Not Quite the Right Thing

"Elayne: "Galad only does what's right, no matter who he hurts." Egwene: "Since he only does right, he only hurts evil people, right?" Elayne: "No, he mostly hurts good people. And that's what makes him so perfect." Egwene: "Wow. I wish I could be so perfect.""

- The Wheel of Time mock summary by ISAM

Sometimes, it hurts to do the right thing. Sometimes, it's damned if you do and damned if you don't. And sometimes, what seemed a good idea at the time turns out otherwise. It sounded like the right thing... but it turned out to be Not Quite the Right Thing.

Whenever a device like this is used in a plotline, it's sometimes used to provide some sort of moral ambiguity to the situation (in which case, there truly wasn't a right thing). Usually leads to a Downer Ending or a Nice Job Breaking It, Hero, and is a major part of shows with Black and Gray Morality. It can get messy when mixed with a good/evil Karma Meter.

Unfortunately, all too often Truth in Television.

When everyone involved is aware that all options are bad and that there's no right answer, it's a Sadistic Choice instead.

Anime and Manga

 * Soukou no Strain: Sara can't bring herself to kill her brother, despite witnessing the massacre at Grabera. Because of this, he kills yet another person that Sara has allowed herself to care about. Although he is still the most important person in her life, she decides to stop him from hurting anyone else.
 * The anime series Monster begins with this trope: a doctor disobeys hospital director's orders and saves the life of a child whose foster parents had been killed, only to discover ten years later that he had murdered them, and committed a string of other murders since then as well. Not to mention that said child decided to "thank" him by killing the director and the entire board that demoted him. And then to be even more of a Poisonous Friend, Tenma himself ends up getting the blame for these murders, and turns fugitive years later when the boy returns and kills one of his patients, who was an accomplice in the boy's serial mass murder of entire families. Tenma gets blamed for that too.
 * Happens a lot in Code Geass, due to its Grey and Grey Morality.

Film

 * John Carter bravely saves the wounded Colonel Powell from a probable quick death at the hands of the Apache and thereby (unintentionally).
 * The ending of the movie Gone Baby Gone totally qualifies with Patrick's final choice. It's generally agreed that he was damned if he did, damned if he didn't.
 * The Butterfly Effect combines this with It Got Worse. Every. Single. Time.
 * In the film For One Night a young student tries to stop segregated proms at her school. Well it might have been the right thing to do, but nevertheless racial tensions exploded in her town. Although to be fair the reporter Desiree Howard kinda added fuel to the fire by breaking the story.
 * The ending to the Richard Gere / Edward Norton film Primal Fear, where it is revealed that Edward Norton's character really is a murderous sociopath, after Gere succeeds in defending him at his murder trial.

Literature

 * This happens repeatedly when Bastian recklessly makes wishes using the AURYN in the original novel of The Neverending Story. Perhaps the best example is when he finds a race of beings so utterly ugly that they constantly weep. He wishes for them to become beautiful and always laugh, but it turns out that their tears are actually necessary.
 * Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series puts the Jews in this position. After Warsaw is freed by the Race, the Jews cooperate with them in order to survive, and are seen as traitors to humanity by doing so. The fact that attempts to condemn the Race for their actions such as destroying Washington D.C. are altered and turned into praises don't help.
 * The Valar were motivated to things like bringing the Elves to the Undying Lands or rewarding the Edain with Numenor entirely by good intentions. The text still takes the time to strongly imply that doing so was ultimately the wrong thing to do.
 * In Tolkien's legendarium, trying to impose any vision or much of anything else on the world is likely to end badly, because the free wills and free choices of Elves and Men are so vital, and because no finite entity comprehends enough of How Things Work in the universe to be able to predict the consequences of their actions outside their purview. Tolkien had a low opinion both of reactionaries ('Embalmers') and progressives ('Reformers'), Sauron started out as a Reformer, the Elves of Eregion who made the Rings were Embalmers. Both were Not Quite the Right Thing.
 * Harry Potter - The same night that Professor Trelawney delivers a genuine prophecy about a servant of Voldemort returning to his master, Harry persuades Remus and Sirius to send Wormtail to prison instead of killing him, only for him to escape. Harry is horrified at the idea that he might have helped Voldemort on his way back to power, but Dumbledore consoles him that he only did the best he could at the time. He also notes that Wormtail owes Harry his life, which may come in useful in the future.
 * Sure enough, it finally pays off in
 * Given that A Song of Ice and Fire is Black and Gray Morality verging on Black and Black Morality at times, it's unsurprising that this happens a lot.

