The moral ambiguity of deeming peoples actions good or bad can be unreasonable, but even more so for their ambitions. First, what is ambition? Ambition is the desire to achieve a goal. What determines the righteousness of a person’s ambition is their actions in attaining what they desire. Sometimes these actions can be forgiven due to the scope of the situation. However, people with morally righteous ambitions stick to their morals and benefit the general populace in the long run while immoral ones do not.
Pure ambitions are born out of a desire to achieve an honorable goal with reasonable actions that reflect this. In my mind their is no better example of this then is John Snow, an english scientists who devoted his life to cleaning London of its’ filth and saving lives from the horrors of Cholera. In his persistence to save London, even when confronted by ignorant scientists wishing to end his career, he never indulged in any corrupt behavior. In order to cement the correlation between filth and Cholera he used public records and everywhere he went he told people to live cleaner or move out of
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Consequentialism asserts that the ends justify the means or that if the results are good then the actions taken to obtain the result is irrelevant. In contrast, Deontology states that actions that are based on a moral code are moral even if their results are detrimental. The worst examples of ambition fall to closely to these two categories. The South Sea Bubble aligns with Consequentialism. Mccarthys direct actions against communism were based on a moral code however the entire situation was immoral. On the contrary, John Snow and FDR’s actions were a mix of both ideologies. In essence, in order to access whether an ambition is ethical they cannot align with either philosophy completely but must be a