Of Bad Means Employed to a Good End

There is a kind of reasoning that sounds like wisdom but is in fact the beginning of every moral disaster: that a great good justifies a small evil, that the safety of the many excuses the suffering of the few, that the prince who maintains order may use disorder to do it. I have heard this argued by intelligent men, men of genuine public virtue, and I confess the argument has its force. But I do not in the end believe it.

The reason I do not believe it is not primarily philosophical. It is practical. The man who employs cruelty in the service of justice does not remain a man who merely uses cruelty instrumentally — he becomes, by degrees, a man comfortable with cruelty. The tool shapes the hand that wields it. We are what we repeatedly do, not what we intend; and the magistrate who tortures one prisoner to prevent a greater harm has introduced into himself a facility for torture that will not confine itself to its original justification. The next case will be easier. And the next.

“I am of the opinion that nothing is so injurious to a state as the innovation of principles; especially when they are introduced by subtlety and disguised as necessities.”

History provides examples enough. The Roman emperors who began as servants of the republic and ended as its destroyers did not proceed in a single leap. Each step was justified by a plausible necessity: the conspiracy must be crushed before it spreads; the province must be pacified before it rebels; the senator must be removed before he corrupts the others. Each step made the next more thinkable. By the time the full transformation was accomplished, neither the emperor nor those around him remembered clearly where the line had been, or that there had ever been a line.

What the prince owes his state is not merely good outcomes but a visible commitment to the means by which the state justifies itself. A republic that employs the methods of tyranny to preserve republican order has already conceded the essential argument to tyranny. It has agreed that order is the value, not freedom — and from there, the tyrant’s position is merely a matter of efficiency. I do not say that all difficult choices may be avoided. I say that the man who faces them should face them with no comfort in his heart, with no doctrine that makes them easy, and with the knowledge that something is being lost that cannot be recovered.