means and ends

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the philosophical distinction between the methods used to achieve a goal (means) and the goal itself (ends), and the moral question of whether the moral evaluation of the means can be separated from the moral evaluation of the ends they serve; the relationship between means and ends is one of the central problems of practical ethics and political philosophy: consequentialists hold that ends can justify means, while deontologists insist that some means are wrong regardless of what they achieve; Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King argued that in political struggle, the means must embody the ends — that a nonviolent society cannot be built through violence — making the relationship between means and ends a question of strategic as well as moral integrity