Breaking Faith

In the movie Rio Bravo, a bad guy shoots an innocent man and then the sheriff (John Wayne),with the help of a small band of misfits, needs to hold the bad guy in jail until the US marshall arrives. Meanwhile, the bad guy's brother, a wealthy rancher, keeps on paying people to try to kill the sheriff and his friends so that he can get his brother out of jail before he hangs.

By the end, it looks like the sheriff has lost. The rancher's hired men succeed in capturing one of the deputy sheriffs (Dean Martin) and insists on a prisoner exchange. The sheriff brings his prisoner to the appointed place, as does the rancher. They set their prisoners free and the prisoners start walking across to the other side.

Then something unexpected happens. The deputy sheriff, just as he reaches the midway point, jumps the murderer, wrestles him to the ground, and then manges to get him behind a wall, where he proceeds to knock him unconscious.

This got me to thinking: was it right, what the deputy sheriff did? After all, the sheriff had agreed to swap prisoners and ordinarily it isn't right to break faith on a solemn agreement.

Yes, it was right. The rancher was a bad guy and the sheriff was a good guy. The sheriff's prisoner was a murderer. And the rancher, who was already responsible for the deaths of several innocent men, had apprehended the deputy sheriff by force and left the sheriff with no alternative to set a murderer free. To set a murderer free under the compulsion of another murderer would be a failure of justice. To outsmart and thwart the rancher, even by breaking faith, is to bring about justice.

So is it alright to do a thing in the fight against evil that would be morally wrong if it were done by an evildoer in the pursuit of evil? Apparently yes, at least that is the conclusion that one would have to draw from watching this movie.

Does this mean that the end justifies the means? If you break your word in order to accomplish something good, it's ok, but if it's in order to accomplish something selfish or bad, then it's not?

I think it just means that the context of an action determines its meaning. When government takes the life of a convicted murderer, that is an act of justice. When a person takes the life of a would-be murderer in self-defense, that is an act of justice. When a murderer takes the life of an innocent man, that is an act of injustice. So when a good man breaks his word with a bad man in order to make sure that a murderer does not go free, that is an act of justice.

How might this apply to the political affairs of the US? Consider this article.

"GUANTANAMO BAY – A United Nations committee has reprimanded the U.S. for trying Omar Khadr for war crimes and detaining hundreds of children in Iraq and Afghanistan, when international law requires that they be rehabilitated. Khadr, who was 15 when he was shot and captured in Afghanistan in 2002, and Afghan detainee Mohammed Jawad are on trial here for allegedly attacking U.S. troops."

Ordinarily it would be wrong to try a fifteen-year old and, under certain circumstances, it might make sense for international law to require the rehabilitation rather than the punishment of children. In the case of terrorism, though, so many innocent lives are at stake that if a child becomes a terrorist, then it would seem to be a matter of justice to prevent that child from killing many innocent people.