Performing an unethical act for others’ benefit does not make it right. However, this is a difficult ethical conundrum because it is the ultimate “ends justify the means” argument when you’re doing something wrong because someone needs it. This is the “would you steal a loaf of bread to feed your family” kind of situation that most people would answer “yes, of course” to. This is taken to the extreme when people talk about having friends that they would help “bury a body” for. It is one of the tenants of friendship that you would put the relationship above the law, others, and even yourself.
Now, it is up to you how you deal with any and all ethical quandaries, as this blog is meant to analyze life but not tell you how to live. That said, it is very, very important to know this one part of humanity because it causes the average person who would normally be ethical to do some unethical things. Arguably the most important study on this wasn’t one of the famous classic psychology studies like the Milgram experiment but a more recent one from Dan Ariely on cheating. The study was trying to measure the degree to which people cheated when no one was looking, having participants self-grade tests where they would receive money for each correct answer. The twist was that they got to delete the test without anyone ever being able to look at the results, allowing them to cheat without consequences. The brilliance of the study is that they had a control group taking the same test where an objective party graded them, so the difference between the two groups equaled the amount of cheating that the self-graders were doing.
The results were pretty interesting: nearly everyone cheated a little, and a few cheated a lot. The main finding was that most people cheated just enough where they could justify to themselves that they were still good people (“Oh, I got that answer right—I just didn’t write it down!”). But, in my opinion, the most dangerous finding was that when someone graded their partner’s paper, they cheated more—much more. The rationale for the cheating for someone else is two-fold: first, the cheating was altruistic and so the “goodness” of helping someone else balanced out the cheating of the exam facilitators; second, they justified it as part of partnership and reciprocity with the peer where they would hope the other person would do it for them. After all, they’re in this together now.
The implications of this are truly dangerous: if someone thinks that they are doing something good for someone, they will lower their ethical standards. This applies to all facets of life from stealing for someone else to lying or cheating for them to justify using the government to take from some people to give it to your group. When combining this with the idea that your ethical standards are significantly lowered when you are dealing with someone you think is evil or lesser (“Oh, they’re not really people.”) and you have the makings of justified atrocities.
And that’s the core of unethical altruism: it’s something that is in and of itself wrong but that you can rationalize to yourself because you’re not doing it for personal gain. Because it’s not selfish, it’s less wrong—or at least the bad is offset by the good you’re doing. Vote to take from people you don’t like and give it to people you do? Completely justified because those people are bad and the good people are good. Look the other way when a friend vandalizes an innocent person’s property? Well, that’s your friend, and they probably deserved it…right? It’s a slippery slope—it’s one of the many reasons for the saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Of course everyone believes that they mean well…it’s just that when they mean well, they can rationalize doing anything in their mind that would normally be terrible.
So while you can choose how you live your life, you want to be very, very careful about unethical altruism because of what it can mean for your life. You could go down the dark path of Michael Corleone in The Godfather where he killed more and more people to protect the family, or you could start a meth empire to save money for your wife and children and kill anyone in your way like Walter White in Breaking Bad. Those stories are so powerful because, while they became monsters, you can see their downfall unfold and how each step seemed reasonable at the time given the circumstances. But, eventually, you’re killing people in cold blood (literally or metaphorically) and wondering how you got there. And that’s where unethical altruism can take you.
Yes, I’m sure for the sake of your familial and friendship bonds that you can be willing to lie, steal, or kill for them, but you want to be careful not to jump too quickly to those kinds of solutions when there might be better, much less severe options. And that applies to trying to force others to help people while doing nothing yourself as well—it might seem like the right thing to do, but there are plenty of ways to help people and so you should try to keep your ethical bar as high as possible knowing that it’s at risk of plummeting when others are involved. It’ll hopefully help you avoid making very, very bad decisions under stressful conditions where you’re not thinking clearly.