The Foundations of Morality
15. Ends and Means
1. How Means Become Ends
All men act. They act purposefully. They employ means to achieve ends. This may seem elementary. Yet there has been no more fertile source of confusion in ethical philosophy than that concerning means and ends.
“Ends” may be “pluralistic,” as many moral philosophers insist, but only if we recognize that this refers to subordinate or intermediate ends. Ends are never irreducibly pluralistic. In choosing between subordinate ends, as we constantly find ourselves obliged to do, we are necessarily guided by a preference of one over the other. And this preference is based on our judgment that one of these “ends” is more nearly an ultimate end for us, or at least a better means of realizing a more ultimate end, than the other.
Thus intermediate ends are at once means and ends. I am tempted to coin a new word, “means-ends,” to emphasize this dual nature.
And this transformation of means into ends is illustrated in a whole life. A man not only wishes to protect himself against hunger and cold; he wishes to have a comfortable and attractive home, to marry and raise children, to send them to college. To achieve these more ulterior ends, he needs money. “Making money” then becomes both a means and a secondary end. To make money he must get a job. Getting a job is both a means and a tertiary end. Thus action and life are like a flight of steps in which each step is an end in relation to the preceding one and a means in relation to the next one.
The wise man tends to see his work, recreations, and ambitions in this dual way. He does not live wholly in the present moment. That would be to make no prudent provision for the future. He does not live wholly in the future. That would be never to enjoy the present moment. He lives in both the present and the future. He enjoys himself as he goes along, savoring life; but he also sets himself a goal or goals towards which he tries to make further progress.
The ideal balance is not easy to achieve. Our temperament or habits may lead us to err on one side or the other. One error is to think of everything merely as a means to something else; to become lost in work or duty; to be driven on, without ever savoring the fruits of past success, by a restless ambition that is never satisfied; to be, as Emerson put it, “always getting ready to live, but never living.” Another error is to forget that something is primarily a means and to treat it only as an end in itself. A typical example of this perversion is the miser, constantly piling up money and working for still more, but never spending it.
2. Dewey, Kant, and Mill
The question that immediately occurs to one is, Growth toward what? Should men grow twelve feet tall, and keep growing? Should population, overcrowding, noise, traffic jams, government power, delinquency, crime, filth, cancer, keep growing? If growth itself is the only moral end, then the growth of pain and misery is as much a moral end as the growth of happiness, and the growth of evil as much a moral end as the growth of good. The glorification of growth for growth’s sake, change for change’s sake, movement for movement’s sake, reminds one of an old popular song, which went: “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way!” Ethical values and ideals, as well as the distinction between means and ends, are dissolved and vaporized in such a philosophy.
Now if the Ultimate End consists of both Virtue and Happiness, it becomes impossible to resolve either into terms of the other. They then become not only incommensurable, but incomparable. So when we are confronted with the problem of which of two courses to adopt, one of which is conducive to more Virtue but to less Happiness, and the other of which is conducive to more Happiness and to less Virtue, or one of which will tend to increase Virtue more than Happiness and the other to increase Happiness more than Virtue, how can we decide which course to take?
Let us examine the confusion as it occurs in Kant. Kant is usually, and rightly, regarded as the arch antihedonist and anti-utilitarian; but in one remarkable passage he assigns so important a role to happiness that he seems to teeter on the verge of eudaemonism:
Yet if we interpret happiness in this context as referring not merely to the short-run happiness of the agent but to the general long-run happiness of the community, then this “Epicurean” view is obviously the correct solution. The ultimate end is happiness. Virtue is a necessary long-run means to that end.
Some people will be shocked at this, because they will interpret it as a downgrading of virtue or morality to a mere means. But a necessary means to a great end is seldom regarded by us as a mere means; it becomes an (intermediate or penultimate) end in itself; it even becomes in our minds an indispensable part or ingredient of the ultimate end.
All this was clearly recognized by John Stuart Mill in his Utilitarianism:
3. Virtue Is Instrumental
In short, we agree to call Virtue and Morality precisely those actions, dispositions, and rules of action that tend in the long run to promote Happiness. Actions and dispositions that tend in the long run not to promote Happiness, or to promote only pain or misery, we agree to call Vice or Immorality.
Hence when a satirical writer like Mandeville writes The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Made Public Benefits (1705), and argues that it is really the “vices” (i.e., the self-regarding actions of men) that, through luxurious living and extravagance, stimulate all invention, action and progress by circulating money and capital, what he is really saying is that what we call the vices we should call the virtues, and what we call the virtues we should call the vices. Mandeville was not wrong in principle (i.e., so far as the principle of the relationship of means and ends is concerned); he was wrong in his conclusion only because his economics were wrong. (Like his later disciple Keynes, he assumed that saving led only to economic stagnation and that only extravagance in consumption stimulated industry and trade.)
