Every tyranny begins with “good intentions.” The claim is never power—it’s protection.  Protection of the weak, the poor, or the planet.  The words sound noble.  The motive appears pure.  Yet once force is justified by intention, ethics are abandoned.  The actor believes he can define good and impose it.  In doing so, he replaces ethics with preference, law with emotion.

The moralizer never sees himself as coercive.  He sees himself as righteous.  Righteousness detached from ethics becomes domination disguised as duty.  Ethics are rooted in property—the recognition that every individual owns himself and what he peacefully acquires.  To cross that boundary, even in the name of goodness, is to step into immorality.  The moment someone claims your life, labor, or decisions for “the greater good,” he has ceased to respect you as a being.  He treats you as an instrument of his own virtue.

Intentions can’t be measured.  Outcomes can.  Yet, the moralizer judges himself by motives, not by results.  He believes sincerity sanctifies coercion.  When his plans fail, it’s never his ideas that are wrong—it’s the people who didn’t obey enough.  This is how every paternalist becomes a tyrant while believing himself a savior.  He sees dissent not as difference but as evil.  The desire to do good without consent becomes the seed of totalitarianism.

The man who claims to act for your good without your consent is no different from the thief who steals “for your benefit.” Both violate property.  Both destroy trust.  The thief admits his motive.  The moralizer denies it.  One calls it theft, the other calls it virtue.  The difference is only in language, not in ethics.  A forced good is indistinguishable from evil because it rejects choice—the essence of action.

If ethics set the boundaries and morality fills the space within them, then the greatest immorality is to abandon ethics for moral ambition.  It’s to believe that one’s goodness grants authority over others.  That isn’t goodness—it’s the corruption of virtue.  To enforce virtue is to erase it, for virtue can’t exist without freedom.  Every empire falls the same way: under the weight of its own good intentions.  The higher its claim to righteousness, the deeper its descent into corruption.

The ethical man doesn’t impose.  He persuades.  He leads by example, not decree.  He respects that others must act according to their own values, just as he acts according to his.  The moralizer, by contrast, sees disagreement as defiance.  He demands submission, not understanding.  When men stop thinking for themselves, ethics die—and with them, civilization.

Reference

Murray Rothbard; Power & Market