I think your story about green peace illustrates the point I’m making. Typically, when you criticize someone for adopting bad means to achieve a good end, what we’re really saying is that the chosen means won’t actually achieve the end, or will cause unintended consequences that are worse than if the bad means hadn’t been employed in the first place.

So at the end of the day it’s still a consequentialist argument, albeit one that asks us to look at the bigger picture, and consider a broader array of consequences. And that’s good!

I don’t believe any effective system of ethics can be purely situational. At the very least there must be some conception of the good by which to calculate harms and benefits. But more than that, a system of ethics has to consider the consequences of its implementation on a large scale. Just telling people to assess for themselves how much good or harm a particular action will do can’t possibly scale, since no one person has access to all the information necessary to see the big picture every time.

Only our collective experience and collective decision making institutions can create rules that achieve the consequences most of us want.