A dispute · spans 3 eras
Do the Ends Justify the Means?
When may we do bad to achieve good?
Machiavelli's Prince makes the case in its starkest political form. Utilitarianism gives the question a formal calculus: yes, if the resulting good outweighs the resulting harm. Kant rules the calculation out of court: persons are ends in themselves; you may never use them merely as means. The 20th century put the question under unbearable pressure: revolutionary violence, total war, terror bombing, the camps. Camus's break with Sartre was, at bottom, a refusal to accept the Stalinist version of "yes."
// The sides
Yes, sometimes
Politics answers to its own logic of outcome, and a ruler must at times do what private morality condemns in order to preserve the community itself; whoever prizes his own clean hands above all pays for them with other people's lives.