issue212 [冲刺 小组]第四次作业

chenhaozUID: 2525010

Should we achieve our goals by any means necessary? I believe even if the goal is very worthy, we still should not do it in this way.

First, although it is good to take many useful and harmless means to attain worthy goals, it does not mean that all the means are suitable to take. For example, if your goal is to get as much wood as possible to maximize the money you will earn, the best mean is to cut all the trees on the earth. However, there will be no more wood later supplied to the human beings, including you. Or if you want to be taken as the most talented scholar, a practical way is using illegal competitions, such as to plagiarize others' fruits. But actually, the utilities you make count for nothing compared with the damages. The human being do not need or want it, because our whole civilization will regress if everyone does it in this way.

Second, even if the actions taken for worthy goals can bring more benefits than what they costs directly, there will be some potential continuous bad effects. For example, if we perform some experiments that will cost a number of human lives by randomly picking, sometimes it can save more people than it kills, but the whole society will fall into a panic because our security cannot be guaranteed due to these kinds of experiments. The same effect will be caused, in the condition that we save a dying scholar or researcher of lots of brilliance by using other common living people's organs regardless of their lives. The utility will seem to be maximized, but some other bad effects will happen later, such as the society's worry about their lives. It is hard to say whether the goal is worthy if we use such means.

At the same time, although we can get a lot from the achievements of some goals without any further bad effects, the humanity or characteristic of us may turn bad if we use certain means. Lots of people eat meat, but they definitely will feel guilty after seeing those live animals be killed at the butcher's. That is the reason why some other people want to be vegetarians, apart from the purpose for health. Personally speaking, those persons who always eat live animals directly must have some mental problems, because they seize their happiness from other creatures' pains. So, sometimes we should stop using some ways to get worthy goals, for the sake of our humanities.

In all, to achieve worthy goals by any means necessary is never recommended by me. Because of the negative total utilities, continuous bad effects and the mental problems caused by those means, we should really think about them taken for our goals before putting them into practice.