the end justifies the means

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the consequentialist maxim, often attributed to Niccolò Machiavelli's political philosophy though the precise phrase does not appear in his work, holding that if the goal is sufficiently valuable, any method used to achieve it is morally justified regardless of how it would be judged in isolation; the principle is most often cited critically — as a warning against the moral corruption that follows from allowing good ends to licence terrible means — rather than endorsed; deontologists reject it absolutely on the grounds that certain actions are wrong regardless of their consequences; consequentialists accept it in principle but argue that proper accounting of consequences — including the corrupting effects on character, social trust, and institutional integrity of practising deception and violence — almost always undermines the calculation that the ends are worth the means