The end justifies the means

The Greek writer Sophocles wrote "The end excuses any evil." In other words, the end justifies the means, and this is what I will be arguing. In this case, the end is the final result and the means are what you use or do to get to the final result. In simpler terms, this means that most anything is reasonable if it leads to an important and meaningful result. A couple points on why this is true; First, if the goal you are working for is important enough, then the means used to get there may not be desirable, but necessary to achieve the overall good end. For instance, look at capital punishment. Ted Bundy was a serial killer who killed between 29 and 100 people. He had already escaped prison twice, so he was sentenced to death by electric chair. If you start to feel sorry for him, think about some of his victims, like 17 year old Laura Aime or Debby Kent. If Ted Bundy was still alive, hundreds more people could have been murdered. So yes, someone was killed, but with that one death, many lives were saved which I believe is a good enough end to justify the means. My opponent will try and tell you that the end doesn't justify the means in the case of war. They will ask if the sacrifice of many people is worth gaining land or just killing other people. These are valid points, but in a necessary war many people die, but many more will be saved by the sacrifices made in this war. For example, in the case of the Holocaust, millions of people died. Of the eight to ten million Jew in Nazi-controlled areas, about 70 percent of them were killed. How were the remaining Jewish people saved? By ending the war, which involved the deaths of some people but in the end, saved many more lives than were lost. Again, if the goal you are working for is important enough, then the means used to get there may not be ideal or wanted, but necessary to achieve the overall good end. As a second point, there is a fine line between a morally "good" end and a morally "bad" end. We classify a "good" end as something that is noble and helpful. A "bad" end is something that is selfish and harmful. If the end is on the right side of this line, then we are justified in seeking it and using non-ideal means to get there. For example, NFL player Ryan Moats was driving with his wife to the hospital to see his mother in law before she died. In his hurry to get there, he turned on a red light, but he did it in such a way so that no one was hurt. So, yes, he did something illegal, but he did it so he could get to his mother-in-law before she died, which is surely on the right side of the morally acceptable line. As another example, in George Orwell's Animal Farm, Farmer Jones gets hopelessly drunk and neglects feeding the animals all day. One of the cows breaks down a door to the store-shed, and several of the animals begin to help themselves from the bins. So they broke the rules and smashed the door and took the food, but the end was not starving, which seems like a perfectly acceptable end to me. Now, if the animals had already been fed and were just being greedy and trying to get more, then this would not be an acceptable end. In conclusion, sometimes the means are perhaps not desirable, but necessary to achieve a "good" end and if the end is on the right side of the moral line, then, even if the means are not what you would normally do in a situation, they are indispensable in a particular position to achieve the "good" end. So, in the words of Sophocles, "The end excuses any evil," but an evil end will not. Otherwise known as the end justifies the means. Thank you.