- The ends justify the means - Meaning we could justify torture if it prevents terrorism for example. Some people would consider this fine, others not.
- Some moral principles or duties have intrinsic value independent of their outcomes - For example, telling the truth might be considered right not because of its consequences, but because honesty itself is inherently valuable.
- Both means and ends matter - Actions are justified when there's moral harmony between how we act and what we achieve. This suggests that good ends achieved through ethical means have a different moral quality than the same ends achieved through harmful means.
Probably I'd put myself in the latter camps, rather than the first two. But then I haven't thought about this too deeply myself, so happy to hear the opinions of others who might have thought about it more :)
I have just refused to answer in a different reply to you, but actually when you describe it like this, the third camp resonates with me the most. So I'm with you there.
However, wouldn't most people say that? It is kind of a cop-out because it let's you decide on each moral dilemma in a case by case basis -> which I think is actually necessary since you can't say that ends justify/don't justify means blankly.
Do you by any chance know Alex O'Connor? I listened to an ethics episode of his podcast and it was quite interesting and well-spoken in my opinion. (It is about veganism again, I suppose it is a useful theme for ethical arguments.)
I believe in a true moral field that pervades reality, but I don't believe that "good" or "not good" can be expresssed in a finite sentence in some human understandable language. I believe the complexities require one to attend to the context as well as the action and so on. There's very few cases where I'd find it good to kill some human no matter the ends; but even just listening to someone patiently with attention instead of begging off due to being busy can be quite important to get right; these ordinary daily issues are where a clear feeling for the ends you live for and a feeling for your own actual physical limits on being patient or having enough energy for various tasks are useful. And I believe that two perspectives I find very useful are missing from many moral analyses: 1) my decisions change who I am, so the reason not to murder is not a strictly utilitarian balancing of the person's likely future actions, but also includes the change to my habits and tolerances, and 2) in the prisoner's dilemma, there is nothing that special about me being me - I could as easily be someone else, so when I am deciding I am picking between a world where x% of people make choice "cooperate" or x% of people make choice "defect."
This latter approach also extends very nicely to probabilistic methods - if I pass garbage on the beach, I can pick it up with probability Y%, and adjust Y so that if most a lot of people make the same choice, then all the garbage will be picked up.
- The ends justify the means - Meaning we could justify torture if it prevents terrorism for example. Some people would consider this fine, others not.
- Some moral principles or duties have intrinsic value independent of their outcomes - For example, telling the truth might be considered right not because of its consequences, but because honesty itself is inherently valuable.
- Both means and ends matter - Actions are justified when there's moral harmony between how we act and what we achieve. This suggests that good ends achieved through ethical means have a different moral quality than the same ends achieved through harmful means.
Probably I'd put myself in the latter camps, rather than the first two. But then I haven't thought about this too deeply myself, so happy to hear the opinions of others who might have thought about it more :)