Mirko Bagaric: Evil must be stopped by whatever it takes

Many of us are barracking for the head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, Paul Watson, as he tries to harass the Japanese whalers. His passion, commitment and bravery are an inspiration.

Go below the icy waters of the Southern Ocean and you'll see that it's not only the whales that should be grateful to Watson.

His activities and our response to them have the capacity to teach us profound lessons about the moral fog within which we live and the rationality-free zone that occupies mainstream moral discourse.

What is illuminating is the lack of criticism from civil libertarians and greens over Watson's law-breaking, life-endangering escapades. Civil libertarians are invariably hot off the blocks to denounce any interferences with rights.

They loudly condemned the new counter-terrorism laws in Australia, Britain and the United States which provide for control orders and detention without trial for terrorist suspects, and were appalled by the "rendition" trips by United States forces keen to prevent the next suicide bomb being detonated.

"The end doesn't justify the means" is the catchcry they trumpet most loudly. If the end justifies the means for the whales, why doesn't it justify the means for humans?

The truth is that it does. Failure to realise this is symptomatic of a self-righteousness that freezes one's moral compass, foreclosing consideration of the thing that matters most - the common good.

The reason that civil libertarians are cheering for the whales has zero to do with the application of universal moral principles and everything to do with emotion - particularly their emotions.

The fact that their emotional response fits the morally correct stance in this case is a happy coincidence.

The bloodied waters of the Southern Ocean have swelled the civil libertarians' compassion gland to a point where they've lost their balance and fallen off their wonky moral high horse.

Hopefully that's where they will stay and join the rest of us and come to understand that the end does justify the means. Always has. Always will.

No action is intrinsically bad or good. No principle is absolute. Matters are always context sensitive.

Plundering organs (in the form of kidneys and bone marrow) is permissible if it is done with consent to save lives; engaging in conflict that will result in the certain deaths of many innocent people is permissible to save many others (as is the case in Iraq), and detaining suspects without trial is morally sound where it is likely to prevent innocent lives being lost.

The best way to deal with evil is to pulverise it. As we did (although far too late) with Adolf Hitler and should have in relation to the likes of Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein.

The good news is that evil is not transmittable. Ostensibly harmful acts are permissible if they are for the greater good.

The moral and political debate in relation to important societal issues must move on from whether the end justifies the means, to what end we as a species should be attempting to secure.

In this regard, there can be only one answer.

The ultimate end is to maximise net flourishing, where each agent's interests count equally - even those which do not excite our emotions.

Animals get a look-in to this equation because they possess the most important attribute that qualifies an entity for moral standing: the capacity to feel pain and hence suffer.

Suffering is suffering, whether experienced by animals or humans.

The world would be a better place if we all applied our energies towards securing the right end, for whales, humans and even less sympathy-inducing creatures.

* Professor Mirko Bagaric is head of the Deakin Law School and author of How to Live: Being Happy and Dealing with Moral Dilemmas.