Do the ends justify the means?
- Thread starter Mr Radioactive
- Start date
Depends on who rights you are going to violate to get what you want.
About six years ago a man in Germany abducted an 11 year old child, and he wanted a ransom from the family. When the man collected the ransom the police arrested him.
In custody the man refused to cooperate with the police. He actually gave misleading information. The police were anxious to find the child, so one of the officers explained to the man that they were going to torture him, and they were going to continue to torture him until he helped them.
This threat was enough for the man to provide the police with the information they needed.
I think if you try to put yourself in the position the police officers were in, and you decide that you would have done the same thing, then you're admitting that there really is nothing intrinsically wrong with torture. It just depends on the circumstances.
Our police service and our intelligence agencies can work in very high pressure environments. They can perform actions which might offend our sense of right and wrong, but they have the responsibilty of our welfare weighing down on them.
Enlisted person spoke about the killing of a suspected terrorist by the police service to try to influence the terrorist's associates. In this case, the police had to get the information they needed as quickly as possible. Their strategy seemed to work, and a disaster was avoided.
So what should happen to the police officer who pulled the trigger? He might have killed one person, but you could argue that he saved hundreds. The Madrid bombing killed 191 people.
doubleohfive
Fleet Admiral
Do the ends justify the means? It all depends on the context of the situation.
Depends whether what he did was legally sanctioned or not.
I'm no expert on Indian law but if he was a mere police officer operating under normal guidelines then it seems highly likely that what he did was illegal. If it was illegal he should be charged with whatever crime he committed, presumably murder. It's a different argument to whether the ends justified the means or not. Many people might agree that they did, but that doesn't mean you get a free pass for circumventing the law to achieve them.
The story sounds rather unlikely to me though, I'll believe that when I see it coming from a reliable source, which Enlisted Person is not.
So whether or not he did the moral thing or not is dependent upon laws created by the government? I would argue that morality has nothing to do with the law. Saving hundreds of people in exchange for the life of one terrorist who is trying to kill them is the right thing to do regardless of the law.
Thanks for grounding the conversation. Its nice to have a mundane example to juxtapose with the extremes.
I agree. Circle gets the square.
Let's move it along. This is not toward you directly, just an open-ended question for the group:
Now, what if your "ends" are to free the enslaved? Your means are to invade the land of and kill the slave owners.
Justified? Don't quickly say "yes". We're talking death vs. undesireable living conditions. It's a question we don't ask because we don't want to have to answer it. Perhaps Pat Henry wanted liberty or death, but that doesn't mean everyone would make that same choice.
I believe this was the back-plot to an unaired "Special Episode" of Saved by the Bell.
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Another question. I forget the film, but Gene Hackman had a great line:
"If you could cure cancer by killing one man, wouldn't you have to do that?"
I made no comment on whether it was moral or not. In fact I went to some pains to point out that acting illegally, and the moral status of those actions are not the same thing. Pretty much the opposite of what you seem to think I said.
He should go to jail. That's the choice he made. I can't say if he did the "right" thing.
Sometimes you bite the bullet. You do something yout think is right despite the consequences to yourself.
Well, I'm not sure how on topic this is, but:
The mistake here would be to label the slave owners the enemy. The enemy is never people but rather ideology, which informs people's behaviour. Ideological assumptions and standards which most of a given society draw upon to inform their decisions and outlooks. And these are often shared by victimizer and victim alike, by "guilty" and "innocent" both. What makes you think that killing slave owners and freeing slaves will end slavery? It didn't when Spartacus launched his revolt - because in his society, ideology held that there could not be free men without slaves; for one to rise another must fall. This was an idea permeating the culture - slaves and slave-owners alike. Most of the slaves fighting for Spartacus didn't share his desire to stop slavery, only to not be slaves themselves. In a system and society that uses slaves, what's to stop the former slaves becoming slave owners in turn? After all, they were part of the system too. And humans almost always acknowledge and live by the "rules" of the social system they work in. Being "screwed" by the system doesn't mean you reject the system- it might mean you reject your place in it, but actually challenging the system itself, the accepted order, the ideological status quo, is something most humans do not do. They might try to rearrange it, but not break free of it, because it is their basis for morality and order. This is why revolutionary movements typically fall into the same patterns of behaviour as the tyrannies they revolted against. And even if you are being screwed by the system, do you yourself agree that this is so? Do you see it that way, or have you bought into the moral and ideological code yourself, and thus accept it? Are you "oppressed" or is it your desire to live as you do, including the sacrifices you make? Or are you okay with the system, only you want to be somewhere better in it?
