Expedient

Convenient and practical, especially in serving an immediate advantage or short-term purpose, but typically implying a sacrifice of principle or long-term benefit for short-term pragmatic gain; as a noun, a means adopted for convenience rather than principle. In UPSC ethics discourse, 'expedient' action is contrasted with 'principled' action — a civil servant who processes a file quickly by overlooking procedural safeguards acts expediently but not ethically. The tension between the expedient and the principled runs through multiple GS Paper IV case studies on policy shortcuts and ethical compromises.