Burgess-Jackson on the Irrelevance of Motives
Keith Burgess-Jackson shows off his philosophy skillz in Bush’s critics meet the logic police. His main point is that Bush’s having lied about why he was going to war is not relevant to an analysis of whether the war was justified.
Either there is a justification for the war (objectively speaking) or there is not. If there is, then it doesn’t matter what motivated President Bush. If there isn’t, then it doesn’t matter what motivated President Bush. Either way, it doesn’t matter what motivated President Bush.
There’s an interesting game he’s playing here. Yes, it’s true that the question of whether or not Bush lied about his motivations is orthogonal to the question of whether or not the war was justified.
We can construct a matrix of possibilities:
| Didn’t Lie | Lied | |
|---|---|---|
| Justified | I | II |
| Not Justified | III | IV |
If you ask any given person whether the war was justified, and whether they think Bush lied about his motivations for waging it, you can map which of the four sectors that person falls into, in terms of which sector they believe accurately describes reality: Sector I (Bush didn’t lie, war was justified), II (lied/justified), III (didn’t lie/not justified), or IV (lied/not justified). War supporters would land in sectors I or II; opponents would get III or IV.
Any one of the four sectors is a legitimate contender at the outset. What Burgess-Jackson is arguing is that the mere fact that Bush was known to have lied wouldn’t mean that everyone automatically had to move to sector IV; there could still be a safe haven for war supporters in sector II.
Which is true enough. But it kind of misses the point. The articles claiming Bush has been dishonest aren’t only about the horizontal dimension of the graph (didn’t lie/lied). They’re also about the vertical dimension of the graph (justified/not justified). See, Bush’s stated motives have basically been a laundry list of every conceivable justification for going to war. If a bunch of those justifications turn out not to be grounded in reality, then yeah, it will mean Bush was probably lying, and the partisan folks at the New York Times or the Guardian are going to make hay with that. But it will also weigh heavily in any rational determination about whether the war was justified. Not because Bush was lying per se, but because of what it was he was lying about (namely, the evidence he supposedly used in making his own decision about whether the war was justified).
It’s significant, too, that there are war supporters who aren’t even seriously considering whether the war was justified. They’re simply taking Bush’s word for it when he says that it was. In a sense, such people are guilty of the same logical fallacy Burgess-Jackson accuses the liberal media of: conflating the question of Bush’s honesty with that of the war’s justification, albeit in the opposite direction. (I believe Bush is telling the truth; therefore, the war is justified.)
I suspect Burgess-Jackson of intentionally obscuring these points. Still, it’s an interesting argument that he makes. Thanks to those clever partisans at The Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web page for the link.
June 26th, 2003 at 9:56 am
“[U]tilitarian moralists have gone beyond almost all others in affirming that the motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action, though much with the worth of the agent. He who saves a fellow creature from drowning does what is morally right, whether his motive be duty or the hope of being paid for his trouble; he who betrays the friend that trusts him is guilty of a crime, even if his object be to serve another friend to whom he is under greater obligations.” –John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1861), chap. 2 (“What Utilitarianism Is”)
July 17th, 2004 at 3:59 pm
Let’s face it people have been trying to define the ‘just war’ for millennia with little success. Generally the purpose of the attempted justification is to cover up some type of gain on the part of the agressor. As to Bush’s ‘lies’ – I do think that these are separate from his attempts at justification. From this date so long after the original post it is clear that the war has not made the world a better or safer place, nor do there appear to be any weapons of mass destruction.