. His interaction with Heroes suggests he's so Dangerously Genre Savvy it hurts, including knowing world domination is rather hard to pull off if everyone knows you're doing it. He even offers help and magical rewards to prevent Xykon from doing so either.
- Belkar, amazingly enough, manages an instance of this, after one of his shoulder demons convinces him that saving Hinjo's life will work out better for him in the long run than letting him be killed by an assassin.
"It's for the Greater Me."
- Exterminatus Now: The Cesspool mercenaries won't sell weapons to the Cultists of Darkness. Because they refuse to pay up front and try to weasel out of the bills.
Web Original
- Pretty much the basis of the Evil Overlord List.
- Dark General Cobalt of Sailor Nothing is this in contrast to his Card-Carrying Villain acquaintances. It's not that he has a moral objection to rape, torture, and murder, it's just that he finds it a colossal waste of time. He'd much rather focus on getting things done. Interestingly, his pragmatism actually results in his being the villain the heroes encounter the most—in the interests of actually getting his project off the ground, he decides to kill the girls who've been wiping out his underlings.
Western Animation
- Shere Kahn in Tale Spin once made certain that his workers were freed from a corrupt underling who was working them to death.
Shere Khan: My dear, I desire only money and power. Unpresentable employees provide me with neither.
- Batman The Animated Series: This was the reason Ra's al Ghul deposed his son Arkady Duvall as a potential heir to his world-conquering empire; Ra's' entire shtick is his belief that Utopia Justifies the Means, which includes making sure The Trains Run On Time, so the prospect of using barbarous and inefficient tactics to ensure that (such as whipping hard workers for every little slip-up, or disposing of supposed interlopers by dunking them in molten lead, as Duvall does in the episode "Showdown") does not sit well with him, at all.
- Zordrak, of all villains, invokes this in The Dreamstone when Urpgor asks why he doesn't just kill his bumbling minions Blob, Frizz and Nug.
- In South Park, "Fun With Veal"
Kyle: Dude, how are we going to move 23 cows to your house?
Stan: I don't know.
Cartman: Guys, I've got it. We can kill Butters, and then float the cows on a river of his blood!
Kyle: Don't be stupid! Butters doesn't have that much blood in him!
- The Kingpin was presented this way in the 90's Spider-Man animated series, even occasionally teaming up with Spidey against more Omnicidal Maniac villains because "there's no profit to be had in the end of the world."
- Xanatos from Gargoyles never carries the Villain Ball; his plans are pretty much designed so he HAS to win something. He also refuses to engage in revenge, because as he sees it, it's a "sucker's game" with no real benefit, and seems to want to remain friendly with his enemies, since he could easily need their help someday.
- A good example of this trope is in "Enter Macbeth," when he's reluctant to kill the gargoyles during their stone sleep not because they're defenseless, but just because it "seems like a waste." The same episode has Macbeth calmly wait for them to wake up before trying to capture them, since that, after all, is the honorable thing to do.
- Keep in mind that Macbeth is immortal, and the only thing that can kill him is a woman who's been avoiding him for centuries, so he can be as practical or reckless as he wants.
- Agent Bishop in the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He had the goal of protecting humanity from aliens, and while he extremely ruthless, he had his priorities in line and didn't go and spend time trying to kill the turtles, who were ultimately more an aid to him then a hindrance.
- Although he hates Darkwing Duck and would be happy to get rid of the interfering superhero once and for all, Megavolt has helped DW on one or two occasions when the city of St. Canard is destroyed. He justifies this by pointing out that if St. Canard is destroyed, there'll be nothing left for him to rob.
- One of the lessons Megamind learns after apparently killing Metro Man. Part of the enjoyment of being a supervillain is having a worthy superhero to do battle with.
- In Kim Possible Monkey Fist explains he didn't kidnap Sensei because the old man was of no value to him.
- Dracula from The Batman Vs Dracula doesn't like to kill his victims, but not because he doesn't like killing. He just hates wasting a life that could be better used as his undead servant.
- The Tri-Predacus Council, leaders of the majority of all Predacons, sends an agent to prehistoric Earth to aid the Maxials and capture Megatron, whom they declared a dangerous criminal. They, like Megatron himself, still want to take over Cybertron and spark a second interstellar war, but would prefer to do so through subtle manipulations and waiting for the opportune moment. That and Megatron's plan is too reckless even for them to consider.
