In Justice We Trust
Gender: Male
Location: Southern California
Rank: Admin
Joined: Wed Dec 12, 2007 6:31 pm
Posts: 4213
"To overcome evil with good is good, to resist evil by evil is evil." --The Prophet Muhammad
"To fight one evil...you must sometimes use another..." --Hawke (from the Advance Wars series)
This occurred to me a while ago, but I was hesitant to bring it up while the Dual Destinies spoiler rules were still in effect (not to mention I was originally planning on discussing the occurrence of such things in video games as a whole). Anyway, as the title might imply, I wanted to look into the idea of the ends justifying the means.
In 5-3, Aristotle Means, the man who most vocally endorses the idea of the ends justifying the means (something I've come to call the Means Doctrine), turns out to be the killer. Furthermore, the proliferation of such ideas is what made the Dark Age of the Law more than just the two cases that kickstarted it. Any way you slice it, the Means Doctrine is portrayed as a bad thing that should be avoided--though it's nothing new for the forgery of evidence and manipulation of witnesses to be portrayed as harmful.
However, in a sense, the game tacitly (and unintentionally, I hope) contradicts its message in 5-5 through a single incident. The truth behind the UR-1 Incident was one day away from being lost forever, and the state was not going out of its way to look into the matter. That all changed when Aura Blackquill forced the courts' hand by taking several hostages, Trucy Wright among them. In other words, it is thanks to Aura's use of the Means Doctrine that the UR-1 Incident was reexamined, thus allowing the truth to be discovered, exposing the Phantom and averting Simon Blackquill's execution.
Admittedly, unlike with Professor Means and his selfish pursuit of victory in court, Aura's goals are more open to interpretation. On the one hand, if we are to assume she was only interested in getting her brother exonerated, then her goals were just as selfish in that she did not take the hostages in the interest of finding the truth, thus making it a textbook example of the Means Doctrine, albeit one that had the unintended side-effect of revealing the truth. On the other hand, if we are to assume that she would have accepted Simon being declared the killer had it come to that again in the retrial, then the game has tacitly said that there are times when the ends really do justify the means, even if said means are illegal and/or potentially harmful, as Aura used illegal and morally ambiguous methods in order to pursue a just goal.
I'll always love you, Max.