Do the ends justify the means?:

We started on an interesting conversation that never really happened tonight. Do the ends never justify the means? This is something spouted at you a lot, but I think it's a surprisingly tricky question and it took me a while to come up with a satisfactory answer. But I think I have one.

First you have to define the greatest good. If we believe that saving human life is the most important thing and that saving more lives is better than saving fewer, than it seems clear that the ends could justify the means. One can easily imagine a situation where killing one person could save many people.

But I believe that there's something worse than death, and that saving a life isn't the most important thing. Then things become a bit more interesting.

Let's consider a currently topical case. Let's assume that torturing a terrorist could produce reliable information. Should we then torture a terrorist to save innocent lives, to prevent another 9/11?

I would argue no. Our way of life is worth fighting for because we don't do things like that. We don't torture prisoners, we don't try to kill innocents even in wartime, and we punish people found guilty of doing that. Once we aren't different than (better than) the terrorists, I don't see why I should continue to fight for us.

That's sort of a long-winded way of saying that one could come up with a hypothetical in which the ends would justify the means, but in the real world, our actions have good and bad consequences. One cannot divorce the negative results of an action from its positive results. So when I torture a terrorist, I may save hundreds of lives, but I have done something fundamentally immoral, and there are consequences to that also. I pay for it by losing the moral high ground, by blurring the lines between right and wrong, between good and evil, and one day I may find myself on the wrong side of the line.

The world is a very grey place. I would hesitate to say that the ends never justify the means. But I would say, in the real world, that I can't come up with a case where I believe one should compromise one's morality to achieve a good result.