Consider the US Civil war as an analogue. It wasn't an act of totalitarianism - forcibly subduing the south was legal, while totalitarianism has the connotation of extralegal use of force. And it wasn't undemocratic - Lincoln won the election. However it was certainly an instance of the government forcing its will on a segment of the population through immense violence. My belief is that immense violence was justified, to allow slavery (and slavery was the keystone reason for the Civil War) to be perpetuated would have been a greater evil. At face value many, including myself, would state that killing 2-2.5% of the total population in suppression of a rebellion is a bad thing. But ending slavery constitutes sufficient social progress to make it worth it.
A more morally gray area would be the overthrow of Egypt's elected government. I don't want to sign praises of the military junta, but some family relatives that are religious minorities (Coptic Christians) praised the military regime. And they made no premise of trying to portray their rule as democratic: they essentially said, "yes, it is a dictatorship. And in spite of that I fully believe it is better than rule by the Muslim Brotherhood. Similarly, while many (including myself) were optimistic about Syrian rebels fighting against Assad, it's tough to say that a peace under Assad would have been worse than the fate Syria got.
Another good example is Singapore's dictatorship. On one hand, silencing dissidents is something I consider bad. The fact that a party that receives ~60% of the vote gets to control ~90% of leadership roles is unjust. But by most other metrics of success, it's difficult to find fault in the country. High incomes, low rates of crime, and extensive services provided to the populace are the envy of most other countries. It's tempting to say that these could all be possible without dictatorial intervention, but the kind of long-term policy (and sometimes heavy-handed policies like relocating residents to eliminate de-facto racial segregation) that created Singapore's success are difficult to pull off in democracies.
I hope this doesn't come off as an attempt to justify Saudi Arabia's apparent actions, or read as an apologia of dictatorship. I still wouldn't choose any other countries' system over my own - at least none other than similar Western democracies. If it turns out Khashoggi was assassinated, it would definitely be a permanent mark against MBS (or whoever made this decision). Rather I just want to prompt reflection of what often seems to be the unqualified assumption that forceful governments results in a bad outcome, and democracy and liberty results in good ones. I certainly agree that assassinating a journalist, dismembering him, and subsequently denying it is unjustified even if it was eliminating a roadblock to social change in Saudi Arabia. But I do want to ask HN: where is that line?
[1] Judging by the responses, this was not an effective way to ask the question I want to ask. A better question is "to what degree does social progress made by foreign leaders offset their moral ills?"
Edit: I realize this was a potentially controversial question to pose, but it's something I've started to reflect on after talking to people that have experienced recent events in the Middle East. A lot of them expressed frustration with the tendency to view foreign policy through a simple, moralistic lens. The result of such a perspective often has negative consequences (e.g. the Iraq war. Hussein carried out atrocities orders of magnitude worse than the assassination of a journalist, but our moralistic response was orders of magnitude again more devastating).
Take Turkey, for instance. Mustafa Kemal ruled forcibly in many ways, and almost certainly had dissidents killed. He fought in the Turkish war of Independence so he has blood on his hands one way or another. But I'd seriously question the judgement of any who would claim that his rule was bad for Turkey. He drastically improved the country's institutions and brought is social policies more in line with Western ideals. In the coming years the military would repeatedly overthrow legally legitimate governments to keep the country secular. There's an honest discussion to be had over whether or not Turkey would be in a better person if Erdogan had been overthrown.
Of course in a liberal Western democracy, which I assume you live in, doesn't stand to benefit from regimes like that. But the blanket statement along the lines of "dictators bad, democracies good" is not productive, and sometimes feel like willful ignorance of history. This killing is a poor forecast, but time will tell whether history remembers MBS as Saudi Arabia as an Ataturk or a ineffective, bloody ruler (or, much more likely, as just another average Saudi monarch).
So was Egypt better under the Muslim Brotherhood than the military junta? The "means" of their overthrow were certainly bad (a military coup), so does that automatically mean it would have been better for Egypt to have continued to be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Is Singapore a morally bad country? We don't know for sure if they would have achieved the same results with a democracy, but in our mental image of "shitty, immoral countires" does Singapore pop into mind?
It's easy to make moralistic claims like this, but to a certain extent we all agree that certain ends to justify certain means. Police shouldn't kill a criminal for stealing an orange. But they probably should kill a criminal if they're holding someone hostage at knifepoint (Purely speaking in terms of the morality of killing people in commission of a crime, I don't know if shooting at a someone holding a hostage is good policing)
I mean, in a twist of macabre irony, many of the activists who led the push for reforms like letting women drive are now in prison. That doesn't sound like a government genuinely interested in reform.
Never will I trade a humanitarian crisis for development. What's development for? It is for humans.
Of course, this isn't the situation we're in. There's no certainty that Bin Salman will follow through on his promises; there's no guarantee that it wouldn't have been possible without this killing. Again, the goal here isn't to try and justify any action - assassination of a journalist is barbaric, full stop. As I've spoken to people that have lived under governments often considered immoral (Middle Eastern countries as mentioned earlier, China is another example) I've reflected on how moralistic one should be when viewing the world outside of liberal democracies, and I want to share that reflection with others.
I'm not asking "was assassinating Jamal Khashoggi worth it?"
What I am asking is "If MBS fulfills his promises, do you think history will be kind to him? And should it?"
RIP, Jamal Khashoggi.
