George W. Bush: Stupidity vs. Intellectual Vice
"If I Decide To Do It, By Definition It's Good Policy"
and
"When The President Doest It That Means That It Is Not Illegal"
And
The Real Relativists

Read this. (Via Brad DeLong.)

Bush's claim--"If I decide to do it, by definition it's good policy"--could almost serve as the motto of his administration.

A couple of points:

1. It is in some sense no accident that this reminds us of Nixon's "When the president does it that means that it is not illegal." The two claims are located in the same quadrant of conceptual space.

2. Bush's claim is straightforwardly relativistic. Nixon's is perhaps rather less so, given the nature of legality--it's something that really is grounded in particular utterances and practices. Nixon is wrong about who fixes legality in America, but not vastly wrong about how it gets fixed. Goodness of policy, however, unlike legality, cannot be established by fiat.

Most people think that the essence of relativism is the diversity claim--that x is true or good over here and false or bad over there. On my view of the matter (which is less confused than most views of this particular matter), it is not the diversity claim that is central to relativism but, rather, a certain type of groundedness claim. Paradigmatically, the relativist holds that things are good or true because they are represented as being good or true by some individual or group of individuals--that is, thinking so makes it so. The diversity claim is a consequence of this more fundamental type of claim about the constitution of truth, goodness, etc.

On this view, Bush's claim is overtly relativistic.

And, contrary to conventional wisdom, it is relativism that is the last refuge of soundrels.

Welcome to the postmodern presidency.

3. As I've said before, though Bush isn't notably intelligent, it's not his lack of intellectual horsepower that is most salient--he is probably of at least average intelligence. Rather, it's his intellectual vice that is most important.

Most people don't recognize that reasoning is largely a moral matter. One can, for example, reason honestly or dishonestly, and one can be fair or unfair in one's reasonings, applying logical standards in a uniform manner, or varying them depending on whether one likes or dislikes the relevant conclusion. We often go astray morally not because it's too hard for us to figure out what's right, but, rather, because we cheat, willingly allowing ourselves to believe, for example, that our preferred course of action is the right one. Exactly analogous things can be said about reasoning in general (especially where politics is concerned): we go wrong much of the time because we already know which conclusion we want, and we resist the force of the arguments, spinning things in our preferred direction. We see where the arguments might take us, but we don't want to go there. So we use a thousand little tricks to convince ourselves that our preferred conclusion is actually the more reasonable one. (This is how the administration acted in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, for example.)

The combination of a tendency toward intellectual dishonesty and an inclination toward relativism is dangerous indeed: a little cheating takes us part of the way we want to go, and any gap is closed by invoking the principle that whatever we think is, by definition, correct. Most of us aren't dishonest enough to close very large gaps that way, so we use a mixed strategy.

Suskind claims that "Bush is not a stupid or bad man." But this is false. He is clearly either stupid or bad (or both), though we might disagree over which it is. If what I've said here is true, it's the badness that predominates. This is not recreational Bush-bashing. Rather it seems to me to be point that is both important and true. Though, as always, I could be wrong.