Machiavelli: Do Ends Justify Means?
 

I really can't stand it anymore how in the movies you get those pinhead protagonists decrying simple moral logic by shouting, "What!? Do the ends justify the means!?" in that exasperated overacting sort of way. For the last bloody time, YES!

Here's a classically ridiculous exaggeration of what I'm talking about:
Guy 1: Oh no! That little girl has been surgically transformed into a miniature missile silo and in thirty seconds she's set to rain down nuclear Armageddon upon Russia to trigger the start of Mutually Assured Destruction!
Guy 2: Wait, the ticking of her heart is the countdown device so if we shoot her head off, we can save the world!
Guy 1: No way man, it's just plain wrong to take a life! My mom told me so!
Guy 2: Jesus H. Christ professor Gigglewitz! If we don't kill that little girl, everyone on the planet will be incinerated! We have to save the human race, and not in the post-apocalyptic reproduction sort of way! I'll just gut the laser guided grenade launcher and-
Guy 1: What? The ends justify the means? Is that what your saying Mr. President? I shall have no part in your silliness, for murder is always wrong!
Guy 2: You idiot, you just wasted my last sec-

The way I see it, a person should be held accountable for all the repercussions of their actions. If you find some tot dangling over the edge of a cliff by one hand and you are the one person around to save her and it would be safe and easy for you to do so, in my opinion if you just lazily stand there and let the girl plummet to her doom, you have just committed a murder. Inaction is as much a decision we must be responsible for as action. Likewise, if you don’t blow up the ticking time bomb terrorist and his toxic gas reduces your country to a graveyard, you are responsible for the mass murder of your nation.

It seems to me that the “Murder is always 100% wrong!” folks are just trying to oversimplify the rather complicated world of ethics into an easy black and white so that they need not hurt their heads by having to think through intricate moral dilemmas (As they’d hurt anyone’s head.) That’s why you always here that old “So your willing to trade one life for a million? What if it was one life for a thousand? What if it was one life for ten? What if it was one life for two? What if it was ninety lives for a hundred?” Well of course it’s blurry! That’s what makes it an ethical dilemma.

The whole deal with such conundrums is that we try to think them through because ultimately we must make a decision; either way, people are going to die. As long as your actions will decide who, you are ultimately responsible for the outcome. It’s simply insane to claim that you are liable for actions themselves and not the repercussions; it’s like when people claim the other guy “walked into their punch” and that sort of thing. So what if it’s blurry trying to figure out which to eject out of the airlock to die in space, the three doctors or the four criminals? That’s why we have ethics; to sit down and think things through rationally. Imagine a world where instead of the capital punishment debate consisting of the rhetoric “Death is a good deterrent,” and “Nuh-uhn” there’d be actual statistics so that people can stroke their chins and try to decide which policy is going to suck the least.

I wouldn't say that necessarily means the Ends justify the Means. The ends justify the means, to me, at least, means if you have a worthy goal (Like... let's say Spread Democracy), you go and can do whatever it takes (including being an oppressive bastard) in order to do it. The ends justify the means.

What I think you're trying to say is what Zeth was saying earlier: The ends don't justify the means, but the goods outweigh the bads.

Like... the crusades was a demonstration of The Ends justify the Means. [Edit: Crusades is a bad example. A better one would be Patriot Act or McCarthyism]

<The way I see it, a person should be held accountable for all the repercussions of their actions.>

Well, then you also say stuff like "Well of course it’s blurry!" Doesn't that contradict each other?

<Likewise, if you don’t blow up the ticking time bomb terrorist and his toxic gas reduces your country to a graveyard, you are responsible for the mass murder of your nation.>

Well, yeah, but so is the bomb terrorist, don't you think? Personally, I'd say the bomb terrorist is much more responsible for it.

<Inaction is as much a decision we must be responsible for as action.>

Again, I must allude back to when you said it's all very blurry. You can't just say, "This is as bad as this. Period." and then say, "But all these people who say blah no matter what are folly." What if YOUR live is threatened. What if you have to risk other people's lives who are or are not willing. That line is just as blurry.

The ends don't justify the means. That's why such a thing as a "martyr" exists.

You're not allowed to kill little girls and you're not supposed to let the world go to heck.

As the honorable person, if you are to do what is correct, you must slay the girl to save the world. Then, as is proper and inexorable, you must be hanged.

This is tragedy.

The ends do not justify the means, but we are responsible to our own guilt if we find our own petty existence more important than that of 2 others.

Corruption exists because most people think that honor is a waste of time. Generally, all this stuff is about the betterment of society and, face it, you don't give a crap either. Screw guilt.

Would you die for somebody you dont know? Do you care about somebody you don't know? Would you die for somebody you don't care about?

Nah. Murder and inaction are both 100% wrong. It's about how much wrong you can take on before you die. The actual significance of what is right or wrong is nil.

The means justify the ends, perhaps?

The ends might justify the means if and only if:

a) The ends are desireable.
b) The means are an effective way of achieving those ends.
c) There is no other, less costly means of achieving those ends.

All too often we see people using the "ends justify the means" excuse to justify their own actions, even when the ends are either undesireable, unachievalbe, or are simply the most obvious means, instead of the best ones. In that case the ends would certainly not justify the means, since even if the indended result is achieved, the means taken will often have continuing, negative ramifications (otherwise they wouldn't need justifying.)

If you can't do what you set out to do, then there's no point worrying about the morality of your methods.

