The ends justifying the means

I think about this on occasion, good goals achieved via terrible acts. The villain in Kingsmen: The Secret Service(which was rad btw) was basically a ecoterrorist who waned to kill the majority of Earth's population to protect the environment, this is by no mean an uncommon plot in fiction, and obviously we are not meant to do much sympathizing with this point of view incidentally I think the prevalence of this idea in fiction goes a good way towards our disdain for protesters in real life, when fictional protesters are portrayed as either villains or stupid, or both, it is easy to extend that to real life people as well, but that is sort of a side note.
Anyway, few to no sane people will attempt to rationalize the deaths of millions as being good or necessary, but on a smaller scale can we honestly say the end never justifies the means? Personally I feel like the phrase is too often used to deny responsibility for committing a "bad" act and no, the end really doesn't justify the means in that context, if you feel your goal is worth the bad things you must do to achieve it, you should at least take responsibility for the fact that you did a bad thing, better yet, perhaps don't do the thing in the first place, because your goal is probably not worth the cost. How you do something matters at least as much as what you do, and why.

Currently in the Republican primary, the issues of torture, and surveillance get brought up during debates and so on, I feel like the answers the candidates give to these particular issues more than any other reveal enough about their characters to prove they are morally bankrupt fools at the very best, and monsters at worst.

Torture is dumb as hell for very practical reasons, basically it doesn't work, like at all, but for the sake of argument let's pretend it can work and provide good intelligence, I would say that even in that fantasy world, it still is not worth legalizing even if it would catch a terrorist or whatever. If the end justifies the means, then the means suddenly isn't a bad thing, and if it isn't bad, then there is no weight to the act or consideration when using it. I feel like if somebody thinks their end goal is worthy enough to commit the act, then that goal should also be worthy enough for them to face the consequences of their action. Your goals and ideology are immediately suspect if they are worth killing for, but not worth dying for basically.

That is the main problem I have with torture and our nascent surveillance state, not so much that these are inherently wrong things(they are), nor even that they are particularly new? Let's be honest here, does anyone really believe the government hasn't been spying on its citizens since practically its inception? Or that the CIA hasn't been doing basically whatever it wants without oversight for decades? Including torturing people? Because man, I don't know how to break this to you, but you are an idiot.

The difference though is that we haven't tried to pretend those acts were right, and when evidence comes out about them happening they weren't able to say "It's totes legal dudes" until relatively recently. So those who did it had to make a choice, is this goal worth the possibility of being fired or arrested? I like to think that in many cases the answer was no, but I know that in many cases that also wasn't the case, however at least there was an attempt at consequences. Those who want to rule us right now want to take away the consequences and tell us that we must become monsters to fight monsters, or even that we must become monsters to prevent other monsters from forming to fight in the first place.

It's about responsibility, they want to take away responsibility for committing evil acts in the service of the greater good, they want to contextualize it and say that in this specific case, this act isn't evil, but it is, and in attempting to justify it we do more harm to ourselves than our enemies ever could.