"The end justifies the means," you say. And what justifies the end?

There is a story that a traveler in Soviet Russia remarked to a communist official something like, "Well, I see lots of broken eggs. But where is the omelet?"

What if the end proposed is altogether imaginary?

A city of the godly? 

A worker's paradise?

And, anyway, ends are a matter of personal taste.

None are compulsory - apart from actual compulsion, of course.

And it is ordinarily just such compulsion - nay, it is ordinarily violence, and even great violence, rather than any lesser evil - that is the means people who talk like that refer to.

Always the means is something widely regarded as wrong.

Come to that, not so very infrequently, so is the end.

Making Europe free of Jews, for example.

And yet that Machiavellian maxim is often cited by way of claiming the moral high ground, as one who makes a great and terrible personal sacrifice.

Humans are such evil animals.