If they manage to reverse the long decline of farming in poor countries, they will have justified themselves.
I wanted to know how plantation owners justified themselves and how the same God served both master and slave.
The long years of frustration, of doing nothing, of serving the general good in unhistoric acts, as George Eliot put it, justified themselves.
Some mafiosi have justified themselves by stressing the difference between a crime and a sin; the Mafia, and not only the Mafia, has appropriated the Catholic culture of forgiveness as a kind of license for anything.
Shell justified themselves on the basis that energy demand is going to keep rising (behaviour) and implicitly on fossil fuels not becoming stigmatised due to the growth of divestment strategies (culture).
If, on the one hand, the acquaintance or awareness is propositional or conceptual in this way, then while such acts or episodes of awareness seem capable, in principle, of justifying other beliefs, they would surely need to be justified themselves.
