Actually my initial question I was pondering was more "do intentions matter, should the intentions matter, and if so, how much should they matter?" Somehow it just progressed into "do the ends justify the means." I'm not really sure how I stumbled upon this but the example I used was people volunteering at a (or donating to a) food bank/soup kitchen. I worked my way through the first question (do intentions matter when performing a "charitable" act matter) fairly quickly, as the fact that I even had to ask the question (along with the numerous spinoff questions and various real world examples) made it very clear that intentions do, in fact, matter when performing "charitable" acts. Moving on... So, if a wealthy, famous person(s) decided to donate food/supplies/time at a soup kitchen out of the goodness of their heart or the Christmas spirit or whatever, some people may accuse them of "just doing it for attention or to appear charitable/philanthropic or whatever." But even if they were just doing it for good press, they still did it, right? That has to count for something because they are still helping in some way, shape, or form. So...should it matter? I'm still trying to work through this one because there are definitely many ways that the benefactor can manipulate the situation so they can benefit from it. In some cases, the beneficiary can end up even worse off than before. So I guess that means that a persons intentions should matter?... Which I suppose leads me to my next question, "how much should a persons intentions matter?" Like is there a limit or a cutoff where people would be like "oh you gave X amount of money/time but that's not enough because you weren't really WILLING to do it...but now you gave Y amount (Y>X for the sake of the example) so even though you didn't really WANT to do whatever charitable act you performed I'll give you a pass because you did 'enough'." For instance, a few years ago the Facebook movie/Mark Zuckerberg biopic came out which kind of portrayed Zuckerberg as a pretty unlikeable guy. Around the time of the films release he donated $100 million dollars to a failing school system in Newark, New Jersey. $100 MILLION DOLLARS (I don't care who you are that's A LOT of money)! But there were a lot of people who actually criticized Zuckerberg, basically saying he was just doing it to rehabilitate his image. Like, word up? This dude just donated the GDP of a small nation to a struggling public school system and people are actually hating on him? Who cares WHY he did it, all that matters at that point is that HE DID IT (I guess somewhere around $100m is my personal benchmark to where you get a "no questions asked pass"). I'm still not entirely sure how I progressed so fluidly from that stream of consciousness into "do the ends justify the means" so I'll just leave that transition (and thus, the question) alone for now; especially since I'm pretty much just rambling to myself at this point anyway (honestly I'm just tired of writing all this because I'm writing it on my phone). So yea...I just felt like I should write this down somewhere and my pen and pad are waaaaay over there --->(points to 5 ft away) and my computer is waaay over there<--- (points to 3 ft away), plus I wanted to share hahahah. But uuum...yup.
