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Posted January 26, 2005
Two thoughts always to keep in mind when talking of war and the reasons for war — or any other weighty matter of contention:
People talk about ends
justifying means,
or not, often without knowing what the terms mean. As a public service, I offer these definitions:
As such, an end always explains the means.
Justification is another matter. Justification and condemnation are actually a little harder to pull off reasonably than explanation. Why?
Every act has more than one effect — this is called the multiplication of effects,
a very basic theorem in classic ends/means theory as well as in the thought of J.S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. In other words, as Garrett Hardin put it, you can't do just one thing.
This means that the end is just one effect of an act — at best. At worst, and because of human error, the end may not be achievable by the means chosen, thus making the end not a result of the action, but merely the imaginary spur to action.
The other effects of an act (or series of acts) adjusted to an end may scuttle the justification for an act. For instance, you wish to save a drowning man. All you have near you are two long-haired girls. Knotting their hair together and throwing one of them in the water and clutching the other by her ankles, yelling Here, grab on!
is probably not justified. Scalped girls, drowned girls, merely disheveled girls — these additional effects of one's chosen means may very well condemn their use as tools to save the drowning man. Similarly, one may wish to depose a tyrant. But if that means killing more of his civilian subjects than he himself killed, well, maybe one should reconsider one's goal, however desirable.
We cannot know all the effects of an act. We do know that most effects of an act will affect no one in an appreciable way. We also, more alarmingly, have good reason to suspect that some long-term or unexpected effects of an act may have dire consequences for some being or other (chaos theory suggests that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil can, through the strange pathways of strange attractors, yield a storm in Floriday). Our lack of knowledge in this regard is no command to demand such knowledge; such knowledge is impossible. Therefore, complaints that some effects of a chosen means can yield dire, unknown consequences may not prohibit or unjustify an end with the weight attributed to them. Were they to do so without respect to probability and other valuation standards, all acts would be condemnable, and a project of strict justification would yield to a command to commit mass suicide by extreme quietism.
So middle-ground rules are required. We must categorize ends and means in their conflicts and imagined conflicts, limiting the scope of processes of unjustification.
This project of settling on middle-ground rules has afflicted substantive moral theory with problems of casuistry (micromanaging others' lives) and outrageous counterfactuals.
There a number of ways out of the impasse. My primary advice has long been to not give the subject wholly over to the substantive ethics professionals, but also to demand that metaethical criticism always be kept close at hand, to debunk the perennial attempts to over-ethicize and over-control the moral realm of life.
Life will always be messy. Adam Smith said that there is a lot of ruin in a country,
and the same goes for any civilization. Moral systems that try to make things too clean
and too perfect need to be held in check.
Moral goals and rules are themselves tools we use (means) to achieve certain ends (the modification of human behavior, of self and others). This is the chief metaethical insight, to which all other metaethical notions must conform. And when we realize this, we realize that substantive moral speculation and rule-making must be kept within the grounds of practical, sensible living. Extremism that scuttles the utility of the morality being promoted undermines the point of ethics.
So concern with ends and means, and the arguments constructed to criticize the means and ends chosen by others, must be seen in another level of context . . . of ends and means.
This is not a destructive insight, but a balancing one. I am not engaging in a thorough deconstruction agenda.
And yet the core of deconstruction is suggested — as Derrida put it, deconstruction is justice.
I interpret this to mean that the impetus to settle concerns of ends and means is (by traditional terminology) defined as the justification/unjustification project, but that, to be rational, one must realize that the tools one uses to engage in this project are themselves means to an end, making the justification/unjustification project itself open to criticism on another whole level. Hence the complexity and vexation of Deconstruction.
I merely, at present, assert that the cycle is not infinite circularity. Though we cannot help but live with the tools we inherit, we do have reason to hope that, before our unchosen (but inevitable) respective ends, we do improve the tools a bit. With use.
Though marginal improvements are continual, a general improvement in these tools (the rules, norms, and ideals, as well as rationales, reasons, and excuses advanced by moralists) will not likely happen until people realize that the tools we've inherited are tools, and not something more glorified, like universal truths.
This has been my basic approach to moral philosophy for two decades. I did not get it from French theorists, though I do tend to respect writers who think carefully about signs and significance in terms of the significance of signs. It developed out of consideration of Herbert Spencer's contribution to social and normative theory. Yes, this is an odd source for such doctrine. But one of the great truths of evolutionary theory and of economics is the truth that the origin of a thing does not determine its fitness or value. This remains true, contra the ancients, contra Nietzsche, contra (some might say) common sense.
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