Topics Ethics

Question Dear Scholars: At what point can the end ever justify the means? I am particularly interested in your response in the context of criminal justice. For example, is it ever acceptable for a police officer to perjure himself/herself to ensure a conviction of a defendant he/she knows to be guilty? Pete C.

Accepted:
November 20, 2005

Comments

What else could justify the means other than the end? Thequestion, though, is what end we should have in view.

In the case thatyou imagine, it seems that the relevant end is getting a guiltycriminal in jail. Let’s assume for the sake of this discussion that wehave no reason to doubt that such an end would be a good thing. Let’sassume that the person is truly guilty of a violent and unprovokedcrime and that he’s very likely to continue his life of violence ifleft unchecked. We then weigh the good end of preventing furtherviolence against the bad means of lying and it looks like, on balance,the goodness of the end outweighs the badness of the means. Not only,it seems, are we permitted to lie; in fact, we’re morally obligated todo so.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that itdoesn’t take into account all of the relevant ends. In this context,when we are considering the ends, we must also consider the ends of theentire criminal justice system– namely, to protect the interests of allcitizens, not only the interests of victims or potential victims ofcrimes, but also the interests of the accused. It’s very important toall of us that we have a system in place that minimizes the chances ofbeing wrongly accused and convicted for a crime. We need to feelconfident that we ourselves will not be mistakenly convicted, that ourfriends and family will not be mistakenly convicted, and that the trulydangerous, rather than the mistakenly convicted, will be stopped. Toachieve this end, we agree to put certain rules into placewhich constrain the ability of any one of us to make decisions on thebasis of a short-term cost-benefit analysis. It seems that overall andin the long run, we’re more likely to learn who has committed whatcrime if all of the witnesses are speaking the truth rather thandeciding on their own whether the wrongness of deceit is outweighed bythe benefits gained from conviction. For this reason, we put a ruleagainst perjury in place and we back up that rule with a threat ofpunishment.

An interesting question is whether it is everrational for any of us to consider ourselves exceptions to rules thatwe ourselves endorse.