Ok, here’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while.
First off, though, please notice my calm tone. Notice the lack of animosity. Please, if I have any power to ask something from the people who reply, it is this: Don’t be rude. I am so sick of rudeness that I will probably just give up reading my own thread to avoid people being jerks. I get enough of that IRL.
So, here’s the phrase in mind:
“The end doesn’t justify the means.”
It seems to me that there is possibly a very good argument for saying that this is by definition wrong. If the end doesn’t justify the means, then what else does? I know this is almost a cliche, but if you had 5 minutes alone with, oh, Idi Amin at age 20, would you shoot him or not? You’d be saving thousands of lives.
Or: if you could somehow know that the guy down the street was going to become the next highway sniper, would you do something illegal if necessary to prevent it? If you would do anything illegal, doesn’t that prove that you are indeed saying that the end of preventing the horror excuses breaking the law, and that your end justified your means? When my ex-roommate came out of the house with a large knife and demanded to know where to go to protect someone from an impending attack that existed only in his psychotic break, he was detained against his will. Everyone, even he, is glad this was done.
Doesn’t even the universally-accepted argument of violence in self-defense prove that people do believe that the end justifies the means?
Now, let me point out a few things.
The examples I’ve put here are mostly just thought experiments. We can’t travel back in time or know with any kind of certainty what someone will do weeks in the future.Pretending that we can know things like that will only encourage exactly the kind violence that we’re talking about preventing.
Getting lucky later is a very bad proof of your right to have acted like you did. The Panama Canal may someday figure very large in helping the U.S. Navy prevent something awful, but that will be Teddy Roosevelt just being lucky. He couldn’t really know that, and I personally feel very funny about excusing his actions in fomenting revolution in Panama so he could dig the Big Ditch.
You have to take into account everything surrounding the action. Who will be affected, even emotionally, by this? What will people be inspired to do by this? How many of them are qualified to make a good decision about following your example? I’m sure there are others.
Actually thought-through responses are appreciated.
the phrase " The end justifies the means" or the end doesn’t justify the means" is subject to the individual circumstance.
The actual “saying” is “The ends justify the means”. The thing is it isn’t always true.
If you could essentially MURDER hitler prior to world war 2 and stop that war from happening then the saying would be true as far as most people are concerned.
Now for example Iraq…Killing close to 30,000 Iraqis, almost 1500 americans/coalitions troops, and wounding close to 10,000… essentially for no other reason but to remove saddam hussein from power? The ends definitly do NOT justify the means.
This is indeed a well-considered OP on this subject.
In philosophy/ethics your question is discussed under the heading deontological ethics (duty-based ethics) vs consequentialist ethics (utilitarianism and the like). Is ethics based on rules that have to be followed alway, regardless of the consequences (as Kant thought), or should you only act for the best consequences regardless of any rules? In practice the extreme positions have come nearer to each other, in particular that most consequentialists recognize the value of rules as approximations of maximum ‘utility’.
My reading of the debate is that in general there is no absolute support for either of the extreme positions. While people in general believe that the ends do not justify the means, in specific cases many people are happy to switch positions. The examples you provided first illustrate this point very well.
Your first and third remarks astutely identify one of the problems with consequentialist theory: it has to assume perfect information, otherwise you cannot make the necessary calculation. Since we do not have perfect information, the whole theory crumbles when applied to practice. At the most you can say that in specific cases, where the consequences are very clear, there may be reason to diverge of rules that in general should be adhered to.
I fully agree with your remark, that pretending to know things for sure only encourages the kind of violence we want to avoid. In fact, I think most people beforehand would (rightly) be horrified if someone would shoot an innocent person with the justification that he was certain that his victim would eventually become a mass-murderer. It would be disingenious to pretend that someone could have killed Idi Amin beforehand and would have done a good deed. We do not have hindsight when having to decide how to act. If I read you correctly, you suggest that allowing people to act on such unverifiable intuitions of the future would encourage people to go off on hunches and prejudices to kill or harrass others. I concur.
