“Historically speaking, it seems likely that, of those who set out to rob banks or murder opponents “in a good cause”, those who managed to hurt themselves, mostly wouldn’t make the history books. (Unless they got a second chance, like Hitler after the failed Beer Hall Putsch.) Of those cases we do read about in the history books, many people have done very well for themselves out of their plans to lie and rob and murder “for the greater good”. But how many people cheated their way to actual huge altruistic benefits—cheated and actually realized the justifying greater good? Surely there must be at least one or two cases known to history—at least one king somewhere who took power by lies and assassination, and then ruled wisely and well—but I can’t actually name a case off the top of my head. By and large, it seems to me a pretty fair generalization that people who achieve great good ends manage not to find excuses for all that much evil along the way.”
History seems to me to be full of examples of people or groups successfully breaking moral rules for the greater good.
The American Revolution, for example. The Founding Fathers committed treason against the crown, started a war that killed thousands of people, and confiscated a lot of Tory property along the way. Once they were in power, they did arguably better than anyone else of their era at trying to create a just society. The Irish Revolution also started in terrorism and violence and ended in a peaceful democractic state (at least in the south); the war of Israeli independence involved a lot of terrorism on the Israeli side and ended with a democratic state that, regardless of what you think of it now, didn’t show any particularly violent tendencies before acquiring Palestine in the 1967 war.
Among people who seized power violently, Augustus and Cyrus stand out as excellent in the ancient world (and I’m glad Caligula was assassinated and replaced with Claudius). Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro, while I disagree with their politics, were both better than their predecessors and better than many rulers who came to power by more conventional means in their parts of the world.
There are all sorts of biases that would make us less likely to believe people who “break the rules” can ever turn out well. One is the halo effect. Another is availability bias—it’s much easier to remember people like Mao than it is to remember the people who were quiet and responsible once their revolution was over, and no one notices the genocides that didn’t happen because of some coup or assassination. “Violence leads only to more violence” is a form of cached deep wisdom. And there’s probably a false comparison effect: a post-coup government may be much better than the people they replaced while still not up to first-world standards.
And of course, “history is written by the victors”. When the winners do something bad, it’s never interpreted as bad after the fact. Firebombing a city to end a war more quickly, taxing a populace to give health care to the less fortunate, intervening in a foreign country’s affairs to stop a genocide: they’re all likely to be interpreted as evidence for “the ends don’t justify the means” when they fail, but glossed over or treated as common sense interventions when they work. Consider the amount of furor raised over our supposedly good motives in going into Iraq and failing vs. the complete lack of discussion about going into Yugoslavia and succeeding.
“Historically speaking, it seems likely that, of those who set out to rob banks or murder opponents “in a good cause”, those who managed to hurt themselves, mostly wouldn’t make the history books. (Unless they got a second chance, like Hitler after the failed Beer Hall Putsch.) Of those cases we do read about in the history books, many people have done very well for themselves out of their plans to lie and rob and murder “for the greater good”. But how many people cheated their way to actual huge altruistic benefits—cheated and actually realized the justifying greater good? Surely there must be at least one or two cases known to history—at least one king somewhere who took power by lies and assassination, and then ruled wisely and well—but I can’t actually name a case off the top of my head. By and large, it seems to me a pretty fair generalization that people who achieve great good ends manage not to find excuses for all that much evil along the way.”
History seems to me to be full of examples of people or groups successfully breaking moral rules for the greater good.
The American Revolution, for example. The Founding Fathers committed treason against the crown, started a war that killed thousands of people, and confiscated a lot of Tory property along the way. Once they were in power, they did arguably better than anyone else of their era at trying to create a just society. The Irish Revolution also started in terrorism and violence and ended in a peaceful democractic state (at least in the south); the war of Israeli independence involved a lot of terrorism on the Israeli side and ended with a democratic state that, regardless of what you think of it now, didn’t show any particularly violent tendencies before acquiring Palestine in the 1967 war.
Among people who seized power violently, Augustus and Cyrus stand out as excellent in the ancient world (and I’m glad Caligula was assassinated and replaced with Claudius). Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro, while I disagree with their politics, were both better than their predecessors and better than many rulers who came to power by more conventional means in their parts of the world.
There are all sorts of biases that would make us less likely to believe people who “break the rules” can ever turn out well. One is the halo effect. Another is availability bias—it’s much easier to remember people like Mao than it is to remember the people who were quiet and responsible once their revolution was over, and no one notices the genocides that didn’t happen because of some coup or assassination. “Violence leads only to more violence” is a form of cached deep wisdom. And there’s probably a false comparison effect: a post-coup government may be much better than the people they replaced while still not up to first-world standards.
And of course, “history is written by the victors”. When the winners do something bad, it’s never interpreted as bad after the fact. Firebombing a city to end a war more quickly, taxing a populace to give health care to the less fortunate, intervening in a foreign country’s affairs to stop a genocide: they’re all likely to be interpreted as evidence for “the ends don’t justify the means” when they fail, but glossed over or treated as common sense interventions when they work. Consider the amount of furor raised over our supposedly good motives in going into Iraq and failing vs. the complete lack of discussion about going into Yugoslavia and succeeding.