The end does not justify the mean ” What does it really mean …??? How you go about doing something is as important as what you end up doing. If you use illegal mean to accomplish a legal and even desirable result, the good result does not make the bad means you used justifiable. “ The ends don’t justify the means” is the classical saying, and there is a lot of philosophical debate about how far this can go. The current debate is whether it is okay to torture somebody if you end up saving people’s lives. The hypothetical nature of the inquiry and the doubtful causal assumptions (you would not have saved the lives otherwise, only torture would have worked, etc.) makes the argument, if you’ll permit the pun, a rather “ tortured” one. the end does not justify the means”?”
That is machievellian..(the prince)…the end justifies the means..
It is only ethical when the majority gains from the sacrifice of a few…… the end only justifies the means when giving up of a few would save the many….(like mr. spock when he gave up his life to save the enterprise…lol)..” sacrifice of one for the sake of the many…. is the logical thing to do”..
It is not justified if it is for selfish reasons…. for revenge…for greed and personal gain…. it has to be a decision based on selflessness and honesty.
You can use the theme “ lesser of the evil”…. sometimes choices have to be made and you have to choose which is the lesser wrong…. or would create less havoc.
Many times, you have no choice. you are placed in a situation that if you do not make a choice, then the choice will be made for you. in such a situation, you choose whichever will cause less evil, chaos and havoc.
World leaders are always placed in situations like this…and they have to make decisions even if they do not fully agree because they are sometimes faced with inevitable scenarios. what is decided in a situation like this is
they choose whichever creates less harm…..
Such is the war in iraq. our boys are in iraq giving up their lives to stop terrorism……if we pull them out right now, many feel it will cause greater chaos in the long run. so what do we do.? we have to make a choice…. do we sacrifice our boys for the betterment of the regions, or keep our boys at home and let chaos develop which will eventually come back to us one day and hurt our children.
What was decided by bush is to send send more military to iraq in the hopes that the war would end. he knows this is putting our boys in harms way, but he is looking (i hope) at the outcome…the final outcome which is to finally win the way and prevent further deaths and terrorism that may haunt our nation and our children in the future.