The End Justifies the Means

[xoxoxoBruce]

There are stories of people doing bad things for a good cause. The thing here is defining bad thing. Chances are polling a dozen people would yield a dozen different parameters. In this case I'll settle for illegal.

The Cape Cod Times has a story about three women in Falmouth, MA, stealing Dinah, a slave girl.

Sometime between 1794 and 1802, three women in Falmouth, MA, hid Dinah, a slave girl traveling through with a southern family.
They found a family to take her in and Dinah became Anness Harrington.
She married Joseph Ray and had seven children.

Son Charles Ray born in 1806, studied at Wesleyan Seminary, was ordained, became pastor of Bethesda Congregational Church in NYC.
Charles belonged to the Anti-Slavery Society, was an Underground Railroad conductor, and owner-editor of one of the first black newspapers,
"The Colored American."

Charles married Charolotte Burroughs and also had 7 children.
Of 2 daughters graduating law school, daughter Charolotte was the first black woman to do so. She was admitted to the DC bar and opened an office
in Washington. Not surprisingly there was not enough business for a black woman lawyer, so she packed up and joined two of her sisters as teachers in the Brooklyn Public School system.

On 12-21-1837 Falmouth residents drew up a Petition to Congress on the slavery question.
Anness Ray signed that petition.

The three Falmouth women broke the law stealing the southerners property, but his wife broke the law teaching Dinah the slave girl to read and write, so it's a wash.

[it]

Funny, I was just thinking of that fallacy behind the obvious answer to that - "two wrongs make a right" - it always perplexed me.

Usually I can make sense of rethorics rather easily, I even adopted a general approach where it's better to explain exactly why something doesn't make sense and the logic behind the fallacy rather then call on the fallacy by name, because I noticed people who try to the fallacy as rule book lists often don't seem to fully understand them.

But that one - "two wrong's don't make a right"... It would make sense if the argument attempts to cancel out an action, if someone would attempt to say they did not kill because they killed a murderer, the fallacy would apply, but nobody ever argues that, the justification isn't a cancellation.

In any environment where one side allows themselves to be do an act but then argues that another side shouldn't on a moral ground, they are putting themselves at an advantage, often with simplistic "it's different when I do it" kind of thinking. How would the fallacy fall on the other side then? Shouldn't the legitimacy they view in their own action create a precedent for legitimacy of others committing the same action, and wouldn't judging them for doing it be hypocritical?