A perennial question in philosophy is whether the end can be said to justify the means. The philosopher whose name is most associated with the advocacy of this idea is Niccolò Machiavelli, a 16th century diplomat and government official of the Florentine Republic, best known for his writing about political philosophy. The fact that the adjective “Machiavellian” is these days mainly used to denote the misuse of power by autocrats is a clear indication that the majority view today is that ends do not justify means, but rather the methods employed need to be separately justified.
The name most associated with this converse proposition, opposing Machiavelli, is that of the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant. He took the view that the principles and laws that govern human behaviour need to be universally justified or justifiable on the basis that we would will that all people at all times should follow them: this principle he called the Categorical Imperative. So, however desirable a particular outcome might appear, if the means proposed are not justifiable based on universal principles, they are to be considered morally questionable, or in modern terminology “problematic.”
It should be said that few these days would look to justify their opposition to Machiavellianism in these stringent and rather abstract Kantian terms. Indeed few would seek to justify it at all, taking the fact that most people readily accept the proposition that ends are not justified by means as proof enough of its validity. However, there is a potential risk here that, in assuming that what was previously an area of moral contention has been settled, we stop paying attention to whether the supposedly agreed principles are being followed or not.
What do I mean by this? More specifically, we might ask whether we really understand what is meant by “ends”, “means” or indeed “justify”. Let’s look at these in turn, considering first the problems which can arise in determining what are legitimate ends.
Problems with Ends
The first issue we need to address here is timing. Are we talking about the a priori intention of a moral actor before they acted, or the post hoc consequence observed? When we use the term “justification,” we tend to be thinking of the latter. But since the consequences of choosing a contested course of action are seldom known in advance, we should really make our moral judgement about the actor on the basis of the information available to them at the time of deciding, i.e. without the benefit of hindsight. This is why we carry out risk assessments: the propriety of a course of action needs to be determined before it is followed, not subsequently allowing the excuse to be made that the risky action led to no undesirable consequences.
To take a concrete example, it has become increasingly common for members of extremist environmentalist groups to engage in highly disruptive and destructive illegal behaviour as a means of pressurising governments into taking action against individuals or corporations whose actions or policies they see as evironmentally damaging. This has tended to cause great annoyance to the majority of the public and indeed the government. Despite ends justifying means arguments having won such groups some sympathies in the courts and on the pages of the Guardian, such arguments have not withstood the test of time. The end to which the guerrilla tactics were actually deployed was of course to gain publicity for the group and its demands and to put pressure on the government to comply with their demands. With hindsight the campaigning style has been seen not to have had the envisioned effect of changing government policy or of preventing climate change. Rather, in the case of Just Stop Oil, it led to negative publicity, prison sentences for leaders and ultimately the abandonment of the strategy.
The second issue is scope: should we consider the greater goal to which a moral actor saw themselves as contributing or only the immediate consequences of the particular action? If we allow the first, we run into the timing problem again (as seen in the previous example): since the achievement of the greater goal is deferred into the future, it cannot be fairly considered as legitimising an otherwise questionable action.
But even where the intended end is achieved, there can be unintended (albeit often foreseeable) undesirable consequences resulting from inadequate scrutiny of the measures proposed. This is well illustrated by the recent upwelling of anger about the erosion of freedom of speech in the UK, to the extent it has become the subject of international discord with the USA. Many of the laws and regulations which have ostensibly caused the erosion by potentially criminalising the expression of opinions, such as gagging orders and super-injunctions, Section 18 of the Public Order Act (1986), Section 127 of the Communications Act (2003) and the Online Safety Act (2023), criticised at length in a recent legal opinion, were introduced to address some other perceived problem(s) in society, but at the expense of eroding speech rights as a (largely foreseeable) side-effect.
Problems with Means
Another question is whether we can really separate out means from ends. The tendency is to think of means as a temporary strategy, with the end achieved being the only residual change. But the deployment of a strategy which is not independently justified as a good thing has consequences. When the statue of Edward Coulston, a Grade II listed structure, was toppled illegally into Bristol harbour and the police made a “tactical decision” not to intervene, the result was a spate of incidents of criminal damage to statues and other monuments across the country. Arguably the guerrilla tactics of environmental campaigners deployed subsequently were at least in part inspired by the impunity apparently enjoyed by those defacing and toppling statues emboldening others.
Indeed the motivation for the guerrilla campaigns was explicitly to create a sense that the disruption and public inconvenience caused would continue “for weeks and months” until such times as the demonstrators demands were met. With hindsight it can be argued, with the continuing spread of disruptive tactics as a means to promote an increasing number of highly contentious political causes, that the main consequence of the lack of an adequately robust response to such disruptive tactics has been not so much to advance the causes espoused (achievement of ends) as to encourage adoption of similar tactics in relation to other causes (proliferation of means).
Of course, recalling Kant’s Categorical Imperative, those who would justify the disruptive protesters’ actions on the basis of supporting their cause should bear in mind that, having legitimised such tactics for their fellow progressives, they are by the same token legitimising their adoption by their political opponents.
And those partisans who would nonetheless stick with the end justifies the means argument in relation to causes they agree with and argue for lenience in dealing with fellow partisans should remember that partisan dispensing of justice will inevitably be socially divisive and lead to accusations of two-tier justice. This will potentially delegitimise not only the justice system but potentially society’s institutions more generally, something which is increasingly perceived to be happening in the UK and elsewhere.
Problems with Justifications
Finally there is also the problem that justifications are by their nature usually post hoc but also ad hoc, viz. they relate to a particular situation and are not readily generalisable to hypothetical future situations, as a proper moral argument would be in accordance with Kant’s criteria. In The Unintended Consequences of Law, I looked at the problem of how the authors of laws and regulations which turn out to have undesirable consequences often justify their actions and successfully avoid moral culpability on the basis that these consequences were not intended. But such avoidance of blame by individuals after the fact is not the same as the provision of sound justification of a law based on assessing its likely and possible consequences prior to its enactment.
It is often pointed out that tyrants rarely take power with the stated aim of advancing their own interests, but rather to furnish protection in the face of a threat or crisis and to establish or maintain peace and stability. Our main protection against such tyrants is the maintenance of those processes which have worked to our collective benefit in the past; and so to prevent them from having the opportunity to deploy the end justifies the means argument in defence of their usurping of power.
