Justification and Knowledge in the Matter of WMDs

As anyone who’s studied philosophy (or a strong dose of common sense) can tell you, there’s a big difference between having knowledge and having a justified belief. I can be justified in believing X even if X turns out, in fact, to be false. Being justified requires, it is usually thought, having good reasons for one’s belief.

In light of that, this from Mickey Kaus is interesting:

If a man says he has a gun, acts like he has a gun, and convinces everyone around him he has a gun, and starts waving it around and behaving recklessly, the police are justified in shooting him (even if it turns out later he just had a black bar of soap). Similarly, according to the Duelfer report, Saddam seems to have intentionally convinced other countries, and his own generals, that he had WMDs. He also convinced much of the U.S. government. If we reacted accordingly and he turns out not to have had WMDs, whose fault is that? Why doesn’t Bush make that argument–talking about Saddam’s actions in the years before the U.S. invasion instead of Saddam’s “intent” to have WMDs at some point in the future? (It wouldn’t necessarily make the Iraq war prudent, but it would make Americans feel more comfortable about it than what Bush has been telling them.)



Thus it may be that Bush, et al. were justified in believing something that nevertheless turned out to be false. However, unless we have access to the same information they had, it’s very difficult to judge if this was the case. We also have to take into account the fact that there were others at the time who said Saddam didn’t have WMDs, and they turned out to be right. But of course, it’s possible that they had a true but unjustified belief. That is, the belief that Saddam didn’t have WMDs may not have been warranted on the grounds the skeptics had available to them.