- From the comics based on the original series, We have Shockwave. Essentially a poor man's Soundwave in the cartoon, he was far more badass in the comics from Marvel, Dreamwave and IDW; as an aversion of the Straw Vulcan trope, Shockwave actually DOES try and take the most efficient course to victory. His defeats usually come from going against incredibly illogical opponents, like the Dinobots.
Real Life
- Generalisimo Franco. While he was not a nice person, he was competent as a dictator, was more instrumental about his atrocities, and avoided the type of "eccentricities" that Those Wacky Nazis are associated with. One contemporary said, "Franco made Spain safe. Not for Democracy, but for the people."
- Benito Mussolini, Il Duce of Fascist Italy, killed far fewer political opponents than Hitler or Stalin (whole orders of magnitudes fewer) and remained fairly pragmatic (although unnecessarily showmanlike) about instituting Fascism in Italy and the world up till the point he started getting chummy with Hitler.
- That may be more, Even Evil Has Standards. He was an incompetent tyrant, unlike Franco who whatever his faults was competent at least. Mussolini also devoted himself to a cult of conquest which Italy's military capability could really not support, and which brought no benefit to Italy. Franco did none of this; he was perfectly happy to remain neutral, and avoid tangling with the Royal Navy. And Franco didn't give a hoot about how ungrateful Adolf Hitler thought him.
- Of course, Mussolini is the one who got himself messily lynched.
- Genghis Khan famously mused over the idea of massacring the entire population of northern China to create pastureland for Mongol horses. He was dissuaded when it was realized living Chinese pay more in taxes than dead Chinese.
- The story goes that he was convinced when one of his advisors, a Uighur, told him:
Kill everyone, and you take a million bolts of silk all at once. Let the people live, and you can have 500,000 bolts of silk every year.
- He also recognized the value of trade, even with nations whom you planned on conquering, and encouraged trade with other nations heavily. Gaining material goods from other lands is always a welcome asset, and sending your own merchants into foreign lands allowed them to gather crucial intelligence for when you finally moved in to conquer them.
- The Nazis' racial ideology painted East Asians as untermenschen, which did not stop them forming alliances with Imperial Japan (and prior to switching sides, with the Republic of China).
- While not considered as übermenschen, the Asian people was still held in high regard by the Nazis. They were regarded almost as the Aryan race's closest cousins.
- Indeed, they had a battalion of Indian soldiers made up of POWs who were willing to fight the British, though they didn't do much, and they made deals with South Slavs to help hold the Balkans.
- Nazis are notable for their bizarre ideas about race. In general, nonwhite Aryans were considered such primarily for the purposes of this trope. The homeland of the Aryan race in Theosophy was Tibet, after all. (In linguistics, Müller placed the Aryan homeland farther west, in the region now known as Iran and Afghanistan; contemporary scholarship places the Indo-European Urheimat, the closest thing to an Aryan homeland that may have historically existed, in Ukraine, southern Russia, and the Caucasus). The Nazis considered the Sioux to be Aryans, in an attempt to develop a race of Sixth Ranger Traitors in the U.S. (a trope that was obviously subverted), and to show a case of Aryans being oppressed by Jews (as all governments save Germany's and its allies' were run by Jews in Nazi ideology). The Japanese were a good example of this trope as well.
- In general, The Holocaust is notable for being a spectacular aversion of pragmatic villainy: As terrible as it is to force millions into slave labor camps, the fact that the labor they performed served no real purpose to Germany's larger war effort, and indeed diverted trains that could have otherwise distributed necessary supplies to Germans at the front, makes it as impractical as it was evil. Even the horrendous medical experiments performed on some prisoners were .000001% more justified than the slave labor, since, at the very least, some useful information about the effects of phosgene gas and cold on the human body is still used today... reluctantly.
- A few of the more notorious Nazi "scientists" put out work so shoddily done even their peers threw it out. Their experiments had no purpose beyond cruelty.
