The Parable of the Flowerbed

A wife asked her husband to do something about the weeds in her flowerbed, so he got to work. When he finished pulling up all the weeds, she went out to inspect the flowerbed. She found that the weeds were gone, but to her dismay, all of the flowers were smashed and destroyed. “Honey, you’ve ruined my flowers!” she said. “What? I had absolutely no intention of doing that,” he responded. She replied, “Well, regardless of whether you intended to do it, that’s definitely what you did.”

To add a moral in the manner of the Greeks: Take away what is bad without taking away what is good, and don’t think that good intentions alone will exonerate you from wrongdoing.