Month: October 2004

Wow – it’s like this was written just for me:

This is not an article for those who are unabashedly in love with democracy, who look forward to election year with patriotic zeal directed first of all to the nation and second of all to one of the political parties. I write instead for the genuinely dispossessed: for those who feel deep in their bones that the entire political process is a sham; who think that our country, whatever its previous merits, is accelerating in a decades-long slide; who grant that Americans enjoy great blessings, but do so in the midst of self-inflicted moral and spiritual deprivations; who believe that voting for either candidate is merely a decision about the handbasket in which to ride to hell. In short, I write for those who, faced with the prospect of choosing between President George W. Bush or Senator John Kerry, are nearly in despair about democracy and who are consequently planning to skip the whole sordid affair rather than soil their consciences.

The author goes on to make some of the same points I made here. For instance:

One of the most distorting errors as regards our perspective on anything is to view it from the wrong angle. We may gain the proper perspective on things political, not by going to Washington, but by taking a journey with the greatest poet, a man who, crushed by politics, turned inward and upward, and created the magnificent Divine Comedy. Dante’s ultimate perspective is revealed, not in the Inferno or the Purgatorio, but in the Paradiso, as he looks back during his climb amid the glories of heaven, and seeing below him the real smallness of earth, smiles:

So with my vision I went traversing …till this globe I saw,

Whereat I smiled, it seemed so poor a thing.

Highly I rate that judgement that doth low

Esteem the world; him do I deem upright

Whose thoughts are fixed on things of greater awe.

Dante does not look at humble earth with a cynical grin but a smile of pity at the ultimately fruitless efforts of mere mortals to redeem a fallen world, especially through the feverish machinations of politics. This was not an abstract smile won through detached philosophical speculation. Born in Florence, Italy, Dante was a prominent White Guelf in the famous political struggle with the Ghibellines. Exiled in 1302, he became a wanderer, settling finally in Ravenna where, divested of all political power and cleansed of all political ambition, he completed his Divine Comedy.

That is the proper perspective on earthly things, especially on political things. It is the view of a pilgrim, of a resident alien in the City of Man whose ultimate allegiance has been transferred to the City of God. The great moment of transformation came at Calvary, where all mere earthly patriotism was crucified, died, and resurrected, and citizenship was transferred to a kingdom not of this world.

For those who are considering not voting or voting for a third-party candidate he says:

For different reasons, both parties and both candidates thus seem unappealing. All too many with whom I have spoken—including my wife!—are either not voting or throwing away their votes on no-win, third-party candidates. To all the politically dispossessed, aliens in their own land, I offer the following consolations and admonitions….

…We shall be judged on how well we acted amid the political imperfections into which we are cast, the very imperfections among which we are called to vote. Voting is a sloppy, ineffective way of setting and resetting the political order, supremely subject to manipulation, flattery, and demagoguery. That is why the partisans of extreme democracy generally avoid it, preferring to use the courts, misuse the legislative process, and abuse executive power. But voting is still the way that we’re called to exercise what political power remains in the hands of ordinary folk, and it’s our duty to use this power as best we can.

Not voting means handing power to those in either political party who make us feel so uncomfortable about voting.

What he doesn’t address, though, is whether there might be particular cases where both candidates take positions that render one unable to vote for either one in good conscience, what Paul Griffiths, in his essay from the Commonweal symposium, called “deal-breakers.” Might there not be cases where abstaining is the only honorable option? Even if we concede (as surely we must) that politics will always be imperfect, does that mean that some situations might not call for conscientous objection? As Griffiths puts it:

A deal is broken if one of the parties to it does something that makes it improper for the other party to continue in it no matter what the ancillary circumstances. If one spouse uses physical violence against another, this breaks the deal of living together: you don’t go on living with someone who hits you on a regular basis, no matter what other virtues they might have. If someone starts screaming insults at you during a conversation, that deal is broken: the conversation is at an end until they’ve calmed down. And in the case of voting (which is also a deal: I vote, as I hope you do, in response to what a candidate advocates and has done), there are also deal breakers, which is to say actions done or positions advocated sufficient to make voting for someone improper, no matter what other good policies that person may advocate and no matter what other good things he or she may have done. …

…You might object to this line of argument by saying that there are no deal breakers in politics, that we have to look at the whole picture and make prudential, calculative judgments about what will, on the whole, be best for the country. On good days, I find this line half persuasive. But it really won’t do: if the two candidates were Hitler and Stalin, would you feel that you had to vote for one of them?

It’s not so clear says former congressman Bob Barr (R-GA).