- Those Wacky Nazis and, to a lesser extent their Japanese Allies were the masters of screwing themselves over with this trope. As if the industrial might of Western Europe and the USA was not enough of an enemy, they had to so thoroughly antagonize some of the most useful allies that were available to them: the Jews, the East Slavs and the Chinese. Granted, the Chinese and Mother Russia would still need to be delivered of their current governments, but that has nothing to do with picking a fight with the much more valuable general populations. Oh, and the Jews? The Nazis really messed that one up, because they were very important in the running of pretty much every industrialized nation and some that were not, one example being Germany, which only managed its post-defeat comeback because the survivors took a massive level in Badass
- Given that antisemitism was a cornerstone of Nazi ideology and one of its defining attributes, it makes perfect sense for them to have done what they did - remove Jews from society that is, not the Holocaust. The Nazis believed that Jews were the cause of all misery and that they had infiltrated all aspects of German society, diluting it and weakening it. So removing them, from that perspective, from whatever job they held, no matter how important, was perfectly rational with that basic belief in place. The Holocaust, though...that was just malice and cruelty with healthy dosage of utter stupidity.
- Prejudice in itself isn't a logical or sensible goal. Of course the Holocaust was an aversion of Pragmatic Villainy.
- They considered themselves pragmatic, in an especially disgusting way:
Reinhard Heydrich: "We will not sterilize every Jew and wait for them to die, we will not sterilize every Jew and then exterminate the race; that's farcical. Dead men don't hump, dead women don't get pregnant - death is the most reliable form of sterilization, put it that way."
- Killing them all and getting at least something out of their detention (at least in theory) was more efficient than the original plan to ship them to Madagascar. Unfortunately. So there is that aspect to it; they were at least trying to be pragmatic about their goal 'de-Jew Germany.' It just so happened that the merciful option was too expensive. Also, it relied upon a conquered British Navy doing the shipping, which the Nazis couldn't use after they lost the Battle of Britain.
- The really odd thing in all this is that it may well have been the choice of Madagascar that did it, rather than the much-closer Palestine. The militant Zionist group Lehi, known to the British authorities in Mandate Palestine as the "Stern Gang," are reported to have sent a message to the Germans to the effect of "Ship all the Jews to the Middle East, and we'll be more than happy to carve out a little fascist empire here and not bother you guys ever again. Also, we'll help you beat Britain and the Commies." The Nazis, of course, rejected this out of hand, not least because Lehi was at that point a splinter group of a splinter group (Lehi broke off of the main Revisionist formation, the Irgun/Etzel, which broke off from the main Zionist formation, the Haganah), and further not all Lehi members were behind the proposal (meaning that the folks who sent the message were a splinter group of a splinter group of a splinter group).
- Georgy Zhukov, while defending Leningrad in 1941, issued an order that if any man surrenders to the enemy, his family will be shot. Malenkov (a senior Politburo member who was in Leningrad at the time) cancelled the order immediately. After all, scaring your own army away from the battlelines is kind of counterproductive.
- Josef Stalin disbanded his infamous "blocking detachments" - these were formed in 1942 and were deployed behind front lines with the sole purpose of shooting "cowards" and fleeing Soviet troops - after only three months. Of course, this wasn't because he cared for the lives of his soldiers, but because they had a detrimental effect on morale and wasted manpower by diverting troops to the rear.
- Funny, considering that he executed his experienced officers and replaced them with incompetent rookies.
- He also had a habit of executing or sending to Siberia any person smarter than him. He particularly hated scientists, believing them to be elitists wishing to exploit the hard-working people of the Soviet Union. In his mind, it's perfectly acceptable to threaten your best minds with death or exile in order to get them moving faster. Any delays (because science doesn't always produce results at the speed demanded) were seen as stalling and treated accordingly. Now imagine what Soviet science would be like had Stalin been a little smarter and a little less paranoid. Supposedly, there were plenty of ideas and designs which he rejected out of hand due to them not being immediately useful. These designs would later be re-developed by someone else and give someone else the advantage. That's not Pragmatic Villainy, that's just shortsightedness (from a guy famed for his 5-year plans).
- Not to mention the Bolshevik stance on science, which was anything but Pragmatic Villainy - they denounced Darwinian evolution as "bourgeois science", replacing it with Lamarckian Pseudoscience, which hampered Soviet biology for years. They spent millions trying to grow crops in the Arctic and Siberia, as well as a crackpot scheme for breeding huge rabbits to feed city populations. They only adopted "capitalist" Einstein's theories when their best scientists begged them to, otherwise they would not have been able to make A-Bombs.
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