I'd say that these situations are rarely clear-cut "help, help, I'm being oppressed, oh, I long for release!!" vs "thoughtless evil beings oppressing them". It's about ideology, morality, social order - those are your enemies. The problem is, people fear to recognise them as such, because they use varieties of the same things to justify their own distaste for what they see. The anti-slave revolutionary or idealist doesn't want to admit they're drawing on the same basic concepts as the slave owner.
People make the mistake, I'd suggest, of thinking that a moral system is something they have and an enemy doesn't. But the most destructive ideologies and social orders there are are themselves highly moral- only it's a morality at odds with that of the peoples opposing them. When the enemy is imposing their moral system on others - invading another nation, say-, it's easy to justify hostilities- to defend people. But in many cases the people suffering are part of the system themselves already.
I would say: When dealing with moral systems and ideologies you disapprove of, or conflict with your own, the solution is to attack the ideology and the morality, not the people who use it. Think of it a bit like fighting the Borg- it's the collective program that's the enemy and target, not the drones. Except in real life people supporting a system you dislike have an advantage- they can break out of the program and exercise their own will if you help them. They can usually be reasoned with (unlike drones). But killing them won't help - how can your own ideologies spread if you kill potential carriers?
And as for "ends vs means", in my view of things the end is pretty much always to see people free of destructive ideologies. All of them. And therefore "means" must be subject to scrutiny at all times, lest you destroy the people you mean to save. That's part of the problem- killing people rarely solves anything when you're dealing with an enemy that is not in fact situated in any one being, or can use that death to stoke further conflict. Sure, sometimes violence is the only option- sadly, sometimes a hostage-taker has to be killed by a police sniper to protect hostages. But ends over means destroys people, and people are not your enemy, even if they currently embody it.
Anyway, that's my take.
Sorry! I get a little caught up in these discussions- particularly when so fascinating a topic. 
Especially never.
Utilitarianism is an interesting philosophy, but the original post didn't put any thought in this subject, so why should I? I studied a crash course in morals from Plato-present so I heard all the different theories. Utilitarianism made the most sense to me, but it was as flexible as you wanted it to be. For instance, if there was someone trying to kill someone else and you were wondering if you should kill him, you could ask yourself the "what if everyone did it" question a couple of different ways. The first, what if everyone murdered everyone? That would be unjust. The second, what if everyone murdered murderers? That's probably still unjust, but more defensible. The third option would be, what if everyone murdered all murderers who were about to kill? That seems perfectly morally acceptable.
Why is law the arbiter of what is ethical? Is it not the product of fallible human beings?Have we all not heard stories of the guilty escaping via a loophole, or how an ignorant, but largely innocent, person was caught in an unjust law?
I propose (for the sake of argument) that the law is merely the least common denominator of ethics. That point at which, if you stoop beneath, the vast supermajority of society agrees you must be punished. Any extension of the law beyond that is unjust. (I'm excluding the streamlining aspect of regulation for the sake of keeping my argument short). Meaning, that if it is debatable whether or not what the officer did was right, it should be legal and he should not serve time.
Pretty much. It's not the type of ethic you lord over people with, since it can be entirely contextual. This is probably why a lot of people don't like it and great philosophers spent years writing works trying to destroy it as it offended their view that morality must somehow be absolute.
^^ So if the ends are a healthier population, that would justify involuntary sterilization and controlled breeding of Humans?
Jesus, not another one. You are the second person to only read the first line of what I posted and then infer completely the opposite meaning to it.
I did NOT say the law was the arbiter of what is ethical, the question was asked "what should happen to the policeman?", not "was what he did ethical?" I responded that what is legal and what is moral are two different things, and that the officer should be charged with whatever crime he committed.
The ethics of his actions can be taken into consideration at that point, that's something for a judge and jury to decide. We don't even know that murdered man in this unlikely story even WAS a terrorist, only that his murder scared a different guy into giving up vital information. I made no comment at all on whether what he did was ethical, or how he should be punished, or whether ethics are determined by law.
The ethical status of an action is always debatable to some extent. What is ethical isn't set in stone any more than what is legal is. Nobody would ever be punished for anything following that line of reasoning.
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