I have to say, I get nervous at the idea of this guy whispering things in Karl Rove’s ear:

“Any discussion of America and human rights must begin with the recognition that this country was created in a revolutionary period and that the democratic revolution — of which America is but one element — is, by its nature and of necessity, universal,” Ledeen declared. “. . . It is crucial for us to remember that the 18th-century revolutionaries and statesmen who created this country recognized that it is impossible for [democracy] to flourish if it is limited to a small corner of the world. The revolution, in other words, must be exported.”…



…The call for the United States to be at the forefront of a global crusade to spread democracy became one of the defining features of neoconservative ideology, a heady brew of American nationalism and an internationalist crusade for democracy that transcended traditional left-right divisions.



But there is another, less ringing, strain in Ledeen’s thinking. “To be an effective leader, the most prudent method is to ensure that your people are afraid of you,” Ledeen wrote in “Machiavelli on Modern Leadership.” “To instill that fear, you must demonstrate that those who attack you will not survive.”

Ledeen is especially contemptuous of leaders he regards as weak and corrupt, such as Bill Clinton. In a 1999 article in the scholarly journal Society, he warned of dire consequences if Clinton were not impeached. “New leaders with an iron will are required to root out the corruption and either reestablish a virtuous state, or to institute a new one. . .,” he wrote. “If we bask in false security and drop our guard, the rot spreads, corrupting the entire society. Once that happens, only violent and extremely unpleasant methods can bring us back to virtue.”

In a March 2003 speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen dismissed worries that the American public would lose heart if there were too many casualties in the then-imminent Iraq war. “All the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war. . .,” Ledeen declared. “What we hate is not casualties but losing.”



(via Mark Shea)

One persistent criticism of President Bush is that he has eroded the “wall of separation” between church and state by his attempts to legislate “private” religious views. The most common examples are his limitations on federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research (ESCR), support for measures limiting abortion, and his so-called faith-based initiative offering federal money to religious charities.

Leaving aside the question of constitutional interpretation, what is at work here, it seems to me, is the longstanding liberal suspicion of embodying substantive moral positions in government policy. None of the above mentioned policies need have specifically religious justification. There are secular arguments against ESCR and abortion, as well as secular arguments for providing federal dollars to religious charities that help lift people out of poverty.

Rather, the idea seems to be the government must remain neutral, not just among religions, but among moral positions. To do otherwise is to “legislate morality” and to force one set of views on the entire populace.

This position is rooted in the dream of Enlightenment liberalism to establish a purely procedural means of resolving political disputes. The watchwords here are “reason” and “compromise,” and the aim is that all parties could come to agreement acting simply as rational agents rather than people with substantive commitments to a particular vision of the common good.

The most famous and sophisticated exponent of this view is, of course, John Rawls. To simplify greatly, Rawls contended that, in devising principles of political justice, we have to imagine people coming to agreement without any knowledge of their position in the social order, their concrete interests, or a commitment to any “thick” notion of the good life. Only thus could we be sure that we had principles of justice that were appropriate for all people qua rational beings.

A kind of popular Rawlsianism has infected much of our political debate. To appeal to any substantive view of the good is considered out of bounds since all such positions, it is said, must rest on “faith” rather than on “reason.” John Kerry very clearly articulated this position in the second presidential debate:

First of all, I cannot tell you how deeply I respect the belief about life and when it begins. I’m a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.

But I can’t take what is an article of faith for me and legislate it for someone who doesn’t share that article of faith, whether they be agnostic, atheist, Jew, Protestant, whatever. I can’t do that.

One peculiar aspect of this response is that Sen. Kerry seems to imply that opposition to abortion is a peculiarly Catholic belief (though he was careful not to say whether he shared that belief), whereas he must surely know that many Protestants, Jews, atheists and agnostics also oppose abortion. Nor does he grapple with the many secular arguments against abortion.

Even more fundamentally, however, one can question the whole faith/reason dichotomy. Many critics of Enlightenment liberalism have questioned whether there is a neutral Reason-with-a-capital-“R” that enables us to stand above all particular faith-commitments. For instance, thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre have argued that all forms of reasoning are rooted in specific traditions and that there is no Archimedean point from where we can distinguish positions based in “reason” from those based in “faith.” Rationality is always and inevitably an evaluative concept. It can never be self-justifying because it rests on evaluations that are themselves not subject to rational scrutiny, since that would require begging the question of what counts as rational.