Live Action TV

 * CSI: Parents euthanize their child upon seeing symptoms of a painful degenerative disease to which they had already lost another child. Turns out that the child was healthy, the symptoms were caused by something else.
 * CSI in general (all three shows) has a strong thread of ironic justice running through it. ANY time a character - ANY character - either breaks the law to bring someone else to justice (say, by planting evidence or searching without a warrant), or kills someone because the law can't punish them for their crimes, it will ALWAYS backfire. Anyone killed out of a sense of "justice" will ALWAYS turn out to have been innocent the entire time, and the killer will always wind up devastated over what they've done. Criminals framed for a crime or illegally arrested will always turn out to be innocent as well, potentially resulting in the person doing the frame losing everything in the process. Crime absolutely does not pay - regardless of the reasons - in the CSIverse.
 * Actually it was subverted in one episode where the father of a missing girl planted an already-dead body he stole inside the chimney of the man he suspected killed said daughter. His plan succeeded spectacularly as his dead daughter's body was hidden in a brick extension to the chimney in question. Considering the judge limited the warrant to the chimney at one point the man not only made his own luck but hit the jackpot with it.
 * Babylon 5: Dr. Franklin performs a life-saving surgery on an alien child, over the objections of his parents that his chest cavity not be cut open or his soul will escape. When they find out, their religion requires them to kill him.
 * Dr. Franklin also forces a traumatized war veteran to confront the fact that he's not King Arthur. Re-traumatizing him catatonic. The good doctor then Lampshades that this keeps happening to him, because of his need to fix everything.
 * This happens in the episode of House where he is institutionalized; House chews out the doctor who forced a delusional patient to confront the fact that he was not actually a super hero (then went catatonic). House ends up trying to "help" the guy and only makes things worse. But he eventually learns a lesson about the difference between trying to "fix" things and actually just apologizing.
 * Star Trek: The Original Series, "The City on the Edge of Forever": Saving Edith Keeler's life seems like the right thing to do, but if she lives she will found an influential peace movement, which also seems like the right thing to do but will delay America's entry into World War II and hand victory to the Nazis.
 * One of the best if not the best TOS episodes, combining the grey areas of real world moral choice with a harsh lesson in the nasty implications of time travel, and also an implicit rebuke to the idea that love conquers all. Kirk was very much in love with Edith, she was not just a pretty skirt he was chasing... but that didn't matter. What was necessary was necessary. Spock's emotionless act is transparently undercut by the genuine sympathy and pity in his simple, dry statement to McCoy, "He knows, Doctor. He knows."
 * The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica does this ALL the time. From Colonial One's abandoning of the civilian ships in the miniseries to the Olympic Carrier to mutiny to military dictatorships to banning abortion to baby-stealing to torture to assassination to suicide-bombing to election-rigging - the characters (mainly Commander/Admiral Adama and President Roslin) constantly wrestle with the decision to do the easy thing or the right thing. And they actually make crappy decisions a good deal of the time.
 * Abandoning the ships in miniseries turns out to be tragically right, though. And it's not like they had any choice (those ships didn't have any FTL engines, and would never have been able to escape the Cylons anyway).
 * In Lost season 3, Kate refuses to leave Jack with the Others, so she grabs Sayid, Locke, and Rousseau, and treks across the island to rescue him. She doesn't know that Jack's scheduled to leave the island by submarine the next day, or that Locke's true intention is to blow the submarine up.
 * Cold Case loves this. Why choose between a Sympathetic Murderer or a Sympathetic Victim when you can have both and make the era the monster?
 * Doctor Who: In Genesis of the Daleks, The Doctor is tasked with destroying or altering the behavior of the Daleks so as to make them a negligible threat. The Doctor, however, realizes that by doing so, he would rob the different races of the universe of a chance to end warring amongst themselves, as countless civilizations put aside their differences to band together in grand coalitions against the Daleks, learning to work together in harmony along the way.
 * In the Farscape episode "...Different Destinations", our heroes get sent back in time and keep trying to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. Finally, it looks like they've succeeded and you're all set up for the little girl to survive the intervening years...
 * This is commented on in an episode of Stargate SG-1, where Daniel recounts the many instances where the team made seemingly good choices which turned out to have completely unforseeable evil consequences. Oma Desala comments that the universe is an infinitely complicated place full of unforseeable consequences which an individual can't control, but they can control whether they themselves are good or evil.

Tabletop Games

 * Shows up a few places in Exalted. The Usurpation, several actions of the Scarlet Empress, and even occasionally the Primordial War had results that were kind of good in the long run but the methods to achieve them and their (undecided) ultimate consequences are still a bit... iffy.

