Intending the bad as such

Here is a plausible thesis:

1. You should never intend to produce a bad effect qua bad.

Now, even the most hardnosed deontologist (like me!) will admit that there are minor bads which it is permissible to intentionally produce for instrumental reasons. If a gun is held to your head, and you are told that you will die unless you come up to a stranger and give them a moderate slap with a dead fish, then the slap is the right thing to do. And if the only way for you to survive a bear attack is to wake up your fellow camper who is much more handy with a rifle than you are, and the only way to wake them up is to poke them with a sharp stick, then the poke is the right thing. But these cases are not counterexamples to (1), since while the slap and poke are bad, one is not intending them qua bad.

However, there are more contrived cases where it seems that you should intend to produce a bad effect qua bad. For instance, suppose that you are informed that you will die unless you do something clearly bad to a stranger, but it is left entirely up to you what the bad thing is. Then it seems obvious that the right thing to do is to choose the least bad thing you can think of—the lightest slap with a dead fish, perhaps, that still clearly counts as bad—and do that. But if you do that, then you are intending the bad qua bad.

Yet I find (1) plausible. I feel a pull towards thinking that you shouldn’t set your will on the bad qua bad, no matter what. However it seems weird to think that it would be right to give a stranger a moderate slap with a dead fish if that was specifically what you were required to do to save your life, but it would be wrong to give them a mild slap if it were left up to you what bad thing to do. So, very cautiously, I am inclined to deny (1) in the case of minor bads.