Whenever we are trying to discover which is means and which end, or which of two ends is ulterior, the test is simple. We have merely to ask ourselves two main questions, such as: Would it be better to have more Virtue (or Morality) in the world at the cost of less Happiness? Or would it be better to have more Happiness at the cost of less Virtue? The moment such questions are posed, it becomes obvious that, as between these two, Happiness is the ulterior end and Virtue or Morality the means.
Clarity on this point is so important that it is worth risking excessive repetition to achieve it. To recognize that something is primarily a means—in this case Virtue—is not to deny that it has a high value also in itself. It is merely to deny that it has a value completely independent of its utility or necessity as a means. We may make the relation clear by an analogy from the world of economic value. Capital goods derive their value from the consumer goods they help to produce. The value of a plow or a tractor is derived from the value of the crops that it helps to create. The value of a shoe factory and its equipment is derived from the value of the shoes it helps to produce. If the crops or the shoes ceased to be needed, or ceased to be valued, the means that helped to produce them would also lose their value. What we call morality has tremendous value because it is an indispensable means of achieving human happiness.
I have frequently spoken in this chapter of “ultimate ends,” by which I have meant simply ends pursued solely for their own sake and not also as means to something further. I have even occasionally spoken, as above, of “the ultimate end,” using this merely as a synonym for “long-run happiness and well-being.” But in the interests of psychological realism I am perfectly willing to accept the qualification suggested by C. L. Stevenson:
That is why, though in the ethical system I am here proposing “the ultimate end” is Human Happiness, I have thought it preferable to put my emphasis on the “focal aim”—Social Cooperation.
4. Does the End Justify the Means?
We come now to a further problem concerning the relationship of means and ends. Does the end justify the means?
Now we can answer this question affirmatively or negatively, depending upon how we interpret the terms of the question itself. Let us begin with the negative answer, because it is the one most frequently made by moral philosophers. I cannot do better than quote Aldous Huxley:
These quotations make clear that what people mean when they say that “the end does not justify the means” is simply that evil means cannot be justified on the argument that they are being pursued in order to achieve a “good” end. But the reason most of us accept this adage is that we do not believe that really evil means are ever necessary or that they can in fact lead to a really good end.
Let us look at the argument as it is stated by A. C. Ewing:
Ewing seems to me here to be (no doubt unconsciously) misrepresenting the position of the utilitarian, and certainly that of the rule-utilitist. The rule-utilitist would say that ordinarily “immoral” means could in a specific situation be justified, not only provided “their moral evil is exceeded by the goodness of the results,” but provided these means were the only possible way to attain these good results, and provided also that these means led on net balance to greater long-run good than any other means.
This is, in fact, the answer of a rule-utilitist like John Hospers:
Sometimes the end justifies the means and sometimes it doesn’t. . . . Even when the means involves agonizing sacrifice, the end may justify it if it can be achieved in no other way and if the end is worth it.
We must be very slow, in brief, to adopt means that involve evil even to secure the most desirable ends. We must tolerate, for example, even major injustices and suppressions of liberty before we resort to the certain evils of armed rebellion or revolution or civil war. And especially in today’s world we must tolerate national insults and serious aggressions before we let loose the appalling disaster of nuclear war.
But the exact amount of injustice or suppression or aggression it is wise to tolerate before we resort to rebellion or war is a question that abstract ethical principles alone cannot answer. We are compelled to weigh alternatives and probabilities and to fall back upon our practical judgment in a specific situation.
It is not always a question, unfortunately, of whether “evil” means can ever lead to “good”; it is too often a question, in the actual world in which we live, of whether means generally and rightly regarded as evil may not sometimes be unavoidable to terminate or prevent a still greater evil.
In brief, our choice is sometimes forced. When we are reduced to a choice of evils, we must choose the lesser.
Thus we strive for intermediate ends that in turn become means toward still further ends. It is therefore not always possible to say precisely how much we value something “instrumentally” and how much “intrinsically.” But it is always possible to be clear-headed about the distinction. Morality must be valued primarily as a means to human happiness. Because it is an indispensable means, it must be valued very highly. But its value is primarily “instrumental” or derivative, and it is only confusion of thought to hold that its value is something wholly apart from, and independent of, any contribution it may make to human happiness.
