The Danger of Allowing Good Intentions to Override the Constitution
04/14/2026
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Mises Wire
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Wanjiru Njoya
Walter E. Williams often made the point that a policy should be judged by whether it works, not by its good intentions. This warning is especially important because politicians are experts at declaring good intentions. If we judge them by their stated intentions alone, when their schemes end in disaster they could simply remind us that they meant well. Unfortunately, Professor Williams’s warnings went unheeded.
In their book Who Killed The Constitution, Thomas E. Woods and Kevin R.C. Gutzman make a very similar argument about the irrelevance of good intentions. In evaluating the constitutionality of a law or policy, whether it is constitutional or not is an entirely separate question from its good intentions. Too often, people are quite happy to endorse unconstitutional laws or unconstitutional government action if they believe it is “good” or, at least, if they think the motivations behind it are good and reflect what “should” be done.
This strikes at the heart of the increasingly hostile debates between North and South in the 1840s and 1850s. Given that slavery was morally wrong, and the radical abolitionists of the North were motivated by good intentions in desiring to abolish it immediately, did it matter what the Constitution said? Jefferson Davis of Mississippi insisted on the principle of constitutional government and the supremacy of the law. By contrast, the Radical Republicans of Massachusetts, led by Charles Sumner, insisted on what they judged to be the morally right thing to do. In his Senate speech on “The Barbarism of Slavery,” Sumner said,
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