Ends Don't Justify Means (Among Humans)

While this helps get the point across, your example doesn't provide comparable events. The distinction is the weighing of the results of actions to the actions themselves. Is taking one life justified to save another? Is it measured by the greater good, such that the life that is saved will provide greater contributions than the one that is taken? Or is it measured in that all life is inherently to be treated as equal? And if all life is treated as inherently equal, is it a numbers game, taking 100 lives is justified so long as it saves 101 or more?

The phrase "The ends don't justify the means" is not hyperbole to discredit accomplishments, nor is it meant to remove the ends from the equation. It changes the equation to provide the necessity of weighing the ends against the methods rather than measuring the ends independent of the context used to accomplish them.

What is even more interesting is the opposite. The ends not justifying the means is typically used for weighing the actions necessary for a favorable outcome. If looked at from the opposite perspective, do the means justify the ends, it presents a more difficult scenario. If X people die, but only appropriate means were used (and others would have saved X people), should those that chose the appropriate actions be held responsible for the failure to provide a favorable outcome? Or should they be heralded for making the difficult decisions to only use morally acceptable practices?

It is never right, to do wrong, for a chance to do right.

So if your daughter is kidnapped by the a Colombian Drug Cartel and you decided that since you're a badass, you're going to go save her. Then you kill 20 baddies that are themselves cutthroat murderers that would have undeniably killed a greater number of people. Can you really tell me that the ends wouldn't justify the means?

If MI-5 kills 4 terrorists which where preparing to bomb a bus station with hundreds if not thousands of people, they're in the wrong for not respecting the rights of the terrorists? Or would they be in the wrong for not protecting the citizens of the country they're supposed to be protecting?

The ends will always justify the means in the mind of the person doing the act. What makes the actions of one person (or government) right is that in the minds of other people the means are also justifiable.

If someone is willing to not respect my rights and kill me to steal my wallet, I'm willing to forgo their rights because lets me honest, the ends do justify the means if it benefits not only yourself, but the rest of the population.

>"It is however acceptable to kill 20 enemy combatants to rescue a dignitary from a besieged embassy."

Even if the dignitary was Von Ribbentrop?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_von_Ribbentrop

Semi-deontological ethical rules suffer the same problems as deontological ethical rules.

That is not an adequate summary of the point. The point that you are addressing is that if we are to truly take this as a question about "what should a real person do?", the question can be rephrased without loss as "You are a person standing before the track and you know with 100% certainty that if you flip the switch that one person is 100% likely to die and if you do nothing that five people are 100% likely to die." and his response is that it isn't even possible in theory for a person to know these things with 100% certainty. The key phrase is "I can't occupy the epistemological state you want me to imagine".

I would also draw your attention to the first sentence of the next paragraph: "Now, to me this seems like a dodge." This isn't the core point of the essay, and the more I stare at it, the more it does seem like it's five paragraphs accidentally ripped from another essay ("And now the philosopher comes" -> "Now to me this seems like a dodge"); if you just cut those five out entirely it seems more focused, and those five paragraphs can spin off into another interesting essay. (One that would, I think, conclude that this is actually just a way of rephrasing the idea that philosophical hypotheticals are actually useless by virtue of being impossibly overspecified which itself comes from impossible oversimplification, and in general the hypothetical question "What if an absolutely mathematically impossible thing happened?" is not a fruitful line of thought.)