In my opinion, it can be shown that explicitly no—except in cases where the end is realized in the very same act in which the means is realized, where under certain conditions it is permitted (though, to be precise, in such situations the act is not really defined as a means, as explained below).

Take, for example, the trolley problem. According to the moral intuitions of most people, you are permitted to perform an act of protection—diverting the trolley from track A to track B—in order to prevent the killing of five people, even if that comes at the cost of killing one. For the end—protection—is realized in the very same act itself (diverting the trolley) in which the supposedly “means” is realized—the person whom the trolley will kill.

By contrast, you are forbidden to throw a fat man off the bridge onto the trolley tracks in order to stop it. And this is indeed a serious refutation of consequentialists (who as usual tend to patch it up with various empty ad hoc excuses). Why? Throwing the person onto the tracks is an act of killing in its own right, separate from the act of rescue (which will come only as a result of the fat man lying on the tracks). You used the person merely as a means and not as an end in himself, and the end does not justify the means.

From here there are many implications for what a government may and may not do in order to realize its supposedly lofty goals.

Copenhagen, in my opinion your example deals with a different question: not whether the end justifies the means, but whether prohibitions and moral principles are act-prohibitions / act-principles (the act of killing) or result-prohibitions / result-principles (taking / saving life). That is an entirely different question, and has no connection to the question whether the end justifies the means.

It seems to me to be the same question, since people raise it in similar contexts. If there is just some means that has no intrinsic defect, then there is no need to “sanctify” it with the holiness of the end in order to achieve some lofty goal, because it is permitted anyway.

What else, then, is meant?

Suppose we reached the conclusion that the prohibition of murder is a result-based prohibition, and the obligation to save lives is also result-based. Could one still not ask whether the end justifies the means? For example, in order to save lives, may I run over animals, steal, or kill someone else? When phrased in terms of “means,” it refers to means toward the end under discussion, not to prohibitions that are themselves means rather than ends: does achieving a worthy end justify all the means required to achieve it (including result-based prohibitions)?
And of course, as I wrote, this question cannot be answered in the abstract, because the issue is what the end is and what the means are. Each case has to be judged on its own.
Take for example Rashi’s view in Bava Kamma 60b, according to which a person may not steal in order to save his own life or the life of another (a person does not save himself with another’s money). That is an extreme approach, holding that the end justifies no means whatsoever. But even there, of course, we are talking about means that infringe on another person’s rights. Means that harm myself, or halakhic prohibitions (that harm the world, the Holy One blessed be He, or me), are certainly overridden in a case of saving life.

What is meant by a “result prohibition”? If this is according to one of the ethical theories called consequentialism—which hold that the ultimate basis for judging the moral value of an act is only its outcome—it is hard for me to see how one could reach such a conclusion. It contradicts the world of human ethical intuitions in a way that is too direct and obvious (and I’d be glad to hear an argument for why I’m wrong). In that sense, we could never reach the conclusion that “the prohibition of murder is (only) a result prohibition.”

In the usual sense, the consequentialist claims that what is relevant to moral deliberation is only the final overall outcome. Therefore all means are, in essence, permitted, and the only question is whether the end is good enough to justify the loss involved in sanctifying the means. That is as opposed to Aristotelian and deontological ethics.

As for saving lives, if killing the other person would not create additional social problems whose outcome is more severe, and it is necessary in order to save many people, then the consequentialist is committed to saying that there is positive moral value in the act of killing, or at least that the act is permitted. I am not sufficiently expert in the material, but as far as I remember, in the halakhic literature a statement of that sort by the consequentialist is impossible.

It seems to me that we all agree there is some basic truth in the claim that one may not rob one person in order to save another. Otherwise we would have to enslave doctors in forced-labor camps to save sick children in Africa (or steal money with which we would buy the doctors’ services). But usually, the average person agrees that his property may be used (for example, an expensive medicine that he possesses and does not need), even without permission, to save his neighbor who is in immediate mortal danger, on condition that every effort be made afterward to restore its value to him. So in ordinary cases this is not theft but consent.

It may be that the reason one is allowed to desecrate the Sabbath in order to save a life is that, fundamentally, desecrating the Sabbath is not an act that is intrinsically wrong (and the Holy One blessed be He was not bound by His very nature to command the Sabbath), but rather because it violates the covenant—and a person’s death is precisely what nullifies the covenant, so it is better that he violate one Sabbath so that he may keep many. By contrast, bloodshed, forbidden sexual relations, or idolatry are acts that are intrinsically wrong, and there is no possible world in which the Holy One blessed be He would permit them.

One is obligated to take from one person in order to save another, and the injured party should even be brought to judgment for not taking care to save a Jewish life.

The question of ends and means has no meaning in reality. In reality there are no ends and means; there are acts that are done.
Ends, means, and priorities are concepts and perceptions and feelings in a person’s mind.

For example, Copenhagen sanctifies his goal of feeling comfortable that he did not kill a person even though he could have saved many others, and he uses manipulations of moral principles as means to achieve that.

Last Decisor: people like you have no problem destroying hundreds of thousands or even millions of innocent people (as in Hiroshima) if in your estimation that is supposed, in the long run, to reduce the total bloodshed.

