The Road to Hell Is Paved with Good Intentions

Three factors determine whether people assess a behavior is ethical: the intention, the action, and the result. For example, if you accidentally (i.e., no intention) kill someone while driving drunk in your car, the punishment is much less severe than if you commit pre-meditated (i.e., intentional) murder. If you attempt (i.e., intention) to kill someone but don’t actually follow through (i.e., action) or succeed (i.e., result), then that carries a much lower punishment than completed murder. All three components are necessary for the full punishment, whereas any one component immediately deems someone as less ethical.

The question for this post is, “How can you be unethical if you have good intentions?” Using the above framework’s terms, how come good intentions don’t prevent bad actions and bad results? This is a legitimate question because most children are taught that good people do good things that lead to good results and bad people do bad things that lead to bad results. Simple, but not complete by any means. First of all, a person can be careless and so have no negative intentions but perform actions with reckless abandon that sometimes lead to disastrous results. Secondly, someone can be well-intentioned, like trying to defend one from harm, but due to being mistaken could harm someone who wasn’t actually doing anything wrong. But the worst situation is when someone who means well does something that looks good but is actually harmful—including both “justice” actions that are really immoral and benevolent actions that lead to worse outcomes than doing something else (or even doing nothing!).

The question for this post is, “How can you be unethical if you have good intentions?” Using the above framework’s terms, how come good intentions don’t prevent bad actions and bad results? This is a legitimate question because most children are taught that good people do good things that lead to good results and bad people do bad things that lead to bad results. Simple, but not complete by any means. First of all, a person can be careless and so have no negative intentions but perform actions with reckless abandon that sometimes lead to disastrous results. Secondly, someone can be well-intentioned, like trying to defend one from harm, but due to being mistaken could harm someone who wasn’t actually doing anything wrong. But the worst situation is when someone who means well does something that looks good but is actually harmful—including both “justice” actions that are really immoral and benevolent actions that lead to worse outcomes than doing something else (or even doing nothing!).

• Good Intentions -> Accidental Actions -> Bad Results – Accidents happen. They happen more frequently with people who are careless. People are usually taught when they are certain ways to mitigate the risk of accidents: look both ways before crossing the street; don’t run with scissors; don’t drink and drive. These guidelines help people habituate the ethics of safety and so avoiding harmful actions becomes instinctual. If people aren’t familiar with these, they will unconsciously behave in riskier ways. While accidents can happen no matter how risk-averse you are, they occur more frequently when people don’t actively intend to do things safely.
• Good Intentions -> Incorrect Actions Based on Incorrect Information -> Bad Results – People who mean well can act seemingly appropriately in the moment but have it be incorrect based on false information. So, if you think a man groped your spouse and you punch him in the face, that’s a socially acceptable response and so most people will approve of it (regardless of its legality). However, if you think a man did that but he did not, now you’ve hurt a person for no legitimate reason and have to apologize and make amends—you might even face civil or legal action for your behavior.
• Good Intentions -> Unethical Actions Based on Ethical Rationalization -> Bad Results – This is similar to the above, but I want to differentiate it between the information itself being bad and the beliefs and bias influencing the behavior. Two examples for this: public policy and rioting. With public policy, humans can hurt the very people they’re trying to help. For example, taxes or minimum wage laws can be targeted at wealthy business owners but end up affecting the poor because businesses can’t afford to hire entry-level positions for unskilled workers. One law tried to tax real estate owners by charging a tax per window (a proxy for the size of the house). Building owners turned windows into walls to avoid the tax as a result, and health of the residents deteriorated significantly. In the rioting example, it’s unfortunate but true that people who feel wronged feel like unethical behavior becomes justified. This, of course, is true when it comes to imprisoning a murderer or shooting a person coming at you with a deadly weapon. But in the case of “social injustice” where someone shoots a person in the same demographic (even if they head a weapon and the shooting was completely legal and justified) and then a group of people from that demographic plan to loot local businesses, that response has absolutely nothing to do with the original event and is just an excuse to exploit a tragedy for personal gain.
• Good Intentions -> Bad Behavior -> Worse Behavior -> Atrocious Results – The most extreme example of this—of which “the road to hell” is referring to—is what we all know from media like The Godfather Part 2 and Breaking Bad. Someone is in a dire situation and commit an unethical act that, due to the circumstances, is either understandable or justified. Someone, for example, might accidentally kill someone trying to defend someone else. In The Godfather and Breaking Bad, the protagonists were squeaky-clean citizens who, due to family circumstances, led them to committing their first crime. Having gotten sucked into the underworld, they dig themselves deeper through murder and other crimes until they become the number one crime lord in their territory. The “road” is the serious of steps that lead them down the bad path, the “hell” being where they end up in a state of villainy, and the “good intentions” were the original reason to support their families.

