13 September

Ends and Means

I’m not always the best sleeper, and in the early hours of this morning I was reflecting on the concept of ends and means. The one captured in the expressions ‘means to an end’, and ‘the end justifies the means’. Most often people would probably say that the ends don’t justify the means, that just because you want to achieve something important doesn’t mean you can use any means to achieve it. For example are wars (the means) necessary to secure peace (the end)? Are rules (means) necessary to ensure freedom (end)? Is smacking (means) necessary to ensure children grow to be decent human beings (end)? And so on - you could list thousands of examples in pretty quick time. What I was thinking about was the separation of ends and means in the first place. Most of these sorts of ethical or moral questions suppose that ends and means are separate. But what if ends and means aren’t separate in the first place? Both means and ends have values attached to them in this framework, and deciding whether the end justifies the mean is about weighing those two sets of values. Is it worth sacrificing the lives of lots of animals (one set of values) to road kill, for the sake of our ease of transportation (another set of values)? And that, I reckon, is where maybe the flaw in this means and ends thinking lies. When we say ‘does the end justify the means?’, sneakily we’re shifting the values part of the question all to the ends, and forgetting about the means, which have their own values. A whole truckload of modern ethical and moral thinking is maybe caught in this particular hall of mirrors, agonising over whether we should use gene technology to choose the sex of our babies, or whether we should forcibly sterilise people with a disability, and suddenly the means