The ends justify the means.

We can rate the morality of deeds on three metrics, the what, the why, and the how. I think it is probably fair to say that the easiest thing to judge is the what, and often the why is irrelevant but it surely helps to know it, but the how is what I want to talk about because it is often overlooked.

"The ends justify the means" is a phrase we hear all the time, and generally when we hear it being said in a movie or read it in a book, we know that the person saying it is at best morally dubious and often a plain old villain. Yet we persist in applying it to real world scenarios all the time.

Is there an end good enough to justify the means when the means are an atrocity? Take the border situation we have today, most people who aren't right wing loonies accept that terrorists and murderers aren't swarming across our southern border by the thousands and even most of those in favor of increased border security mostly aren't saying that a majority, or even a large minority, of those crossing are threats. Yet the measures we are taking at the border are needed because some of them are. Now statistically speaking that is bullshit too, but let's say they are right, let's say that there are threats, and that the draconian internment and family separation measures we are taking are right now literally saving the lives of real Americans at the same time as they save our tax dollars from going directly into the pockets of those wily Mexicans.

How many lives, or dollars, have to be saved to make what we are doing to people worth it? Some estimates claim that fifteen thousand children have been stolen from their families by US border agents in the last year or so, the reality is the true number will never be known because we couldn't be bothered to actually track them properly. Could be higher, hopefully it's lower. How many kids are we willing to kill and torture, and make no mistake that is what is and will happen, to prevent a single American death, or ten, or a thousand? What is the dollar value of a stolen child's life? Let's say that right now those fifteen thousand kids are saving ten thousand lives at the cost of their own.

Remember, this is a fantasy where the security measures do work, in the reality I am describing terrorists and murderous drug dealers are being stopped daily, is it worth it? What if those fifteen thousand kids saved a hundred thousand lives? Or a million? Who makes that decision?

In this situation, the what of the action is undeniably a good thing, saving lives, the why is also without fault, saving lives is it's own reason after all, but the how is pretty bad. Bad enough to negate the what and why? I certainly think so but others may have a different opinion.

There are certain morals that you don't bed, certain lines you can't cross and still be a good guy, even if your motives are pure, and make no mistake, in the real world the scenario I described does not have pure motives anywhere near it, but even in our idealized fantasy world we would still be the villains, because we are making the choice to sacrifice innocents.

It comes down to choice, and choosing not to save someone at the cost of others is absolutely not the same as choosing to sacrifice others to save someone. Once that decision is made, you lose the right to be the hero in the story even with the best of intentions.

Now there are people like that who perform services that might be necessary even if we don't want to think about it. I am sure someone can put together a hypothetical about shooting through a hostage or torturing an innocent or whatever, I don't want to heat it, those acts might require courage, and there is certainly a cost paid by the person committing it, but that doesn't make them a hero, at best it makes them a necessary evil and honestly I am not too sure evil is necessary.

On the national scale when politicians or pundits try to convince us that our cruelties are necessary, that we should sacrifice the other for ourselves, that the how that they offer is the only way to get the what, we should be seeing that for what it is, an attempt to shift responsibility. If tens of millions of people support it, then they are just serving the will of the people after all, and the thing is they are right! When the majority support evil then the responsibility for that evil does fall on the majority, they succeeded at shifting the responsibility and we all now have that stain on our souls. So when we are asked to accept atrocity, we have to ask ourselves if that is who we want to be. Make no mistake, the consequences of internment weren't hidden, we knew what would happen when that policy was enacted. Just as we knew we would lose an element of freedom when we approved the additional security and surveillance powers granted to government agencies post 9/11, we knew innocents would die in the Gulf Wars, both of them, we knew it and we did it anyway, and we voted for the same people who told us it was necessary again. We focused on the what and the why, but the how was there, never exactly hidden, but never exactly mentioned either.

I voted for Barack Obama twice, policies he instituted are responsible for the deaths of innocent foreign civilians and American citizens, I have blood on my hands too, as do we all. The system we live in makes murderers of all of us. We are told that it is too hard to be truly moral, that ending those policies would make us unsafe, or that it is too expensive. We are told to buy our comfort with the lives of other people and that it is naive of us to think it could ever be otherwise.

Maybe that is true, but I am not so sure, all of our wealth and power has to be good for something other than living in fear behind a barricade draped with our enemies corpses. If not then what is the point o fit?

It has to be worth a try right? We've tried cynicism for so long and we only seem to be getting less safe and more poor, why not try running the country with naivety instead for a while? Wouldn't it be better to die a hero and to live as a monster?