I’m reading The Day the American Revolution Began by William H. Hallahan and he was describing how Samuel Adams wanted desperately the revolution and the methods he used to achieve it: libel/slander, practically making up reasons for riots, strong-arm tactics, reporting news only useful in propaganda. Hallahan even suggests Adams was behind ‘the shot heard around the world.’
That got me wondering, Adams used tactics that today we would say are deplorable and just plain wrong, but because of them we got the American Revolution, which I kinda think is a good thing.
I think you can only say that the ends justify the means (and be correct) if you know for sure what all the possible outcomes of a situation are and that one outcome is really the best.
In this case, we don’t know what might have happened. What if Adams had not done this and therefore a peaceful resolution was reached and nobody had to die in a war? Wouldn’t that have been better?
Also, not everybody is always going to agree on what outcome is best. Who knows? Maybe if we were still British citizens we could have ousted the Royal Family by now or replaced Parliament with something cooler. Maybe that would be better.
I assume that in Sam’s mind it might. Perhaps others will feel his actions were justified too. Still others will disagree. There is no ultimate objective standard of justification - for anything. What we have left is little more than a poll. And in this case the alternative candidates are unknown.
How about us taking terrorism from Iraq seriously? The Jews and Bush Administration had to engineer 9/11 in order for us to wake up and pass the Patriot Act and initiate a regime change in Iraq. While the deaths and the loss of the WTC were regrettable, at least the guy collected insurance money after pulling WTC 7. That must’ve covered the cost of the installed explosives.
Now we have a more positive presence in the hitherto unstable Middle East and brought down oil prices. See, the ends justified the means.
PS: Guess which “documentary” they aired on a local public access station?
You can’t really seperate ends from means. Reality is actually just a stream of ongoing events and you have opportunities to make some decisions and take some actions which will partly influence events that will occur further on. And when those events occur, they will in turn influence what happens in their future. So guide your decisions and actions by whether they are likely to move future events in a better or worse path.
It’s not ends that justify the means, but the results. In other words, you can’t justify something you did by pointing to some planned achievement, but to all of the effects of what you did ( including inconvienient details like casualties ). One of the things that makes ‘The end justifies the means’ such a nasty philosophy is because it ignores most of the actual results of what you do. Which is why the ‘end justifies the means’ slides very easily into ‘Any end justifies any means’.
Another problem about claiming that the end justifies the means is that it tends to simply not work. How often have we seen stupid or evil things justified in the name of some noble sounding cause like ‘freedom’ or the ‘war against drugs’ or ‘protecting the children’ whcih are not only bad, but which don’t even work ? “The end justifies the means” is used to justify stupid behavior at least as much as it is unethical behavior; which is why I consider results so important.
Well, is someone is putting another person’s life, or your life, in peril by a criminal act you are allowed to violate the law against homicide without penalty.