Monday, 21 March 2022

the means shape the end - i.e., the end does NOT justify the means

Something I have come across in the past is people claiming that “the end justifies the means”.  

Now, if that is interpreted as “great” goals (e.g., trying to end world poverty, or world hunger or thirst, which are both spiritually valid and very, very, very large undertakings) deserve great efforts, that is probably justifiable.  

However, my experience is that many people mean that in the sense that it means sometimes one has to do things that are morally questionable, in order to achieve a goal that is for the benefit of others, and that is an interpretation that I disagree with.  

If I take an example of this from public life, mergers of companies often come with redundancies - sackings, in other words. To those people who lose their work, the merger has been a complete disaster. To the managers who arranged it, however, if the outcome is a more efficient, more profitable company, they will consider the pain they had along the way acceptable - particularly if most shareholders (which is most definitely NOT the general public) say they are happy with the final outcome at the annual general meeting.  

The managers and the happy shareholders would say “the end justified this means”, but a lot of other people directly involved in the situation wouldn’t.  

Let’s consider another example of this second interpretation of “the end justifies the means”, the view that anything necessary should be done to achieve “worthy” goals.  

Let’s say you want to, start a new spiritual organisation - perhaps the Elvis is Alive Mediumship Society. If you go about promoting this group ruthlessly, and perhaps in ways that are quite underhanded, you may gain a large membership, but perhaps at the expense of other, existing spiritual groups.  

Now the question would have to be asked, is that necessarily a bad thing?  

I tend towards loyalty, so my initial reaction would be, yes, that is taking from other groups, and I’d probably chuck in the word “unfairly”.  

But that isn’t necessarily the case.  

IF the Elvis is Alive Mediumship Society actually met the spiritual needs of those people who had changed their memberships more effectively, then perhaps it is not a bad thing … but what if they were coerced, or misled in some way?  

And it is at this point that I would like to introduce the reformulation of that saying, which is that “the means shape the end”.  

To illustrate that, let’s consider the Elvis is Alive Mediumship Society. If the formation of that group involved any coercion, or any underhandedness, perhaps rumours and gossip about existing groups, then no matter how many members it has, or how well it meets their spiritual needs, the group would be tainted by the moral corruption of the methods they had used. Any misdeeds done during the group’s formation, would create a link to the negativity of those misdeeds, and that negative link would undermine, would niggle at, what they are trying to achieve - even if it was spiritually worthy.  

Let’s consider a human rights lobbying group in the 1990s.  

If one wanted to argue that “the end justifies the means”, an example of the risks one could take would be to, perhaps, lobby only one side of politics. The view here would be that getting change was so important, it was best to pick the most likely way to get that change, and just do it.  

The problem with that, back in the 90s, would be that you risk having the other side of politics, at a change of government, repealing the changes you had successfully lobbied for.  

So in this case, what you had seemingly achieved, could be a false thing. On the other hand, if you approached the goal properly, doing things like educating everyone and gently bringing them along with you, then you would be more likely to get a lasting, beneficial, effective change.  

In that case, where everyone had been educated and brought gently along a path of growth, it is likely most people would have said “that end justified the means”, although what had really been applied was the idea that “the means shape the end”. 

The first example I mentioned was that of a companies being merged together. This is something I actually know a fair bit about, as I started working in the water industry in Victoria in the 80s, as the government started to reduce water authorities from over 400 to around 184, which was then further reduced – more drastically – by a subsequent government in the 90s.  

This caused a recession in the water industry, and, at the same time, the company I worked for was bought by another company, which was the first of four takeovers and acquisitions I experienced. In the course of doing that, I saw the best and the worst of how companies can approach this.  

If they approach it thinking only of shareholders and profit, their management of people is generally abysmal. If, on the other hand, they do so openly acknowledging that there will be change, and genuinely committing to helping people deal with that change, the end result is better all round. The goals of improved profit are achieved, but with far less personal stress to many workers.  

Sadly, that doesn’t apply to all the workers caught up in such events, but if they’re surrounded by co-workers who, because they’re not also stressed and worried sick are able to be supportive, well, that’s still better than when everyone is worried sick.  

I have to say that this has been handled well only once in my experience – by an American company, for what it’s worth.  

I’d now like to move this topic out further, to consider some fairly low key everyday life matters.  

Let’s say you do something like … take a car parking space that someone else had been waiting for. You may be in a hurry, perhaps for a toilet, or in need of that space because the disabled parking spaces are all full - possibly of people who don’t have permits - and you can’t walk from the spaces further away.  

If you just dive in, and then treat the person who was waiting dismissively, I would hope that your conscience would bother you. Even if it didn’t, however, you would have both the irritation of that other person, and likely some negative consequences coming back into your life in some way.  

So you got the car park and the convenience, but at what cost? Feeling guilty or stressed? Having someone else do the same, or similar to you at some future time?  

What if you had tried asking – “Hi, I can’t get a disabled space but I’m going to have trouble if I park further out. Would you mind if I took that space instead of you?”  

It might work.  

And on “the means shape the end”, I’d like to mention a saying from the training of another spiritual group, which is: “do not be trifling, even in little things”. There is a whole wealth of reasoning behind that, drawing on several sets of philosophy – including Zen, but in terms of the notion that “the means shape the end”, it is useful. If you do something with loving care and attention, and strive to make it the best you can, then it will be infused with loving energies and, even if it is not perfect, the love is going to help it along the way.  

If you make a cake with love, it will taste – or seem to taste - better than a cake made using the same recipe, but made with resentment or grudgingly.  

In more complicated matters, remembering that “the means shape the end”, rather than trying to use “the end justifies the means” to justify taking a short-cut or approaching things in a dodgy way, may mean doing things in ways that can be tedious, difficult, or downright challenging.  

If we consider the founding of the Elvis is Alive Mediumship Society, then doing it properly would involve talking to a lot of people, letting people know what you’re thinking of doing and working out how to get them to think about the things they have to think about, and doing a lot of travelling, meeting, listening, talking, considering. Maybe, as an outcome, it would lead to joint memberships, and working together to find out who is best suited to which group.  

To broaden our horizons, the problems that can occur from thinking the ends justify the means are also visible in politics, where the distrust caused by the “anything goes” attitudes of power brokers / back room people / “grey” people underlying the Watergate scandal has ultimately contributed to a host of conspiracy fantasy rubbish such as the incredibly dangerous anti-vaxxer nonsense.  

A similar set of issues arise in professional / expert fields, where some experts may have the appalling habit of thinking a pronouncement without explanation or justification is fine - which isn't helped by the rabid financial cut-throatedness of consulting in the neoliberal era, nor by experts in one field thinking they don't need experts in other areas (such as communication), nor by a history of failures such as thalidomide, DDT, the West Gate bridge collapse, Chernobyl, the under-design of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, the active resistance to implementing car safety measures and addressing the climate crisis, and so on, all of which leads to distrust and problems trying to implement necessary, justifiable actions – such as addressing the climate crisis, or responding to pandemics.  

Trying to act in accordance with the principle that “the means shape the end” is incredibly difficult at times, but it also leads to a better result – the energy is better, as I’ve discussed, but the skills and knowledge accessed, and the views considered, are also more comprehensive and informative, and it is possible that catastrophic mistakes could be avoided.  

As a final thought for those “big things”: if the goal is something so big, so important, so momentous, that you could possibly consider it justified being unscrupulous, then surely it also justifies being scrupulous.  

 

 

For a few other perspectives on this, see also :  

 

 

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