A result prohibition is a halakhic definition meaning that one violates the prohibition when loss of life is caused. An act prohibition is a prohibition that one violates by performing an act of killing. It is commonly thought that exemption for indirect causation exists only for act prohibitions and not for result prohibitions (although there is room to reject that).
Regarding attempted murder, the same discussion exists. Consequentialists do not see it as a real prohibition (except because such an act may lead to a bad result). Deontologists see it as the same prohibition as murder. In Jewish law, of course, it is something in between.
I am not discussing what the answer is to the question whether prohibitions are consequentialist or not. That is not our topic here. Our discussion is about what this question refers to, not what the answer to it is. For myself, I completely agree that the prohibition is not determined only on the basis of the result, and that the act is also important. Therefore all the arguments you raised are not relevant to our discussion.

True, as you put it, “the consequentialist claims that what is relevant to moral deliberation is only the final overall outcome.” But you are not right that it follows from this that all means are in essence permitted. After all, the means one uses can itself be a prohibition. As I explained in the previous comment, you are conflating two independent levels here.

On the question whether a person may save himself with another’s money, you are completely mistaken. Most halakhic decisors argue that this is entirely permitted, and it will not help the owner of the property if he publicly announces to all the world that he objects. Rashi’s view is that no, and all the medieval authorities and later authorities already wondered at his position. True, I showed elsewhere that there are other medieval authorities who share Rashi’s basic conceptual view, but that is unrelated to the owner’s consent. When the owner agrees, it is certainly permitted, and even when he did not say so but there is a reasonable presumption that he agrees, there is no room for discussion here either. It is obviously permitted. The Talmudic passage deals only with a situation in which the owner forbids it.
Your difficulty regarding doctors is incorrect, because a person is not supposed to devote his life to saving others (otherwise send everyone to study medicine). We are talking about someone before whom a case happened to arise and who has the ability to save. Beyond that, the obligation to save is incumbent on everyone who can, so there is no permission to force one specific person to sacrifice his money or his time. But on a desert island, according to most medieval authorities, one could indeed be compelled to give the money (only Rashi holds otherwise, against all the medieval authorities).

Your last remark is also incorrect. There can be prohibitions that are intrinsically forbidden and yet they are still overridden in order to prevent another prohibition or to save something or someone. There is absolutely no necessity to say that all transgressions, apart from the three severe ones, are not intrinsically forbidden. You assume that this is always a case of full permission rather than temporary override, and that is not so. Proof of this is that in public and in a time of religious persecution one gives up one’s life over any prohibition, even though according to your view, aside from the three severe ones none is intrinsically forbidden.

If they brought Hitler before you, you wouldn’t do anything to him, and afterward you would use manipulations of the rules of morality to convince others that you are a moral person. In practice you didn’t eliminate him because you were afraid to eliminate him, and it has nothing to do with morality.
The cowardly moral systems represented here are among the marks of Christianity.

My basic claim was that the end does not justify the means, or in other words, there is no act that is intrinsically wrong which, simply by being used for a good end, changes in its essence into an act that is morally positive. For now I’ll leave open the question whether it can turn it into a morally neutral act.

As for a means that could itself be a prohibition: everyone agrees that, absent other variables, an act that maximizes the overall positive outcome is preferable. Therefore, in order for it even to be possible to distinguish consequentialism from other theories, it seems that at least the following necessary condition must hold: the consequentialist must think that certain moral properties rest solely on outcomes.

And so it seems that according to most consequentialist theories, at least, when all the variables cause the final overall result to be positive, since the normative evaluation of the act depends solely on the outcome, the act itself is no longer defined as wrong. For after all, what defined the means in other situations as a wrong act was only the outcome, and it follows that when the final outcome changes, so does the status of the act (which could have been wrong under other conditions).

As for whether a person may save himself with another’s money, even according to what I presented here it is obvious that this is completely permitted, because when the act of using the property is itself the act of rescue (in analogy to diverting the trolley onto the other track), then this is not a matter of an indirect end sanctifying the means but of identity between means and end. The only question is: is it permitted to steal from someone in order to take the money afterward and use it to save others? And the answer is no, because the end does not justify the means.

That “a person is not supposed to devote his life to saving others” seems to me an ad hoc explanation without clear boundaries. Why should he not be forced to devote 10 years or one year of his life to saving others? Or a day, or an hour? (and either way we end up with doctors in forced-labor camps). The answer, apparently, is because one may not directly violate rights and use the doctor merely as a means, and the end does not justify the means.

The issue of halakhic transgressions is clearly not similar to moral transgressions. It may be that all the commandments were given in accordance with the halakhic conditions for their realization. In moral laws there is something necessary (the Holy One blessed be He “could not” command their opposite) that does not exist in halakhic laws.

You are assuming a dichotomy that has no basis whatsoever. Consequentialism does not necessarily make everything depend on outcomes; rather, it assumes that outcomes also have weight in evaluating the act (and not only intentions). In fact there are three possibilities: only the act; only the outcome; a combination of both. That undermines most of your arguments. The rest I did not understand.
As a rule, I think a general discussion like this is not effective because it remains up in the air. If you want to continue, it is better to focus on an example.

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

To resolve this vagueness, we need to determine which of the various claims of classic utilitarianism are essential to consequentialism. One claim seems clearly necessary. Any consequentialist theory must accept the claim that I labeled ‘consequentialism’, namely, that certain normative properties depend only on consequences. If that claim is dropped, the theory ceases to be consequentialist.

I only meant to respond to the criticism that was raised, not to discuss specific examples—that can be done separately.