These are all ways that people can do the wrong thing for seemingly the right reasons. The question is, how do you prevent them? In the first example, the best approach is to be careful and intentional in your actions. In other words, don’t be like a bull in a china shop—be aware of your surroundings and be conscious of how your actions will affect the world around you. Again, you can’t eliminate all risk, but the more careless you are, the more people will want to hold you accountable for your actions.

In the second example, the best approach is to confirm your facts. Jumping to conclusions or overreacting are the main causes of these actions. I had a situation in my own life where someone next to me kicked the tire of a person’s car as they were making a turn because they didn’t yield for pedestrians. The driver turned around and chased down the person and then got out of the car and accosted me. I hadn’t done anything, and he was ready to fight me. If it weren’t for his female friend telling him that I didn’t do it, I would’ve had to throw down. Look at the series of actions there: the failure to yield, the seemingly justified (because it expressed the frustration and exacted punishment without harming the vehicle) response in kicking the tire, the response of tracking down the person, and then the incorrect information leading to an unethical attack on a person who would then have to fight back (normally a bad action unless attacked like in this situation) to defend himself.

The third example is the most difficult to mitigate because your actions will seem right. There are a few techniques can use here, though. First, ask yourself if your behavior would be ethical if no one did anything to you first. That works for this situation as well as the previous one because if what you’re doing would normally be wrong, you’ve better be right. So if your information is wrong (previous example) or your action is harmful, you need to ensure that you know the consequences of your actions from a biased observer on the other side. The other side will either say they weren’t doing anything (wrong information) or that the new harmful act was much worse and, therefore, wasn’t justified (poor rationalization). Second, you can then ask yourself if your reaction is appropriate given the action taken against you from an objective party. So, if a situation you weren’t involved in, for example, causes you to steal something, then an objective party would look at those and say that the first action in no way justifies the second. The third way to avoid this is to ask what would happen if you were the person on the receiving end of what you were about to do. This would allow you to switch your bias to the other side and see how “evil” your action will be, and if you set a policy or law you can see how you would react to it—whether to comply, to avoid it, or to circumvent/exploit it. This will prevent you from taking an action that will justify responses that will make things even worse—also known as “escalation”. The goal is to neutralize or deescalate, and many responses result in even worse situations or have unintended consequences.

In the final example, you have to at some point “reset” your ethical mental calculations. Over time, resentment can build and cause you to rationalize worse and worse actions. So your mental math can be that people have been treating you poorly for years and so, while no one did anything worse than bullying, you can start shooting people because of everything that’s happened. You can also have the “well, I’ve already come this far” (known as the “sunk cost fallacy” in psychology) mentality and begin to identify with your negative actions. “If I’ve done a bad thing, I’m a bad person, and so now I must continue to do bad things.” You need to overturn this mentality by doing the right thing, trying to make up for any wrong things, and—most importantly—stop doing things that make your situation worse.

This is a tough post because these concepts are easy to explain but very hard to do. When you are mad at someone else, you are not thinking objectively. You will justify terrible acts in your mind when someone harms you. Worse, you will act negatively even if you suspect that something has been done to you—whether or not it’s true. So you have to be diligent, be objective, or even see things from the other party’s perspective. You have to overcome “blind rage” and bias to identify the right actions going forward. You have to acknowledge that helping some people at someone else’s expense is not necessarily righteous. Do this, and you can avoid “the road to hell” and your intentions, actions, and results will be as aligned as possible.