The end does not justify the means /
Background, definitions, and assumptions:
"Bad" means can mean a number of things. Within a given society "bad" may mean something that society has made illegal. Therefore, from this definition, stealing to provide for your family would involve "bad" means. Stealing so you can give money to Baby Seal Clubbing organizations would include both bad "means" and "ends".
Until you have decided if laws or social norms are ethical or not, you should follow them. This will ensure, until you prove otherwise, that your (means) are at least generally acceptable as morally defensible. As you have time to set goals, and determine what type of life you will live, you should ensure that you have good goals. But the real philosophical question is if bad actions can be used to accomplish good goals.
Reasons to agree: +7
- People have not concluded which is more important, the ends or the means, so you should consider both when making a decision.
- Philosophers have not concluded which is more important, the ends or the means, so you should consider both when making a decision.
- You should seek societal approval any time you want to excuse your means to accomplish your means.
- If a society all agrees that a goal is important enough, and the means are not bad enough, then it is OK for the ends may justify the means.
- This system examines both the ends and the means, but gives a higher weight to the means. It could even be formalized with math.
- No one can see all the consequences of your action, and so it is stupid to think that you can do bad things very often, and that these bad things will magically end up causing good results, because your motives were pure... Every selfish action that causes immediate harm runs the risk of setting a bad president, and setting off domino affects of unforeseen bad results.
- Individual moral agents do not know everything about their particular situations, and thus do not know all the possible consequences of their potential actions.
Ranking this conclusion by the ratio of reasons to agree vs. disagree (please add your reason to agree or disagree by commenting below, or commenting on my Google (blogger) blog)
We can use algebra to represent each term, and make it more formal mathematical, with the below formula and explanation of each term:
- L: Linkage Score. The above equation would work very well, if people submitted arguments that they honestly felt supported or opposed conclusions. We could probably find informal ways of making this work, similar to how Wikipedia trusts people, and has a team of editors to ensure quality. However, we could also introduce formal ways to discourage people from using bad logic. For instance, people could submit that the “grass is green” as a reason to support the conclusion that we should legalize drugs. The belief that the grass is green, will have some good reasons to support it, and may have a high score. At first, to avoid this problem, I would just have editors remove bad faith arguments. But a formalized process would be to have for each argument a linkage score, between -1 and +1 that gets multiplied by the argument’s score that represents the percentage of that argument’s points that should be given to the conclusions points. See LinkageScore for more
Movies that agree:
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Movies that disagree:
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Interest of those who agree
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Interest of those who disagree
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Books that agree
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Books that agree
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Web pages that agree
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Web pages that disagree
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