Shots Across The Bow

A Dangerous Idea

The end justifies the means.

Has there ever been a slipperier, nastier, more pernicious concept in the history of thought? No matter how many times its essential fallacy is revealed, it keeps creeping back into our minds. It's seductive; it let's us do whatever it takes to win, and we're all genetically programmed to be winners.

Nowhere is this more evident than in politics. We believe in our ideals; we believe in them so strongly that they become part of how we see ourselves, part of who we are. We don't say we are 'members' of a liberal, conservative, or libertarian group; we say we 'are' liberals, conservatives, or libertarians. We take any challenge to our ideologies as a personal challenge, which invokes our will to win.

The end justifies the means.

Conservatives are familiar with the principle. It's practiced by some of the more extreme elements of the party, but we'll get back to that in a minute. Lately, that belief has surfaced in a particularly noxious form among some liberals, not among the extreme elements, but right in the mainstream.

Which isn't too surprising actually, since the left has always been fond of civil disobedience to draw attention to their causes, and what is civil disobedience if not the ends justifying the means? We break a law in service to what we see as a higher purpose or cause. The lesser wrong is committed to prevent a greater wrong from continuing.

We had another example of this just last week in Texas. 59 dems walked out of the legislature to bust the quorum, risking arrest, to prevent the republican majority from passing their redistricting plan. Many dems, maybe even most, applauded their actions, saying that the illegitimate action was warranted in order to stave off a worse threat, republican redistricting.

The end justifies the means.

Now we hear from Gary Kamiya, editor of salon.com.

Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people. But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative -- four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere?

Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world. It is based on the belief that every apparent good will turn into its opposite. If this is true, then it would be better for bad things to happen to Bush.

Do you recognize our little friend hiding in there?

"But," you say, "wishing for bad things to happen isn't the same as doing bad things."

Let's think about that for a minute. Isn't the difference between wanting something to happen and causing it to happen merely a matter of conviction? If you truly believe your action will bring about a more positive outcome, aren't you ethically bound to act? Sure you are! It's an easy call when the action called for is positive. It's when the action is negative that things get tricky. How bad are we willing to go to get a better outcome?

The end justifies the means.

So what's so wrong with that? Why is it such a bad thing? Surely there are times when the end result is so important that almost any means are justified, right?

I know a group of people who feel just that way. Everyday, they are faced with a horror so deep, they're willing to do almost anything to try and stop it.They march; they picket; they hold sit-ins; they lobby congress; they mount ad campaigns. They do everything within their power to fight the good fight.

Some of them go a little further, though. Their convictions are stronger than average, compelling them to take stronger actions. They vandalize the locations where the activities occur; they sabotage equipment; they harrass and intimidate practitioners; sometimes, they even kill them. Of course, you know by now the group I'm talking about.

When asked why they do these awful things, usually as they're led away in handcuffs, they simply say, "I had to stop it somehow. I had to do whatever I could, whatever it took."

And that's where using the end to justify the means leads us, with the same certainty as the sun rising in the east. That's the problem with the argument; there's no ending point. There's no place to say, "We go this far, and no further." The exact same argument civil rights protesters used during sit-ins can be used by an eco-terrorist spiking trees, or a anti-abortionist blowing up a clinic, and it is logically the same in each case.

Now I'm not saying that Mr. Kamiya is going to run out and start actively working to make things worse, in some attempt to keep President Bush from getting re-elected. Nor am I saying that most dems want things to get worse, just to keep Bush from getting re-elected. What I am saying is that the thoughts he is entertaining, hoping to gain something from the misfortune of others are nothing more than another version of ends justifying means.

It has to be recognized for what it is and rooted out, before the libs find that the extremists have taken over the party.

Posted by Rich at May 20, 2003 10:51 PM | TrackBack