Slavery isn't necessary but if anyone wanted to get any large scale projects done and couldn't convince anyone to help they would need it. I'm going with drug dealing because I wouldn't go cannibal even if it was my only option, raiding is mean and ultimately counter productive, and prostitution is icky and fills the same need as drug dealing.

I personally consider prostitution, so long as it is done by choice, the least bad of all of these, because if the prostitute chose that line of work, nobody suffers.

Cannibalism requires the murder (or at least, killing) of people, slavery requires taking someone's freedom away, chem dealing forces people into terrible addictions, and raiding is abusing another person's labor for your own gain.

Of these, I'd say prostitution is by far the least bad, so that's the one I'd consider a necessary evil.

Become prostitute in the Wasteland, contract STD, die.

oh my god i read it wrong and picked slavery. my answer is cannibalism, assuming you aren't killing people to do that and just munching on corpses already there

^^^You can cannibalize a person without having to kill them. In literal life-death situations it's unfortunate that some people might not be among the current group of survivors.

Imo murdering to cannibalize should have been a separate option, if that is what was intended by the poll. Because it adds in a separate moral dynamic. It's not only "Is it necessary to eat someone else's body to survive", it's "Is it necessary to kill someone to survive".

Is it necessary to kill AND eat someone to survive? That's gotta be double evil. It may be necessary to kill at some point, it may be necessary to eat a corpse you found (or eat with sketchy tribals), but to kill and eat the person, perhaps not.

I read the title wrong, I thought it said something about which one was more evil not which one was a necessary evil. Oops

^ I also read the title incorrectly as well! A third "Oops"!

Such disregard for one's own soul in all these replies.

Opening the door for one of these is cracking the door open for all of them. For they all have the same root. I do X, even though evil, but X will "benefit" me.

Enslaving, torturing and killing people to take their stuff comes packaged in with prostituting I guess.

Also as sax said, eating isn't something you do to "benefit" you, it's a need, and in extreme cases (isolation/famine) a human body is all you might have.