Flip Flop! Flip Flop!?
Regarding the Borders kerfluffle, Alina writes:
While Max should certainly be criticized for his erroneous views . . . , Will should also be criticized for his waffling and wish-washy positions. Sure, it’s great to wait to until you see the results of the war become taking a serious principled position on it. But it is also futile and useless– it doesn’t save lives, and it only saves the margins of ego. Better to be proven wrong about your criticism of a war than to hedge your bets. You can only afford to waffle about war when you aren’t being forced to fight in the trenches.
Alina puzzles me. She mentions my short “non-committal” Doublethink piece as evidence of my moral/intellectual pusillanimity. It may help to know that the editor’s assignment was to say something about the significance of the war for libertarians, once it was clear that it was going to happen, and specifically not to argue for or against it. I thought then, and still do think, the most significant thing American libertarians intellectuals can do regarding the middle east is offer intellectual, emotional, and material support to liberals in Iraq and Islamic theocracies. I have failed to do anything significant on this score, as have most of the libertarians I know (Tom Palmer being a notable exception.) Be that as it may, my sympathies, if not my actions, rest with the long-run effort to assist the development of something like liberalism in Iraq and elsewhere, rather than making a racket about the wrongness of the war. The war in Iraq is indeed unjustified and this is a point worth making, and forcefully. But the expense of the war, and the loss of American lives and liberty is morally trivial compared to the danger illiberal Islam poses for hundreds of millions around the globe. I’ve believed that from the beginning, and I believe it now.
I resent the charge that I’ve been waiting around to see how things pan out to take a position, that I ever lacked a “serious principled position.” What I was saying then is pretty much exactly what I’m saying now. Here you can see me saying in Novermber or 2002 what I said a few days ago (read down in the comments, too). And that’s because my principles haven’t changed. At the time I wrote the Doublethink article, it wasn’t as obvious to me as it is now that Iraq had no WMD. If Iraq had proven a genuine imminent threat with ties to Al Qaeda, I likely would have supported the war, as I support the war in Afghanistan. I came to have better information, and thus believed Iraq not to be any sort of serious threat, and so concluded the war was unjustified. A change in confidence about the injustice of the war due to a change in information about the facts is, I’d think, a principal symptom of a genuinely serious, principled position. An unserious principled position is just dogmatism, and so, naturally, doesn’t vary with a better account of the facts, since the facts never meant much to begin with.
My position has always been a set of solid, unwishy-washy, unwaffling conditionals. If such and such is the case, then the war is justified; if such and such is the case, it is not. It is an obligation of intellectual honesty to wait patiently for the world to clearly reveal the antecedents. However, I congratulate Alina on her commitment to principles that avoid this kind of unmanly reliance on the a posteriori.
Last, Alina is hallucinating or indulging fantasies of grandiosity if she really believes that a bold principled stand against war by minor bloggers will “save lives.” Naturally, I favor saving lives over saving “margins of ego.” But since I’m in no position to do either, I’ll just continue to do something else altogether.
September 14th, 2004 18:52
Right On.
What makes it even stranger, though, is that this blogger Alina goes on to say: “Now [Will] takes Max Borders to task for his seemingly misguided ‘Contractarian Position’ supporting the war in Iraq.” As though your critique of Max is further *evidence* that you are waffling.
Of course, your critique of Max was simply that his contractarian view doesn’t remotely entail his hawkishness. Big deal. That’s a philosophical argument that someone might make whether they are a hawk, a dove, or whatever. It is logically independent of the policy views that one happens to hold.
Intellectual honesty commits us to both develop and employ our ability to critique the validity of an argument, independently of whether we happen to agree with the argument’s conclusion.
I could perhaps see how writing such a critique counts as waffling, but only to someone who measures the strength and identity of all arguments by how closely she agrees with their conclusions.
September 15th, 2004 00:24
For what it’s worth, I remember you opposed the war before it started, on the grounds that Iraq wasn’t a big enough threat.
I disagreed, and still do, but I wouldn’t accuse you of “waffling.”
September 15th, 2004 15:57
Does Alina remember Stand Down? You know, the antiwar website Max Sawicky & Jim Henley & I started? The one where both you and Alina were on the freaking masthead during the whole run-up to the war? I took that as a pretty unambiguous indication of which side you were on, unless you were just being polite to Jim & Me…
September 18th, 2004 16:34
The very first sentence of the Doublethink essay describes you as “barely” opposed to the war. I think it’s fair to call that “wishy-washy.” I don’t know what else you were saying/doing at the time, but based on that single piece of evidence it seems like a fair characterization. I was wishy-washy myself….
September 20th, 2004 11:49
Will, your position is honest and frankly I have had it with libertarians who treat the war as some sort of ideological vanity contest. Being willing to admit that one’s views change in time is surely the sort of honest stance to be valued, not mocked.
Good for you, Will.
September 24th, 2004 00:08
I Wish - That - I Knew What I Know Now
Alina Stefanescu and Will Wilkinson are having it out over whether the war in Iraq was supportable back in 2003. Stefanescu alleges that Wilkinson faltered in not taking a side for or against; Will presents his case: A change in…
September 27th, 2004 20:15
Isn’t there going to be a problem with having to prove a negative here? We have found no WMD, true enough. Is this a sufficient proof that Hussein had no access to them, especially given that he had fair warning enough to move them or hide them? It is not my desire here to split hairs over some logical point. We have found nothing. Why do we assume that this is because there was nothing to find?
There is another problem of judging the case ex post facto. An analogy migh help. Assume that the police have conflicting reports about a man, who has a history of using guns on people, as to whether he has a gun. The man is confronted by the police with his hands behind his back. The man insists that he has no gun behind his back, and certain other people, who can partially see behind his back, insist that he doesn’t have it either. Others deny it, and say that he does have a gun. What should the cops do?
Wouldn’t the reasonable course be to insist that the man show both his hands, and if he doesn’t, to suspect that he has a gun and take him down in some way? If, after he is disabled, he is shown to have no gun, how can we blame the police for acting like he did? This is to judge the case ex post facto, on the basis of evidence that was not available at the time.
If someone wants to argue against the war on the basis of whether or not there was WMD’s, they must do so on the basis of evidence that was available before the war, not subsequent evidence. At the very least, this will temper the discussion, and show the decision to go to war as a difficult one. Let those who assume that Saddam had no WMD’s infer the fact from our not finding them till now. It is at least as reasonable, and more relevant, to infer that someone who acts like they have something to hide is actually hiding something.