All Crystal Balls Are Broken To Begin With

Does the End Justify the Means?

An elderly man in our congregation was preparing a suspension of psyllium powder and water to give to his wife. (For you younger folks, you can easily look up what this mixture is used to facilitate.) She made a face and a noise that left no doubt that she was not a fan of the drink. Her husband said, “I know you can’t stand this, but you must admit that the end justifies the means.” He avoided adding the pun, “Alimentary, my dear Watson.” She was already suffering enough.

The statement that a troublesome means is tolerable in order to attain a good result is often sensible in areas like medicine. Nobody likes to have a surgeon take a scalpel to his skin, but if there is a tumor likely to create a disability or even death, we endure the suffering to prevent an unthinkable outcome. Property owners understand that the city or county can use easements on their land in order to install conduits or sidewalks for the common good. The logic is strong in many cases; in more difficult ones, it might be necessary to seek legal remedies to prevent injustice.

In the moral realm, however, one of the fundamental principles we follow is “do no harm” or “never commit an evil action.” St. Paul, in writing to the Romans, refers to this when he attacks the slanderous accusation of some his own enemies: “if through my falsehood God’s truthfulness abounds to his glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner? And why not say (as some people slander us by saying that we say), ‘Let us do evil so that good may come’? Their condemnation is deserved!” He accused his foes of slander when they spread the falsehood that he permitted evil actions so that a good result might occur.

Notice that I said, “might occur.” One of the most durable principles of science is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Simplified, we realize that we can’t be certain that action A will always produce good effect B. We create unavoidable uncertainty in our predictions. We may think we know what will happen if we try to commit armed robbery, but there’s a real chance the result will be worse than we predict. All crystal balls are broken. That’s why we make moral choices based on the rightness or wrongness of the action itself, not its likely consequences. We don’t commit armed robbery because theft and threatening violence are always wrong.

The most questionable moral decision of World War II was President Truman’s approval of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two bombs killed upwards of 170,000 human beings. As predicted, the use of these weapons moved the Japanese government to surrender. The moral decision was framed with the parallel question, “how many Americans and Japanese would have died if another course of action was taken?” The answer given is usually “lots more people would have died in an invasion or mere blockade.” There is no doubt that use of the weapon of mass destruction was immoral, an evil act. The phony moral position being used here is once more “doing evil so that a greater good will result.” This is a tough moral choice to accept precisely because there were some good effects from the bombing. Not all right decisions are easy to accept. Perhaps the possibility of being thrust into that kind of conundrum is the reason we pray every day that God “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”

The real problem in moral decisions involves us treating the ones that affect human beings in their life, liberty or property as if they were decisions only about material things that affect ourselves. Deciding what kind of car to buy, or whether to rent or purchase a home might not be a true moral decision but deciding whether to carry an unborn child to term or murder it before birth certainly is. If we treat matters of life and death according to what we expect the consequences to be, rather than what the rightness or wrongness of the action itself is, we are in the same court that Pontius Pilate was in with Jesus and the priests. That’s why studying the moral law, and moral decision-making, is critical for every Christian. That study, combined with daily prayer, gives us a solid foundation for our moral choices, and may help us to avoid relying on a consequentialist mind-set every time we choose.