My dad is a secular humanist who believes in reason and science, and in being kind and ethical. When I was a kid, I remember him telling me he didn’t believe in the Machiavellian idea that “the ends justify the means”. His argument was simple and made sense: people would do all sorts of bad things for the sake of power, justifying themselves by appealing to some idea of an eventual outcome.
I’m a curious sort of person who questions everything, so eventually I questioned my dad’s take on this. I've spent a long time in the tech industry, where there are lots of Type 1 assholes who will go to any length to achieve their vision — often, a vision of a better world. And who wouldn’t want a better world?
I think it’s reasonable to believe that a certain amount of assertiveness is needed to make things happen. If you want to change the world, you have to be willing to make decisions and take action — and some people are always going to be unhappy. Cautiousness is not conducive to change-making; nor is people-pleasing. And if you don’t care about making other people happy, it’s easy to act like an asshole.
Also: maybe we should take “the ends” more seriously. Most folks I know believe that climate change will have catastrophic effects, possibly including human extinction. If Elon Musk can solve climate change and save humanity, who cares if he’s an asshole?
There are whole philosophies around this, and folks in the tech world who half-jokingly call change-makers “sociopaths” (this is not meant as an insult) and encourage folks to “be slightly evil” for the sake of... being effective. I mean, if you want to solve big problems, you have to be effective, right?
I think there is something to this. I admit: it is possible that humanity will be saved by some jerk who was willing to do whatever it took and incur some collateral damage. This is why I have some amount of sympathy for Type 1 assholes.
But I still don’t think “the ends justify the means” is good ethics. The reason is rooted in my epistemic stance.
My epistemology is a whole other essay, but in short, we humans generally do not perceive reality objectively. We all have different perspectives and different beliefs and different opinions. Certainty is usually an illusion. Being wrong is our base case, our null hypothesis.
Like gravity, knowledge exhibits locality. What we perceive most directly is our own immediate, subjective experience. We can, arguably, see the literal world in front of us with some approximation of objectivity. The more we are talking about abstract phenomena — social reality, cultural discourses, politics, complex/chaotic systems — the less objectivity we have and the less we really know. And the future is the most abstract and unknowable of all.
In other words, we don't even really know what is true now, let alone what is going to happen. However good our intentions, we simply have no idea what the outcome will be. But we know some things better than others. We can often perceive, with some degree of accuracy, the immediate impacts of our actions on the people around us.
The “means” are now. The “ends” are hypothetical. The more steps there are between where we are today and our intended outcome, the less we can know about what fruits our actions will actually bear. Things might go drastically wrong — “the road to hell” and all that. And then if our “means” were harmful, we’ve committed harm upon harm. The least we can do is try to lift people up as we go, instead of tearing them down.
In short: don't be an asshole. Not even a mission-driven Type 1 asshole. Betting on your own correctness about the future is a risky gamble, and betting other people's well-being on it is a jerk move.