The end justifies the means

A female with a sneaky grin on her face.
Perhaps it all depends on what the end is and what the means are.

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Phrase: The end justifies the means

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It’s more of a philosophical question than anything else, but I’ll ask it anyway.

Do you believe the end justifies the means?


To clarify the question, do you think it is OK to use any means, even bad ones, to achieve a goal as long as that goal is good?


Some would say yes, it is OK to lie, cheat, steal or even worse, to attain a just goal.

Depending on what that goal may be, it turns into a genuine conundrum

We often see a scenario play out in TV dramas where a police officer or prosecutor will use illegal means to catch and jail an elusive criminal.

Evidence may be invented, or fingerprints falsely placed on a weapon to get a conviction and put a bad person in jail.


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Is that an entirely bad thing? Does the end justify the means?

If an evil person is in prison, they are no longer a danger to people on the street.

If that’s the main goal, then the end justifies the means. Doesn’t it?

Politicians knowingly make promises they can never keep to win an election.

If they do good work once in office and benefit the people of their electoral district, then we could say the end justifies the means because the result was a win for the people.

Yes, society values playing by the rules and always being fair.

There is a saying that goes, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.

Perhaps sometimes you have to break some minor rules to achieve larger goals.

Where do you stand on this? Does the end justify the means?


Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 75.

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.