An Ethical Reflection on Change in Emergency Management
By Dan Stoneking
There is a phrase people reach for when circumstances feel urgent and the stakes feel high: the ends justify the means.
It is often spoken quietly, sometimes defensively, and almost always with good intentions. It is the moral shorthand of pressure. When time is short, consequences loom, and outcomes matter deeply, the phrase offers relief. It suggests that process can be relaxed in service of results, that shortcuts are acceptable if the destination is worthy enough.
At first glance, the argument is compelling. If the goal is noble saving lives, protecting communities, preventing harm then surely rigid adherence to procedure, ethics, or norms can seem indulgent. In moments of crisis, people do not want philosophical purity. They want results. They want action. They want someone willing to do what must be done.
History is filled with moments where this reasoning appears not only understandable but necessary. Wars have been won, disasters mitigated, and injustices corrected by leaders who acted decisively, sometimes uncomfortably so. In these stories, the outcome becomes the evidence. Look what was achieved, we are told. How can you argue with success?
This logic is especially persuasive in systems designed to operate under stress. Fields where delay costs lives, where uncertainty is constant, and where second guessing feels like a luxury. In such environments, moral calculus can begin to resemble triage. Choices are framed not between good and bad, but between bad and worse. And in that framing, the means become secondary.
But this is precisely where the argument begins to fail.
The first problem with the ends justify the means is that it assumes the ends are fixed, singular, and universally agreed upon. They rarely are. Outcomes are almost always defined by those in power, interpreted through institutional lenses, and revised after the fact. What one group calls success, another may experience as harm. What appears efficient in the short term may carry long term costs that were simply excluded from the original equation.
The second problem is more subtle and more dangerous: means are not neutral. They are not disposable scaffolding that can be removed once the building is complete. The methods we use shape the systems we inhabit. They set precedents. They teach people what is acceptable when pressure rises. Over time, those lessons become culture.
When transparency is sacrificed for speed, people learn that opacity is permissible in moments of stress. When dissent is silenced for the sake of unity, people learn that questioning is disloyal. When rules are bent just this once, they rarely return to their original shape. Temporary exceptions have a way of becoming permanent norms.
History offers painful clarity on this point.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study began in 1932 with a stated goal that many at the time believed justified its methods. Researchers wanted to understand the long term effects of untreated syphilis in Black men. The knowledge, they argued, would benefit public health. The end was framed as scientific advancement and societal good.
The means were deception, exploitation, and the deliberate withholding of treatment from hundreds of men who trusted the system meant to care for them. Even after penicillin became the standard cure, treatment was denied so the study could continue. The ends never changed. The means only grew more indefensible and repulsive.
When the study was exposed decades later, the damage extended far beyond its immediate victims. It shattered trust in public institutions. It seeded generational skepticism toward medicine and government. The knowledge gained was forever tainted, and the harm inflicted could not be undone or justified by data.
This is not an anomaly. It is a pattern.
Whenever outcomes are allowed to excuse unethical process, harm is rarely contained. The injury spreads outward into culture, memory, and trust. The cost is paid not only by those directly affected, but by the legitimacy of the institutions involved and the faith of the people they serve.
Trust, once broken, does not regenerate on the same timeline as operational success. It cannot be demanded, spun, or retroactively explained. It must be earned through consistency and fairness, especially when doing so is inconvenient.
There is also a moral hazard embedded in outcome based justification. If success redeems method, then failure condemns it. The same action can be praised or vilified depending entirely on how things turn out. This retroactive morality encourages risk without accountability and discourages reflection. It rewards boldness when lucky and excuses recklessness when outcomes happen to align.
Perhaps most importantly, the ends justify the means framework misunderstands the nature of ethical leadership.
Ethics are not most valuable when things are easy. They matter most when adherence is costly. Anyone can act ethically when incentives align neatly. The true test comes when ethical choices slow progress, complicate decisions, or invite criticism. To abandon ethics under pressure is not pragmatism. It is convenience.
There is an alternative view that is less dramatic and less satisfying in the short term, but far more durable. It holds that means are not obstacles to outcomes. They are part of the outcome. How we act is inseparable from what we achieve. Process is not the enemy of effectiveness. It is its foundation.
In this view, integrity is not a luxury to be indulged when time allows. It is an operational necessity. Fairness is not a distraction. It is a force multiplier. Transparency does not weaken authority. It legitimizes it. Ethical constraints do not prevent success. They define what success actually is.
This perspective also recognizes something deeply human. People are not merely instruments for achieving goals. They are participants, stakeholders, and moral agents. When people feel used, misled, or dismissed in the pursuit of an outcome, the damage extends beyond the immediate moment. Cynicism replaces commitment. Compliance replaces trust. And the next crisis becomes harder, not easier, to navigate.
None of this denies the reality of difficult tradeoffs. Real world decisions are messy. Perfect options rarely exist. But acknowledging complexity is not the same as abandoning principle. The presence of hard choices does not absolve leaders of responsibility for how those choices are made.
In fact, leaders who resist the seduction of outcome only thinking often make decisions that appear slower or less decisive on the surface but prove more resilient over time. Their organizations bend without breaking. Their people remain engaged rather than alienated. Their legitimacy survives beyond the immediate crisis.
The irony is that the ends justify the means argument presents itself as hard-nosed realism, while it is actually profoundly shortsighted. It focuses on visible results and ignores invisible costs. It treats ethics as expendable rather than foundational. And it assumes that once the crisis passes, the damage done along the way can simply be repaired.
It usually cannot.
Over the past year, I have watched a profession built on trust, service, and shared purpose wrestle openly with this very question. And what has been lost along the way cannot be dismissed as collateral damage, because it was the moral foundation that made the work legitimate in the first place.
Dan Stoneking is the Owner and Principal of Stoneking Strategic Communications, the Author of Cultivate Your Garden: Crisis Communications from 30,000 Feet to Three Feet, the Founder and Vice President of the Emergency Management External Affairs Association, and an Adjunct Professor in the Communications Department at West Chester University
Stoneking Strategic Communications (SSC) 