But if there is no “neutral” concept of reason, then the Enlightenment liberal’s appeal to “reason” actually masks certain evaluative claims that remain undefended. If we say that the law cannot protect fetal life, then we are making an evaluation, whether explicitly or not, about the value of fetal life. This is just as much a substantive moral judgment as its contrary. The appeal to proceduralism only works because our political traditions already embody certain substantive moral commitments such as the equality of persons. There is no getting around the need to make such commitments.

Ironically, it may be precisely this attempt to embed particular moral positions in the very framework of political debate that accounts in part for the shrillness of our political discourse. If, on the terms of acceptable debate, one position is ruled out from the get go, there will be less incentive for both parties to compromise. Only when the outcome is up for grabs will compromise and moderation begin to make sense.

This is not to defend all the positions that President Bush has taken. The point is that we should candidly acknowledge that politics involves a contest of substantive moral claims. To portray the conflict as one of “faith vs. reason” is simply disingenuous. Government simply cannot remain neutral about momentous moral issues. Whatever policies it enacts will embody a certain moral perspective. When the U.S. government outlawed slavery it was taking a moral position. One wonders if the arguments of Abraham Lincoln would carry the day if judged by the standards of neutrality about comprehensive goods. One needn’t shed one’s moral commitments to enter the public arena in good faith.

The Maverick Philosopher has an instructive post on evidentialism and the ethics of belief in light of an argument from Sam Harris that religion qua religion is evil and dangerous.

I offered a rebuttal to Harris here.

UPDATE: In my original post I mistakenly identified Sam Harris as “John Harris.” Thanks to Bill Vallicella for pointing this out. The link to the piece seems to be broken; Harris’ op-ed from the L.A. Times can be seen here.

One of the reasons I am always reluctant to support a given decision to go to war is because I believe the burden of proof must always lie on the party advocating war. And since war involves the killing and maiming of hundreds or thousands of people, it only seems just that the bar of evidence ought to be particularly high. One might steal from Benjamin Disraeli and say that if it is not necessary to go to war, it is necessary not to go to war.

In the case of Afghanistan it was clear that the Taliban was harboring and giving succor to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. So it seemed eminently justifiable to attack the terrorist camps and overthrow the regime.

In the case of Iraq, however, matters were much murkier. The evidence offered for Saddam’s possession of WMD and connections with al-Qaida seemed inconclusive. To justify a pre-emptive strike one would, I think, need a greater degree of certainty than was on offer. Certainly I think it’s fair to say that there was reasonable doubt.

Add to this the fact that governments lie. Not just occasionally, but systematically, and especially during wartime. They lie, they spin, they manipulate, they distort. I’m not saying that I know for a fact that anyone in particular lied; as I said before, I don’t have the information to say that for certain. But I do think that history should teach us to be skeptical of the claims of government officials to say the least. Given my limited access to reliable information on these matters, I remain, happily or not, unable to give my assent to most acts of war.

The Maverick Philosopher has responded to this post continuing our exchange on Iraq.

His conclusion:

So perhaps the upshot is this. Although the war in Iraq was not a diversion from the war on terror as Kerry and others claim, it is nonetheless arguable that given what we know (or at least justifiably believe) now, the war in Iraq was ill-advised and led to a misuse of resources.



But the important question is what to do now. If we ‘cut and run,’ a bad result is assured. But if we ‘stay the course,’ there is a good chance of a stable and more or less democratic Iraq.

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.

Apparently when you change templates on Blogger it wipes out all your sidebar links. Grumble, grumble…

A few days ago Bill Vallicella posted an entry on his blog criticizing what he dubbed “the diversion argument” – i.e. the claim made by John Kerry and others that the war in Iraq constitutes a diversion or distraction from the war on terrorism proper.

Dr. Vallicella counters that the war in Iraq can legitimately be considered part of the war on terrorism, and that the argument as it stands is unsound:

The war on terror is a war against Islamic terrorists, first and foremost. Of course, there are non-Muslim terrorists, e.g., Basque terrorists, but the threat they pose is negligible as compared to the threat posed by the Muslim variety. It would be an egregious error to identify the war on terror with the task of bringing to justice the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack. Even worse is the mistake that Kerry made during his speech, namely identifying the war on terror with the task of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden.The war on terror is not solely about Osama, or solely about the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, or solely about al-Qaeda; the war is about Islamo-terrorism as such.



… Given this, it makes no sense to identify the war on terror with anything so specific as the task of capturing Osama. But that is what libs and lefties do ad nauseam.



…We know that Saddam directly supported Islamo-terrorists, since we know that he supported, with large sums of money, the families of Palestinian Arab suicide-bombers.

Since I have endorsed what might fairly be called a version of the diversion argument in the past, I wrote Dr. Vallicella to take issue with some of his points, to which he graciously responded on his blog.

