I-53

sunyinhoUID: 3463152

If a goal is worthy, then any means taken to attain it are justifiable.

(Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoining for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.)
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While reading a book teaching people how to write a good essay for admission into business schools, I noticed that a word being repeated many times: goal-targeted. This book also urges business school applicants to demonstrate their trait of "goal-targetedness" in their essays. Clearly, being "goal-targeted" is deemed as a virtue of a business school applicant in this book. In fact, nowadays more and more people in the real world (a world with lots of competition, distraction, and inhibiting factors) are also claiming that people should be goal-targeted. By saying that, they imply an attitude simultaneously. That is, a person should take any means in order to achieve her goal, and any means are warranted because the goal is considered important.

  Undoubtedly, the willingness to take any means to attain a goal benefits people in at least two ways. First, that attitude brings efficiency. A common example is how people view their e-mails with "intentional ignorance." Since occasionally there are too many things on their to-do list, people take 1 minute instead of 15 minutes to read through those mails one by one. They only read those from their department chiefs or marked as "urgent," and neglect the other mails. That approach enables people to focus their limited time and energy on other more important issues and thus achieve more. In other words, the "intentional ignorance" brings people efficiency at work.

  Moreover, adopting any kind of approach effective in attaining a goal means diversity and more possibilities.
Lighting techniques are used simply to light up people's environment, but the best way to do that has been a great misery. Prehistoric cavemen found that fire could emit light needed. Later human beings tried to burn every material they can think of to see which best fit for the use of lighting. Oil, wax, wood, and even components from dead animal bodies all came into play. Then, the generation of electricity illuminates human beings' creative mind to invent light bulbs. Nowadays, even lighting techniques that use chmical reactions are
created to overcome the heat problem engendered by electrical lighting technique. All these different ways for achieving the same goal, lighting up the environment situated, are made possible because of our ancestors' willingness in exhausting any feasible ways to do that!

  But does a noble goal really self-justify "any" means used to achieve that?

  Yes, it does, but only for those approaches that don't backfire! (To be honest, I am not discussing this issue in a moral constraint.) It is true that some methods taken for some specific goals might harm, if not expel, the goal desired. A filthy politician winning a campaign through bribing might have her validity reproved if revealed. An examinee staying up late every night just to absorb more material could accidentally fall asleep on her big day and fails her test. Eager parents who require their children to study 12 hours a day without any after-school fun might make them hate learning, and that has been psychologically proved. If methods used in attaining a goal are not carefully weighed before applied, things might go wrong, just like those mentioned above.

  So, the essay guidebook is right about being a "goal-targeted" applicant. The message is clear through above discussion: a goal could automatically warrant virtually any means taken to achieve it because of inherent efficiency and consequencial creativity toward diversity, but only if the potentially harmful approaches are carefully weighed beforehand and excluded accordingly.