rights he is able to fulfil. But what I am saying here is this:

If someone holding supreme authority or one of its subsidiary offices—such as leadership, governorship, judgeship, or the like—cannot fulfil all its obligations and avoid all its prohibitions, yet deliberately pursues this to a degree that others do not, in both resolve and ability, then it is permissible for him to hold office, and it may even be obligatory.

This is because, when holding office is among the obligations whose benefits must be secured—such as fighting the enemy, distributing fay’ revenues, enforcing the prescribed punishments, and keeping the roads safe—undertaking it is obligatory. If this necessarily entails appointing some people who do not deserve appointment, taking some things that are unlawful to take, and giving to some people who ought not to receive, and he cannot avoid this, then it falls under the principle that whatever is indispensable to fulfilling an obligation or a recommended act is itself obligatory or recommended, provided that its harm is less than the benefit of that obligation or recommended act.

Indeed, even if holding office were not obligatory, and it involved injustice which its holders perpetuated until someone assumed it with the intention of reducing that injustice and averting its greater part by bearing its lesser part, doing so with this intention would be commendable. Whatever wrongful act he committed with the intention of averting something worse would be well done.

This is a matter in which the judgment varies according to intentions and purposes. If a powerful oppressor demands money from someone and compels him to pay, and another man intervenes between them to spare the victim much of the injustice, taking money from him and giving it to the oppressor, while preferring that no injustice be done and being willing to prevent it if he could, then he is doing good. But if he intervenes to assist the oppressor, he is doing wrong.