> Ends justifies the means is just a fancy way of saying that the cost/benefit analysis is favorable to the decider. I think it's more accurately defined as th

> Ends justifies the means is just a fancy way of saying that the cost/benefit analysis is favorable to the decider. I think it's more accurately defined as the decider acknowledging that the costs are not something he/she would typically approve of, but the desired or touted ends are so worthwhile for everyone (as determined by the decider on behalf of everone) that it's worth doing. In other words, an un-democratic greater good argument. It turns out that there was majority consensus among ETH miners to do a hard fork, but only after the Ethereum maintainers signaled their bias by researching and writing the hard fork code.