Do the Ends Justify the Means?

Machiavelli's Prince makes the case in its starkest political form. Utilitarianism gives the question a formal calculus: yes, if the resulting good outweighs the resulting harm. Kant rules the calculation out of court: persons are ends in themselves; you may never use them merely as means. The 20th century put the question under unbearable pressure: revolutionary violence, total war, terror bombing. Camus's break with Sartre was, at bottom, a refusal to accept the Stalinist version of "yes."