"The ends justify the means" is a slogan for the belief that morally wrong actions are sometimes necessary to achieve morally right outcomes. Though such a view is implicit in many moral philosophies (especially utilitarianism), and almost all persons would be willing to commit small moral transgressions in the service of a greater good, the phrase is most often used to denote the much stronger view that any action in the service of an important enough cause is justified. This view is found in many radical political ideologies, and the atrocities committed by Jacobins, communists, capitalists, fascists, and others are often attributed to a form of moral blindness in which a powerful ultimate goal becomes an excuse to ignore ordinary moral considerations.
In some applications at least, this argument is related to the question of serving the greater good in which the means is detrimental to an individual or a small (i.e., minority) group while appearing to benefit the majority or the vaguely defined society. For example, faced with a bomb hidden in a metropolitan area, it could be considered morally justifiable to torture the person who knows where it is. Given the belief that torture is wrong, one could consider it moral to commit that wrong in the interests of saving thousands of lives. As is often, but certainly not always, the case with this dilemma, this is a lesser of two evils situation.
Few people will use the ends justify the means to describe their own views; instead, the phrase is often used to cast suspicion on the actions or motivations of others.
Some free-market libertarians, following Robert Nozick, characterize their views using the reversed slogan the means justify the ends.
Few people will use the endsjustify the means to describe their own views; instead, the phrase is often used to cast suspicion on the actions or motivations of others.
This phrase the endsjustify the means is closely associated with Machiavelli and The Prince, credited with helping to advance the colonial and modern forms of imperialism.
In Roman Catholic moral theology, Thomas Aquinas states explicitly that an end which is good does not justify the use of evil means to attain that end.
We can define "poor means" as means that produce unsatisfactory subconsequences, where a subconsequence is a consequence other than the means in question, for whatever criteria the "satisfactory-ness" of consequences may be determined, which is another debate in of itself.
It can be stated then, that while poor means produce the ends in question, they also damage the good produced by the ends by reducing the total good by whatever it might have been by other means, as the unsatisfactory consequences are bad (by definition of their being unsatisfactory).
It depends on the situation, what the "means" are, what the "end" is, and what your ethical and moral positions are.
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