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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