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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unjust or immoral actions can ultimately have on balance positive ends. What you decide to do is a matter of your philosophy, but in most significant cases none of your choices are completely moral.
In what sense is you saying “the ends justify the means” not “excusing” the means?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you can think of their actions as real large scale cases of “the ends justify the means” and “putting the greater good ahead of the individual.” I'm curious. What makes you think the Party's actions were anything but a selfish attempt to maintain control over society, like any other authoritarian government? > our frankly ineffective and destructive forms of Western democracy What do you mean by this, and what alte…
For the ends justify the means part, each time China went through a major revolutionary attempt in the last 150 years or so it led to incredible amounts of human suffering (on the orders of millions to tens of millions of deaths each time) and blatant foreign exploitation of their country, and some of those revolutions were for dumber things than a call to democracy (I find the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to be particul…