It is only your second remark where I’m not sure whether I agree. True, it is not good reasoning to take hindsight into account for the evaluation of the act itself, since hindsight was not available at the time. However, it is a quite natural element of evaluation. For one thing, hindsight is how we distinguish (admittedly poorly) between true visionaries and lunatics. For another thing, there is something called ‘moral luck’. People do get blamed to a certain extent for things not entirely under their control, and may get praised in the reverse situation. This may be a result of the conflicting intuitions I alluded to earlier. Nonetheless it shows that consequences matter, even if they need not entirely justify the means.
Looks to me like the previous posters pretty well covered my take on this -
ie means are knowable, ends are unknowable - but I’d take it a step further.
Even ‘post-facto’, ends remain unknowable. There’s just no way to follow the many ramifications of a given action.
Frinstance - you kill Idi Amin before he reaches power, but one of his yet unborn grandsons was the guy who was going to save the world from the Martians…
So I’d tend to support ethics that are based more on principles of behavior than on expectations of outcomes.
IMHO, there are times when the expected outcome trumpts the principles of behavior. Extreme example: As a general principle of behavior, killing another human being is not good. However, if someone is threatening my children with harm, and I have the means to kill that person, I’d do it without hesitation.
The problem with thinking that the ends justify the means is that there are often several paths that one can take in order to achieve a certain end, and it seems unintuitive to think that all paths are equally tenable simply because they achieve those ends.
For instance, a man is in my way while I walk towards my destination. Suppose that, for whatever reason, the end goal of “getting to my destination” is good. At least three options present themselves:
Exert a little more effort to walk around him
Call him names and demand he moves
Kill him and step over his corpse
Intuitively, the three solutions have different moral value. If the ends justified the means, then it seems that any of the above are arbitrary.
I’ve always thought that it should be “The ends do not excuse the means.” That is, if you kill someone you know is going to commit genocide, then you may be justified, but you’re still accountable for killing them. Just because you produce a good outcome doesn’t mean you get a bye for every evil thing you did along the way to achieve it.
That example, IMHO, is entirely different. In this case it’s the circumstances that excuse the means; the ends do not come into play. Killing someone out of self-defense is not a wrong act, regardless of what would have happened if you hadn’t done it.
No need to speak theoretically. We have today a good example to test our ideas.
Torture.
Should US agents who capture leading Al Qaida figures in Afghanistan, for example, employ torture (either directly or via allied agencies in Eqypt, say) as a means of uncovering potentially lethal plots against Americans or the identities or locations of other Al Qaida figures?
Has torture even been shown to be a reliable method? Using force in obtaining confessions, for example, does not have the rosiest history.
In any case, the question of whether ends justify the means does fail in the presence of alternatives. Given seperate ways to the same “good” end, the principle in question gives no way to select between them: we need an alternate method of evaluation to select among them. This then belies the notion that the ends justify the means.
If there is only one means to an end, the question might be answerable and the principle more sound. I am hard pressed to think of any situation where this is necessarily the case, real or theoretical.
Its not only about perfect information and “good deeds”. Naturally killing a dictator appears to be something positive… but then why stop there ? Once you go beyond a certain moral threshold why stop ?
The common expression is “The ends don’t justify the means” BTW.
If your morality creates exceptions then its just a matter of justifying further “un-moral” acts with good ends. Morality becomes a decorative object good for times of peace and quiet.
The problem is that “your” moral code isn’t necessarily the moral code of others.
In my opinion that is something that is entirely missing in the perception of almost everyone who makes a claim on “morality” to justify own deeds (or wording).
You’re quite right, Cardinal: Utility does not lie solely with an amount of “people left alive” following some theoretical timeline, and in any case we can never be anywhere near certain that such a timeline would have transpired. (Maybe Idi prevented someone even worse taking power?)
All we can do is make a best guess at how suffering might be minimised in the long run. Note that arbitrary assassinations of unknown young men themselves may have negative utility: The notion of somebody running around killing people will cause no little panic amongst the wider population who will worry that they might be next.