Video Games

 * An irritating example occurs at the end of Akiha's route in the Tsukihime Visual Novel. . Breaking your promise nets you a very depressing ending where  every day. This is her normal end. Keeping your promise  nets you a Bad End despite being much less miserable. (To get the best ending, you have to Take a Third Option, but that's beside the point.)
 * Fate/stay night, during the Heaven's Feel route, the protagonist faces the choice of . The former choice has Shirou emulating his foster father Kiritsugu and killing his emotions to do what's "right"...and severely disappointing Ilya (who was previously ) and Rin (who is then forced to ), with the implication being that . Even the Tiger Dojo inhabitants are speechless. And the one person with congratulations happens to take pleasure in the suffering of others... The latter choice also cannot be considered the 'right' thing because while you, it results in
 * Used quite frustratingly in Yggdra Union, where there are three examples of the trope.
 * Starting at the end of Chapter 7, when the Royal Army begins its invasion of Bronquia, but don't stop because Yggdra is afraid that Gulcasa will just invade Fantasinia again. The venture winds up.
 * Then in Chapter 9, when is reintroduced, Yggdra and Milanor automatically vilify him and refuse to listen to his side of the story, even before . While his plans do endanger the world and he's come dangerously close to crossing the Moral Event Horizon, he's also got very good reasons for what he's doing.
 * And finally, the player's choices mean that there is no real good ending. If Yggdra, but if she follows in footsteps and chooses to . There is no happy ending for , who the Royal Army looks at as a villain either way, and everyone who died still died (in some cases pretty needlessly).
 * Devil Survivor has a few examples. For instance, on Day 5, you can talk
 * Well ultimately it's a in place of a . Not exactly a bad deal.
 * Day 5 can be pretty evil about this. If you, one of the first things your party recommends that you do this day is Did you do that? Well, congratulations - you've basically  The proper solution to all this is to  Dammit, Atlus!
 * The Sadistic Choice at the end of Meria's route in Knights in The Nightmare. Either you, or you . There is no other option but fighting Marietta and losing, which is much worse.
 * In Dragon Age, two sidequests in Orzammar have this effect.
 * First is the quest where you help the dwarven Genki Girl scholar Dagna be allowed to move into the Circle to study (Dwarves are incapable of magic). While this seems like a good thing, according to the epilogue, . The negative effects can only be avoided by mage warden under the right circumstances.
 * The second, and probably much more severe quest, is where you help a dwarf establish a Chantry presence in Orzammar. If you do this, the epilogue reveals that.
 * Yet a third comes from the main questline in the city itself. In order to get any support from the city, you need to ensure that one of two candidates for kingship takes the throne. One candidate is Lord Harrowmont, a fairly good natured man who is said to have been chosen by the former king himself as the successor. The other is Prince Bhelen, the remaining son of the former king,  suspected of killing his older brother and framing his other sibling (possibly main character) among other shady schemes for the throne.   Yeah, this game loves it some Grey and Gray Morality. Then again, the game does show that Bhelen is supportive of the Casteless while Harrowmont is a traditionalist to the point of stagnation.
 * Unsurprisingly, Dragon Age II likes this trope as well.
 * In three out of four of those cases it makes no damned difference what you choose, it'll happen anyway. The disaster with  is the only one that can be avoided, and is probably the biggest surprise of your "good" choices going wrong.
 * Mass Effect 2: During Samara's recruitment mission, you come across an Eclipse merc willing to surrender and who is practically begging for her life.  But it's Ultimately Averted: If you listen to the news afterwords (the same news that talks about Blasto), they say that she was arrested.
 * Fallout 3 has the infamous Tenpenny Towers quest, where the guards won't allow Roy Philips, a sentient ghoul, to buy himself an apartment or even let him in. Fighting the Fantastic Racism would be the right thing to do for anyone except Roy, because . With a proper FAQ, the player can subvert this trope by.
 * Fallout: New Vegas also has a number of unexpected negative consequences result from seemingly good acts, although nothing as extreme as the Tenpenny Tower example from Fallout 3.
 * Honest Hearts features one of these in both outcomes of the final choice.
 * In Knights of the Old Republic one mission sees a you tasked with defending in court a renounced republic war hero accused of murdering an agent of the sith forces on a neutral planet. The Sith have clearly tampered with evidence to incriminate him making your job easy enough. Trouble is  The correct (i.e. Light side) choice is to point out that the Sith altered the evidence,.
 * In Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark, you'll come across a woman who has built a shrine and is caring for a sleeping celestial searching for his one true love. Later on in the game, you can discover that she is the woman the celestial has been searching for the entire time. Not playing your cards exactly right results in her rejecting her destined lover since she feels she is unworthy of his feelings and dooming the celestial to an eternity of searching for her in vain. Do it right, however, and they stay together.