I wrote:

…I think one can concede that Hussein’s regime had ties to Islamo-terrorism (e.g. the payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers) but still maintain that the Iraq war constitutes a diversion from the war on (Islamo) terrorism. As far as I have been able to tell, Saddam’s regime never directly sponsored terrorist attacks on the U.S. (the first WTC attacks were carried out by Iraqis, but I don’t believe that it has been credibly claimed that they were acting under orders from the Iraqi government).

To which he responded:

If you grant, as I think you do, that (i) the war on terrorism is a war against Islamo-terrorism whatever its source, and that (ii) Hussein’s regime had ties to Islamo-terrorism, then I don’t think you can say that the war in Iraq is a diversion from the war on terrorism. To prosecute a proper sub-task of a given task is not to divert oneself from the task. I think what you want to say is that there has been an undue emphasis on Iraq, that resources used there could have been put to better use elsewhere. But then we would be discussing a Misallocation rather than a Diversion Argument. Kerry, however, repeatedly used the word ‘diversion’ in his speech.

I’m willing to concede the point here that one should speak properly of a misallocation rather than a diversion. If we define the war on terrorism as a war on any and all groups that have ties to (radical Islamic) terrorism, then I think Dr. Vallicella is right that an attack on Saddam Hussein’s regime counts as part of that war, since it seems clear that he had some ties to terrorism.

Dr. Vallicella continues:

Just how much a threat Saddam posed is hard to ascertain because the relevant facts are hard to ascertain. But it is worth mentioning that Saddam tried to assasinate Bush the Elder. There is also the ‘Abu’ connection: if I am not mistaken, Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and Abu al-Zarqawi all received support from Saddam. Abu Abbas was the mastermind behind the Achille Lauro incident during which the elderly, wheel-chair bound American Leon Klinghoffer was shot and then thrown overboard.

I agree that the threat posed by Saddam qua sponsor of terrorism is hard to ascertain. However, I think what should be pointed out is that the stated reasons for going to war – i.e. Saddam’s ties to terrorism combined with the threat of WMD – have turned out to be based on false information. So, if nothing else, I think it’s safe to say that Saddam turned out to be less of a threat than we were led to believe (I don’t say deliberately misled; I don’t have the information to know if President Bush, et al. deliberately made false statements about Iraq’s WMDs).

I continued:

…Since there are other groups and regimes that have supported, directly or indirectly, attacks on the U.S., it would seem prudent to have dealt with those before dealing with Iraq. I realize that reasonable people can disagree about the gravity of the threat Iraq posed, but I think at the very least one has to take into account the considerable opportunity costs of going to war in Iraq when we did. Was it really the best allocation of the resources that it has absorbed (and will continue to absorb for the forseeable future)?

To which Dr. V responded:

I think one must also consider the other reasons for the war in Iraq, namely, the humanitarian reason; the enforcement of unanimous U.N. resolutions that that august body did not have the will to enforce; the need to put an end to an on-going war; the need to try the noble (if perhaps in the end misguided) experiment of bringing (more) democracy to the Middle East for the sake of the long-term stability of the region; the need to remove a dictator and his sons who was going to have to be removed at some time anyway, with removing him now while he is weak being better than later when he is strong; the sheer danger of allowing Saddam to develop nukes which he would be more than happy to give to terrorist groups for use in the U.S. and Israel.I submit that these reasons, taken cumulatively, add up to a very strong case for the war. I stress the cumulative nature of the case. Thus the first reason, taken by itself, is insufficient. It may that they are all insufficient, taken by themselves. But taken together, they are reasonably held to be sufficient.

While I think the cumulative case is strong, I think it would only be dispositive if allocating the necessary resources to a war in Iraq wouldn’t take away resources from more pressing matters. However good it may be to liberate an oppressed populace or enforce UN resolutions, the primary duty of the United States government is to see to the safety of American citizens. If going into Iraq has made it less able to do this, then it is derelict in this duty. It may be good for a man to give money to starving orphans in Africa, but not if by doing so he neglects his own children. That is, I regard this primary duty as exercising a kind of veto power over other ventures, however worthwhile they may be in themselves. One might add that given the seriousness of going to war, the gravity and cetainty of the threat should be the paramount consideration.

So, if the war in Iraq has resulted in resources being allocated to it that could have been used to deal with more pressing threats, then I think it was a mistake. I think given recent revelations, it’s reasonable to think that is indeed the case.

Thanks again to Dr. V for taking the time to engage in civil and (I hope) instructive debate!