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June 21, 2005
The Ends Justify What Now?
Jay Tea at Wizbang discusses circumstances under which attaining good ends might justify otherwise immoral means used in the attempt. This is very dangerous ground, because it's exactly the kind of reasoning that led to millions dead in the death camps of Communism: capitalists and reactionaries are holding up the good that comes from the Revolution, and must therefore be killed so that the good of the true just society that Communism brings about can be realized.
Jay Tea is not sliding down that slope; that is not my point. My point is that when you begin to use reasoning that has known dangerous ends, to which people have been proven to travel before, it is a good idea to set up limiting reasoning in the same breath. Rather than "the ends justify the means", a better formulation would be "actions that harm one person to save more than one person, or harm the guilty to save the innocent, are permissible". That way, you allow for the "lifeboat ethics" scenarios Jay Tea posits, while preventing the reasoning from being taken to an extreme it was never intended to reach.
Engineers deal with this kind of thing all the time: if you don't have a way of preventing a feedback loop, the radio blows up. Unfortunately, people don't tend to build in logical breaks, leading to reactions extreme on both ends. There are some who advocate actual torture, even in less than "lifeboat ethics" situations, and others who advocate against even detaining the enemy. Both positions are morally destitute and ethically worthless.
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Comments
A good follow-up for this discussion is taking a look at the principle of the double effect.
My own feeling on the subject is that the nature of the world is that we don't choose between good and evil but between better and worse. Moral purity is impossible.
Posted by: Dave Schuler at June 21, 2005 1:58 PM