As a phrase, “The ends justify the means” has always chilled me to the bone. If the means itself engenders great suffering, then how can one evaluate the end as a separate entity?
There is always a conflict between “The Rules” and unforeseeable contingencies. The best “rules” know this, and make allowances.
Pure utilitarian evaluations lead to certain kinds of “utility monsters.” e.g., would it be okay to kill 1,000 innocent people in order to save 10,000,000? (Churchill and Coventry.)
There are times we need to make such decisions…but the motto “the ends do not justify the means” is intended to remind us that they should be rare, and only made after long thought, deep soul-searching, and a lot of effort in looking for alternatives.
Sometimes, it is okay to steal. (A man swipes a loaf of bread for his starving family.) But if we start codifying this explicitly, we get some weird results. (No bakery would be safe from hungry men – and how hungry, exactly, is “starving?” And does the baker have the right to lock his door? What if the starving man uses a gun? What if the baker does? etc. etc. et ad nauseam c.)
‘The end justifies the means.”
“The end doesn’t justify the means.”
What dictates the use of either of these statements? Perspective. Whatever situation, both can be applied, depending on one’s opinion.
In order to really know if one or the other is true then, like Tusculan stated, we need perfect information. But we don’t have it, nor will be ever have it. Ultimately, we’re all subject to time and neither statement can ever be said without an understood disclaimer that, while the statement appears to be true to the speaker at the time, at some point the statement may be proved false for a period of time until the cycle of time shows it to be true again and so on.
The time travel scenarios pose an interesting problem. On one hand, the chance to get Hitler as a youth, even as an infant could be seen as beneficial. However, we still don’t know or understand what the fallout would be from that decision. When it comes to temporal scenarios, I tend to go with the whole “don’t change history” philosophy as there is no way to know if we’d actually be making the future better.
I’d like to think that one can discuss morality without digressing into the ridiculous time travel scenerio (if you met Hitler/Osama/Michael Jackson as a child).
The problem I always had in ethics class is that for every example of an ethical framework (utilitarian, reletivistic, whatever) there are examples and counter examples that each can be taken down a slipery slope to an extreme and outradgeous conclusion.
The only absolutes that I can acertain is that 1) you have a right to defend yourself, people you care about and your property 2) any rule that applies to you applies to everyone else 3) you should attempt to do as little harm as possible 4) you can only act on what information is available and 5) in the end you are responsible for your actions.
Individual ethics are fairly easy. I imagine things are a little more complicated when you lead a nation of millions or a company of thousands where quite often the choice is between the lesser of two evils.
Huh. Due the practicalities of actions that affect huge numbers of people, I’d say quite often that leaders have it easier than most of us absolutely speaking because they are often permitted and expected to make decisions that will knowingly hurt others. I am surely not allowed such a standard, at least, I do not allow it for myself. On the flip side, of course, is the fact that I am faced with ethical choices that don’t already coincide with learned behavior far fewer times than any leader is. So, summary, I’d say their decisions are absolutely easier because they are given a larger berth, but relatively harder because they face many more of them.
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Huh. Due the practicalities of actions that affect huge numbers of people, I’d say quite often that leaders have it easier than most of us absolutely speaking because they are often permitted and expected to make decisions that will knowingly hurt others.
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Being expected to make decisions that possibly may cause direct or indirect harm to others does not make those decisions easier to make. They are still bound by ethical considerations that you and I rarely have to consider.
Unless it caused Stalin to achieve even greater power later on.
Based on what? Forget whether we (the US) should have gone into Iraq. What would have the cost have been worth if the Iraqi people decided for themselves to oust Saddam. What if it would have cost 100,000 lives or more? Then would it have been worth it?
When is it “worth it” to go to war? Is it ok to start a small war now instead of fighting a larger war later? What about instead of killing Hitler as a small child, we killed him when he first rose to power? Is that any different than Sadam?
I’m not saying whether we were right or not to go into Iraq. I am just trying to reconcile how you can advocate killing a pre-war Hitler but not actual dictator Saddam. The only diference I can see is that we have the luxury of knowing what Hitlers path in life was before we go back in time.