Ian Fleming's spy novels are often compared to John Le Carré's.  The comparisons often find James Bond to be wanting.  In contrast to the emotional richness of Le Carré's internally conflicted heroes, Bond is often presented by his critics as a cardboard cutout with an overly simplistic view of the world.  Bond fights for crown and country.  Alec Leamas and George Smiley, on the other hand, realize that things are much more complicated than that.  Fleming presented a 50's version of the world where we all had just left off making the world safe for democracy, and still naively saw the cold war in black and white terms.  Le Carré, on the other hand, by drawing attention to the moral ambiguity at the heart of our conflict with the Soviets, turns James Bond on his head.

Or does he?  Written in 1953, ten years before The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Ian Fleming's first Bond novel Casino Royale includes this surprising piece of introspection from 007:

Le Carré attempts to preserve us from full surrender to the topsy-turvy world by making it asymptotic to ourselves.  it is a point of evil, or the transvaluation of all morals, that his heroes are always approaching but also always stay just to this side of.  In this way, the Cold War becomes a metaphor for life itself.

Fleming's hero actually goes beyond this point, in the very first 007 novel, and comes out the other side.  The lack of moral ambiguity for which Bond is so frequently criticized is not due to the fact that he doesn't see it. Rather he sees it and surpasses it.

In order to keep Bond out of this topsy-turvy world, where good is evil and evil good, Fleming is obliged to provide his hero with a series of sufficiently evil villains.  First there was SMERSH, the Soviet counterintelligence and murder agency whose job it was to keep the people of the Eastern Block in line through intimidation and fear.  After a time, this was in turn replaced by SPECTRE, a world-wide terrorist organization bent on world domination (perhaps an example of art anticipating life).

Le Carré similarly requires the latticework of the Cold War in order to sustain his aesthetic-moral structure, and it is telling that following the collapse of the Soviet empire, his novels have become more simple David versus Goliath narratives with clear good guys (whistleblowers) and clear bad guys (international corporations) -- in a sense, more like the traditional Bond narrative.

In Part II, Question 2 of the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of the Witches), the 15th century witch hunter's manual, the authors ask:

Is it lawful to remove witchcraft by means of further witchcraft, or by any other forbidden means?

 This is a variation on the question concerning means and ends, but with a poetic twist.  In the standard form of the question, we evaluate the two terms and try to determine if the good we seek to accomplish is greater than, or less than, the evil that is required to accomplish it, and if the answer is yes, then we call these means a necessary evil.  In the form posed by the Malleus Maleficarum, there is a more direct relationship between the means to be used and the evil to be overcome.  They are neither greater nor less than, but are in fact identical to the evil to be overcome.

In metaphysical jurisprudence, Dante calls this relationship between the crime and the punishment  contrapasso, or the counter-suffering that a soul suffers for the sins he committed in life.  Through this principle, people in sinning choose their own meet punishment in the afterlife, and the cosmic order is maintained.  Thus, Paolo and Francesca, who were caught up in each other's lust in life, are caught up in in an eternal whirlwind in the afterlife, and the epicureans, who insist that the soul is permanently tied to the body, are forced to drag their bodies around in hell.

This poetic principle which assures justice with regard to punishment, because it makes the punishment always fit the crime, has a jarring effect when applied to practical reasoning and police work, which occur before any punishment is necessary.  By using the means of the enemy we seek to overcome, we somehow perpetuate the evil that we seek to destroy.  Cosmically, this evil is somehow transferred to us.  It is a standard trope of science fiction that when we use the tools of our enemy, we become no better than our enemy. 

There is a direct relationship between the witch-hunting of the 15th century, and the cold war of the 20th.  Not only were we similarly caught in a general fear about an enemy that we were not certain we could overcome, but the same temptations about the tools to be used were raised by the nature of the conflict.  Deviousness and ruthlessness, an absence of morality, are the greatest strengths of the enemy.  To what extent must we suspend our own morality in order to defeat this enemy?  And having done so, to what extent are we still the good guys.

In the 15th century, the advice to witch-hunters was to not use the tools of the witches.  In the Malleus Maleficarum, this is stated as an absolute prohibition, with the explanation that any attempt to use magic will either directly call upon the aid of demons, or will open the practitioner of such means up to the influence of the demons.

In the 20th century, we were more accommodating toward the Devil.  In The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, John Le Carre places the following words in the mouth of Control, the head of the Britain's Secret Service, who is explaining to the hero, Alec Leamas, why he must go on just one more mission:

 But if our actions are justified because we are the good guys, at what point are we no longer able to distinguish ourselves from the bad guys and suddenly find ourselves in Hegel's verkehrte Welt, the inverted world in which we are no longer ourselves?  This is a question that is raised with great regularity in modern politics, in world affairs, and in our daily lives.  The problems of the topsy-turvy world arise when we begin to practice a negative ethics rather than a positive one, in which we are defined much more by what we are not, rather than by what we are.

We all know that James Bond drinks his martinis "shaken, not stirred."  In the first Bond novel by Ian Fleming, we are actually given directions for making a very large martini, which Bond invents and later dubs 'The Vesper,' after Vesper Lynd, the heroine of Casino Royale.