This is a difficult post because, ironically, my intentions for it might not lead to the outcome that I desire. Which is, not coincidentally, the point of this post: good intentions don’t always result in the best outcome possible. They can help, but—and if you’ve read my posts emotions, you already know this—when combined with the wrong beliefs, can result in negative outcomes.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions…” The saying is famous because of situations like the ones depicted in all-time great entertainment such as The Godfather: Part II and Breaking Bad. In those two stories, the main characters initially have the good intentions of taking care of their families. But as events unfold and trials and tribulations arise, they continue to take the path that is objectively immoral but, through their subjective lens, seems to be the best option that helps them attain their goal of safety and well-being for the people they care about.
Now, you are not always making the decision between killing someone or turning yourself into the police, so we’ll set those extreme scenarios aside, but you might mean well when trying to help someone where you might bend the rules. Dan Ariely famously found in his research that when peers graded each others’ tests, they cheated even more than when grading their own papers. The conclusion was clear: people only cheat enough where they can still rationalize that they are good people, and so they cheat a little bit for themselves but even more for others when they believe that their cheating is altruistic. This is a compelling and somewhat disturbing finding: humans have a loophole in their morality that can be exploited: if you make seem something appear to be moral, then you can justify immoral behavior.
You see this frequently. The politician that commits all kinds of violations of the constitution but justifies it as fine as long as one person was saved from it. The friend or family member that lies to you to protect you but then it turns out that it would’ve been a great outcome had you heard the truth. The person who will kill for his or her family. The online pirates that feel righteous in downloading or sharing copyrighted materials because the movie or video game industry is expensive or unethical (when they could just not purchase the product). The way that someone might guilt or manipulate someone else into helping with a cause. After all, as long as you mean well, it’s justified, right?
Unfortunately, that’s not the case in objective terms. It doesn’t matter whether you mean well when you stop traffic for your cause if someone dies because they couldn’t get to the hospital in time to be saved from an injury or illness. It doesn’t matter whether you mean well if you hurt someone while trying to help them. Yes, these things might factor into things like penalties enacted by society when you are punished for wrongdoing, but that doesn’t make the actions right per se. Society is lenient toward gray areas of morality because many factors can influence your decisions and actions, but eventually when a line is crossed (usually, direct, observable harm), everyone agrees that it was wrongdoing no matter how good the intentions were. Yes, some people (e.g., powerful leaders in society) can cover up their wrongdoings well or have plausible deniability when blaming something or someone else for what happened, but the negative consequence still occurred.
Unfortunately, there is no perfect piece of advice on how to make sure that your intentions and deeds match. However, one good approach to help is asking yourself whether your act would be ethical if you didn’t have the justification you’re using. For example, is it okay to hit someone if they didn’t hit you first? Is it okay to take from someone who didn’t do anything to anyone? Is it okay to stop someone from leaving their house without a good reason? When the answer is no, it raises the bar for what proof you need to be sure that what you are doing is right. For example, if you see someone hitting someone else, you can intervene. But if you’re told that someone hit someone else, you might wish to be more cautious. You see this occasionally when a person lies about a man touching another man’s sister, the brother beats up the accused, and then it turns out it was false and a man just beat up another man for no justifiable reason. What was in one moment seemingly the only possible outcome now becomes a crime punishable by jail time.
So verify your facts or get proof before doing something that would be abhorrent in a vacuum but is justified when something bad happened prior. You might not be able to take back what you do, so you’ve better be sure. Additionally, be careful with things like fundraising, political support, and other actions that will take money from people or harm them in some way for a potential benefit. If that benefit isn’t realized, you just harmed someone for no reason. Something like fighting a disease might be okay because, as long as people tried, if they didn’t succeed then at least it was worth the attempt and the participants knew the probability of success was not 100%. But with something that might have a benefit 50 years from now but might hurt people today—see: climate change action, speech laws, religious practices becoming mandated, or spending too much on anything—you have to be very careful. Imagine if society, for example, banned HVAC equipment and thousands of people died from hot or cold environmental conditions. The policy might’ve meant well to stop millions dying in 50 years, but is killing a few thousand today worth it—and what if the climate crisis is solved via some new invention one year later and nothing ever happens? In that case, the policy killed thousands of people for no reason.
This is not to advocate for any particular position on any of these ethical issues. This blog is not a place for moralizing, but it does have to bring up the various ethical dilemmas we all face and look at the various angles now so people make the best decisions possible when the time comes. Currently, societal ethical frameworks are such that no one seems to want to pass a law that kills someone, but there’s enough ambiguity when a law indirectly causes a death for people to justify it. Additionally, there are policies like “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” that might cost lives and leaders have to determine which approach will result in the fewest deaths—negotiating, which might result in more threats of death in the future (to get more money), or not negotiating when it might lead to a death today.
The only difference with this particular example is that the death is always the responsibility of the person committing the act, so the terrorist in this example is to blame for the death. But ethicists will debate forever what the optimal law is that will mitigate the risks of those situations in the first place. It’s why laws regarding guns, abortion, speech, and a variety of hotly contested topics will continue to be debated: it’s a matter of intent, action, and outcome.
But just because they mean well, doesn’t mean that they’ll do the right thing and it’ll end well. And that’s why you need to be careful: good intentions don’t make your actions right—consider the risk of a negative result and how a third party would view it if it goes a different way than you expect. You might think of a better option or act differently just having the risk more accurately calculated in your head. You can convince yourself of nearly anything; make sure you are ready for the consequences in the worst-case scenario before you let your intentions take you across the point of no return. If you commit an act that in a vacuum would be abhorrent and it turns out that your justification was wrong, your act will be viewed as abhorrent—no matter your intent. Proceed with caution.