Do Ends Justify The Means?

Latin proverb "exitus acta probat' is translated to "result justifies the deed". To explore the meaning of this phrase, we must first agree on what the word "justifies" implies. For our purposes, the term justified shall be extrapolated as the right course of action has been taken. Another ward, it is acceptable to cause suffering to some if the outcome will alleviate a greater proportion of suffering.

The moral question this presents was illustrated in the thought experiment of the well-known Trolley Problem. By forcing a participant to choose between killing an innocent person intentionally, thereby saving the lives of five others, or doing nothing, seemingly absolving them of responsibility, however thereby ensuring all five die instead, presented one such moral impasse.

Another such example is illustrated in Maslow's torturing of baby Rhesus monkeys to determine the importance of a nurturing environment for children. Was the anguish, and likely permanent psychological damage, caused to the young monkeys justified by Maslow's contributions to psychology? Can one hold themselves to the model of being a good person, while at the same time do bad things in the process?

To analyze how this concept echoes in politics, it is constructive to begin from where the phrase was derived. The 15th-century Italian diplomat and writer Niccolò Machiavelli, who authored among other works ‘The Prince’, went deeply into the concepts of balancing ethics and politics. In the novel he explicitly states that the ends justify one to be free in deploying all sorts of means, honorable or wicked, to whatever extent necessary, to attain one's objectives. "For although the act condemns the doer, the end may justify him".

Perhaps this is an easier point of view to hold if one does not find themselves as the sacrificial lamb of the situation. In Machiavelli's view, the concept of "well-used cruelty" is an important distinction when justifying the means and it broke from the fixed morality principles of Aristotle and the church of that time.  He felt that one sometimes needed to be cruel and ruthless to secure your position, but once that goal was achieved, one must suspend cruelty and let things heal. Continuing cruelty for its own sake is not justified but coercion in the name of a calculated common end is just.

Before Machiavelli's works, it had not been explicitly suggested that cruelty could be used in creative ways for greater means. The ideas of this have evolved into today’s “raison d’etat”, putting national interest over the personal and very much echo in the ideals of liberals and conservatives.  

There is, however, a different lens through which to view the question. The ideas of justification for ends and means emerge from the acceptance in the juxtaposition between ends and means. This contrast is deeply ingrained in our psychological, political, and ethical vocabulary - even by the very question itself. The distinction between the immediate and the ultimate, the short-term and the long-term, or the individual and the societal leads us to extrapolate that if the ends justify the means, then we are taking the moral position that the means cannot be considered except in relation to their ends, or that the latter has moral supremacy.

Mahatma Gandhi firmly rejected the notion of the distinction between ends and means. He felt that it is the means rather than the ends that provide the standard of reference, leading to his stance on truth and nonviolence as twin moral absolutes. He felt that the misguided belief that there is no interdependence between the means and the end was like expecting a rose through planting a deadly weed. Likewise, his metaphysical belief in the law of karma, or moral retribution is linked to all acts being interdependent. Through this view, the relationship between means and ends is organic and the moral quality of the latter is directly dependent upon the former. One cannot disentangle them from each other. For Gandhi, it was impossible to separate means and their ends. His basic belief was that in politics, as in all spheres of human action, we reap precisely what we sow.

Lastly, it is important to underscore that in evaluating a given end, we are choosing an arbitrary point of focus as every end is a means to some other end. Accordingly, what appears to be an end at our chosen point in time, later becomes a means for the next end. Our subjective assessment of an end being good, irrespective of if attained by wicked means, can flip once time develops the end into a new means towards some other end. It is imperative to not become suffocated in the pursuit of perfection by dismissing the good along the way. However, if one is to build anything concrete and lasting, like the American Constitution, the foundation upon which you are building cannot be rotten, or the entire architecture leads toward collapse, as what we are finding in the denial of inequity towards United States citizens.