While I am always for taking the most palatable solution to a problem, sometimes there is no such solution nor time to come up with one. In which case you work with what you have. You might want to apply the argument for ends and means to shooting a terrorist bomber in the head. Could you rehab him? Yes. But he'd blow up everyone first. So you kill him and regret your sins at leisure. People consider this kind of thing a dilemma because it goes against their emotional grain, and emotions rarely aid in decision-making during a crisis, viz. the girl problem. Far from calling the first guy selfish because he wants to kill this girl with a bright young future to save himself, why shouldn't the second guy censure himself for letting everyone die just to placate his sense of morality? If she's going to die either way, might as well save the human race while you're at it.

Moral of the story: You can't please everyone, so please as many people as you can.

(Time for me to get off the soapbox, I hate morality debates)

You can't just say that the ends justify the means, nor that the means justify the end. There are situations where neither work... for instance... taking over the world, committing ethnic cleansing, bring the world down to one race, only allowing the most intelligent of that race to live, and slowly breaking people until the world over was resigned to something akin to the world described in 'The Giver' or 'Anthem' would, after a hundred years or so, bring on a golden age of humanity with almost no human suffering. Racism? Couldn't exist because there wouldn't be any races. Homophobia? Couldn't exist because mating would only be done for the purpose of producing young. Sexism? Couldn't exist because men and women would be seperate except when mating. Or their 'jobs' would be enforced by society to such a degree that no one would question them. Dissenters would be killed. Again, this would create a golden age... where no one (or very few people) suffers... but would it be worth it? I'm sure some people would say yes. I personally do not think so.

On the other hand... if the means say that you may never make a sacrifice at all, then you are going to end up in positions where you MUST sacrifice a person to save others. A rather unlikely one having already been discussed here. Is it ok to let millions die to save the life of one person? Probably not.

There is no black and white... you can't say whether the means justify the ends, until the end comes about. And even then... those choices suck... and you can never be certain if you did the right thing. Take the little girl point brought up. Let's say you just go kill her straight off and save the world. Then a few hours later someone points out that it may have been possible to diffuse the bomb without killing her. Did you do the right thing? Would you spend nights awake thinking, "If only I had known... she didn't have to die... she was innocent..." or would you just go on with your life with an 'eh'? That's the point of these movies... there is almost always a better way than to just look at it and kill. Maybe not more efficient... but less morally reprehensible.

The means modify the end.


Basically, this means your actions alter what eventually happens. What originally was your goal(end), if actually reached, suddenly becomes goal+other stuff..... the other stuff being repercussions or bonus points.

Perfect DI, perfect. However, Krylo, you do bring up good points. I think what it comes down to, is that every one is human. As human beings, we tend to fuck up every once in a while, and thats just how it is, and we've got to learn to accept it. You know, maybe you could've saved that little girl had you defused the bomb instead of shooting her, but you know what, you didn't have enough time to figure that out so you did the best you could under the circumstances. The more important thing is that you saved a nation full of people. "But, what if that girl could have you cured cancer?!" you might be saying. well, obviously she won't now, 'cause she's pretty freakin' dead, so I guess we'll just have to wait a bit longer for that cure eh? I think at some points one needs to draw the line for the extremes they'll go to. A lot of that "Would you kill a billion people to save one" bullshit never happens anyways, so I think those points don't hold much weight. That's just my two cents however, Krylo, I encourage you to expand on your thoughts a bit more. I am interested in seeing if you can elaborate on it more, it seems like a good point.

Well, I don’t see why it would. Yes, a person must be responsible for the repercussions of the decisions they make, but we hardly have a crystal ball with which to foresee exactly what all those repercussions are. It’s like chaos theory; perhaps your dropping a penny on the ground could lead through a chain of events by which a former vagrant becomes global dictator (Run Lola Run is a good movie for showing how very small things might lead to massively different consequences.) We’re only really liable for the foreseeable consequences of our actions, the ones that occur by the design of our intent. Furthermore, even amongst actions you are liable for it can be quite blurry whether or not you have made the right decision; the choice between saving your family, and saving a twice as many other people for instance.

Of course the terrorist is responsible, but there can be more than one guilty party to a given crime. Both the killer and the Good Samaritan have the potential to prevent the murder, and are thus both guilty for it. Now, the killer would be guilty of first degree murder for planning the killing and performing it while the Good Samaritan who just lets it happen would be guilty of only third degree murder because of their criminal negligence. I think that guilt for something you could have stopped only goes so far though.

If ten thousand people were to kill one person be each stabbing the guy with a sewing needle so that the guy’s death is the result of the combined blood loss of all of these ten thousand stabbings, I’d think it overkill (I love puns.) to declare all ten thousand people guilty of first degree murder and give them all a life sentence in prison, at least given the practical consequences of trying to punish so many people.

Well a martyr is just someone who dies upholding a cause. I don’t think the lives lost to collateral damage in fulfilling a given action can be considered martyrs unless they’re being specifically persecuted for something.

That seems like a fairly skewed concept of justice to me. Usually capitol punishment is rationalized for its deterrence effect; the wrong of killing a criminal is considered acceptable if it leads to lives being saved by stopping others from pursuing a similar course of action by psychological conditioning. Personally, I don’t see how killing a single innocent to save all the other innocents is something we wish to prevent by means of punishment. I just honestly can’t see the point of wasting more lives for an entirely abstract concept like “honor” when it’s not making anything better.

Krylo:
I don’t think most people would think the ends you described were justifiable. The end of mass eugenics can’t be just slimmed down to “everyone lives happily ever after”; the fact that a holocaust had taken place is an end in and of itself. It basically comes down to what Zeth said about the good outweighing the bad. Killing millions upon millions of people is a worse evil than the existence of so called “weak” people. Then it also comes back to what Drooling Iguana said, “c) There is no other, less costly means of achieving those ends.” I think there are far better solutions to racism than multiple genocides given that we see racial cooperation daily (Notice how the lines of what are considered “races” are drawn arbitrarily by skin. If we were to consider races by hair, notice how well we get along over racial lines!)