 * Army of Two: The 40th Day subverts/deconstructs/parodies video game morality choices with heavy use of this trope. There are a number of points in the game in which the heroes are given a choice of two actions; one obviously "good" and one obviously "bad". The "bad" morality choices usually turn out exactly as you would expected. The subversion/deconstruction comes in the fact that the "good" morality choice almost always has a completely unforseeable, incredibly negative consequence in the future, often as bad or even worse than what would have if you made the "bad" choice, which the heroes never even become aware of and which is only revealed to the player by the narrator.
 * As an example, the first morality choice you get in the game is to kill another mercenary who's been helping you, or to pretend to kill him and tell him to disappear. If you kill him, he dies. If you let him live, he escapes Shanghai before all the shit goes down, and moves to a quit tropical island...where he's killed by an assassin while sleeping on a beach lounger.
 * In the first half of Time Hollow, this happens to Ethan a lot. His first try at fixing each past incident usually makes things worse, and he has to try something else. He has even more trouble in the second half of the game, but this time it's because the bad guy is actively undercutting him.
 * Two examples from Alpha Protocol:
 * In Rome, you will be given the Sadistic Choice of saving your friend or defusing bombs that threaten to kill dozens, if not hundreds, of people. If you choose to save the Damsel in Distress, the bombs go off. If you defuse the bombs, she is shot dead in front of you. From a purely utilitarian perspective, defusing the bombs is obviously the right thing to do, since many more people will die if they go off. However, the epilogue reveals that, if you let the hostage die, she becomes a symbol for the movement to enact harsh new anti-terrorism laws (which was the villain's goal all along), while, if she lives, she becomes a charismatic and effective leader in the movement against them.
 * In Taiwan, your choice is to save the President from being assassinated or prevent a violent riot. Saving the President is intended to preserve the stability of the region, but it actually leads to Taiwan and China edging even closer to war, since he uses his increased popularity with the public to get more aggressive in his foreign policy. If you let him die, his successor will be much more moderate and will work to ease tensions.
 * As an example, the first morality choice you get in the game is to kill another mercenary who's been helping you, or to pretend to kill him and tell him to disappear. If you kill him, he dies. If you let him live, he escapes Shanghai before all the shit goes down, and moves to a quit tropical island...where he's killed by an assassin while sleeping on a beach lounger.
 * In the first half of Time Hollow, this happens to Ethan a lot. His first try at fixing each past incident usually makes things worse, and he has to try something else. He has even more trouble in the second half of the game, but this time it's because the bad guy is actively undercutting him.
 * Two examples from Alpha Protocol:
 * In Rome, you will be given the Sadistic Choice of saving your friend or defusing bombs that threaten to kill dozens, if not hundreds, of people. If you choose to save the Damsel in Distress, the bombs go off. If you defuse the bombs, she is shot dead in front of you. From a purely utilitarian perspective, defusing the bombs is obviously the right thing to do, since many more people will die if they go off. However, the epilogue reveals that, if you let the hostage die, she becomes a symbol for the movement to enact harsh new anti-terrorism laws (which was the villain's goal all along), while, if she lives, she becomes a charismatic and effective leader in the movement against them.
 * In Taiwan, your choice is to save the President from being assassinated or prevent a violent riot. Saving the President is intended to preserve the stability of the region, but it actually leads to Taiwan and China edging even closer to war, since he uses his increased popularity with the public to get more aggressive in his foreign policy. If you let him die, his successor will be much more moderate and will work to ease tensions.

Web Original

 * This flash video about driving is all about this trope. Every time the person does the "right" action, it only brings further trouble or inconvenience.

Western Animation
"Carver: (clenches teeth) Tino: You Did the Right Thing. Carver: Still... (clenches teeth again)"
 * The Weekenders, "Band": Carver Descartes tells his favorite band that he is not a songwriter, simply because he thinks that lying about the band dedicating their local show to them was enough lies. Turns out that because of that, Chumbucket doesn't have to pay royalties for a song they wrote from doodles Carver left on a napkin. Carver is seething.


 * Futurama, "Jurassic Bark": Fry thinks it's tampering in God's domain to resurrect his dog, and he probably had a long fulfilling life anyway. Long? Yes. Fulfilling? No -- he never got over Fry's disappearance, and spent the rest of his life waiting in front of Fry's old workplace. We call that a Downer Ending.