Among the cacophony of accusations of flip-floppery there seems to be particular glee with the recollection of Kerry’s criticisms directed against Howard Dean in December of 2003.
Those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don’t have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president.
Charles Krauthammer last week claimed that this contradicts Kerry’s more recent pronouncement on the war:
Source (WaPo 09/16/04): Kerry is now back to the “wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time,” a line lifted from Dean himself. So we are not better off with Hussein deposed after all.
Relational predicates have a funny logical structure. Failure to pay attention to this logical structure generates simple fallacies. Plato was probably the first to explore the absurdity of these fallacies in his dialogue the Euthydemus, which anyone interested in logical fallacies, or who just wants a quick philosophical laugh, should read. In that dialogue, Plato has a sophist advance the following argument.
Tell me, have you got a dog?–Yes, and a brute of one too, said Ctesippus.
And has he got puppies?–Yes indeed and they are just like him.
And so the dog is their father?–Yes I saw him mounting the bitch myself, he said.
Well then, isn’t the dog yours?–Certainly, he said.
Then since he is a father and he is yours, the dog turns out to be your father, and you are the brother of puppies, aren’t you.
This argument is more humorous than misleading and it is easy to detect the fallacy contained within it (though there are probably several ways of describing it). In a nutshell, the problem is that “father” is a relational property, or a “two place predicate.” One is always a father of some set of children (fatherhood in this sense is always a “causal relation”). Symbolically we might represent this as xF(a,b,c) reading “person (or animal) x is a Father of persons (or animals) a,b and c.” Thus from “your dog is a father of puppies,” we cannot conclude that “your dog is the father of you.” The fallacy works by substituting an “incomplete predicate” (your father) for a complete two term predicate (father of you), and in a sense concealing an equivocation.
This looks like what we find in the above example of supposed “flip-floppery,” only now the predicate is the comparative adjective “safer,” (or “better than”) which is also a two term predicate xSy (x is safer than y).
Those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don’t have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president.
This claim contains three comparative claims:
- Iraq is “better off” without Saddam Hussein than with him ruling.
- The world is “better off” without Saddam Hussein than with him ruling.
- We (the U.S.) are safer with Saddam Hussein captured than with him free in Iraq.
The question is whether Kerry’s recent claims contradict any of these comparative claims. There are several quotations that are claimed to do so.
Kerry is now back to the “wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time,” a line lifted from Dean himself. So we are not better off with Hussein deposed after all.(Krauthammer, see quote above)
A good “translation” is one which preserves the sense of the original. More precisely, for our purposes, a good translation is one which is either logically identical with the original (“less safe” as a translation of “less secure”), or in which the translation is a reasonable and necessary implication of the original. Krauthammer claims that “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time” can be translated as:
A. We were better off with Hussein in power than with him deposed.
We can simplify Kerry’s claim to:
A1. The invasion of Iraq was the wrong war.
To say that it was the wrong war is to say that it was not appropriate given the circumstances–that is, the ends of the war (disarming Saddam of WMD, disrupting the association of Saddam with al Qaida, deposing Saddam, or any of the other twenty or so justifications that have been advanced), did not justify the means–in some cases because the ends could not be achieved by these means (how can you disarm someone who is already disarmed?), and in some cases because the ultimate costs of the war are overcoming the benefit that the world has acquired through the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.
Kerry’s criticism of Dean, however, was that Dean (supposedly) suggested that the end was not desirable (whether he in fact did or not is now moot).
But, Kerry’s recent claim concerns the question of the right means to a desirable end, and not a claim that the end, deposing Saddam Hussein, was not desirable. Thus, the two claims are perfectly consistent, and the accusation of “flip-floppery” only seems plausible because Krauthammer creates a contradiction by misrepresenting the meaning of Kerry’s words.
A more plausible case for flip-floppery can be made on the basis of Kerry’s claim most recently at his NYU speech on Monday:
Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure. Source (Kerry Campaign 09/20/04).
David Brooks was first out of the gate with his response to Kerry’s speech in yesterday’s New York Times (Source (NYT, 09/21/04). Again we find the charge of flip-floppery.
The president’s case is that the world is safer with Saddam out of power, and that we should stay as long as it takes to help Iraqis move to democracy. Kerry’s case is that the world would be safer if we’d left Saddam [in power.]
In the speech above, Kerry actually makes a claim about the relative security of our current situation and the pre-war situation (unlike in the manufactered example above). Thus, the translation of
“we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure”
into
“Kerry’s case is that the world would be safer if we’d left Saddam in power.”
seems at least plausible.
Nonetheless we should be careful. Kerry’s sentence from the NYU speech seems to mean that “we are less secure with the present chaos than we were with Saddam Hussein in power.” Certainly this does not contradict statement 3 above (which when accurately read only compares our safefy in regards to Saddam being free and Saddam captured). But perhaps it contradicts statement 2: The world is “better off” without Saddam Hussein ruling than with him ruling.
As Kerry makes clear in the passage quoted, he is not saying that the “world is not better off with Saddam Hussein deposed than with him in power.” Instead he seems to be claiming that the consequence of a policy that may have made the world “better off” has now made us less secure. This is not an outlandish claim having been advanced by numerous policy experts both inside and outside our government. But its truth is beside the point right now: What is important for my purpose is that it does not, in fact, contradict his original claims.
To say that the world is “better off” with Saddam deposed is perfectly consistent with saying that as a result of this improvement in the general condition of the world “we” (Americans?) are “less secure” than we were when Saddam was in power. An example:
- I am better off being fit than not being fit.
- I am more tired having exercised than if I had not exercised.
There is no “flip-flop” if I make these claims: Attaining a desirable goal by means that cause other undesirable consequences involves no logical contradiction. This is obscured by the tendency of the op-ed writers to translate Kerry’s words in terms of not fully specified relational predicates.
It is much easier to find a contradiction between between my two claims above if I render the first as, “I am better off being fit” (concealing the relationality of the predicate) and if I translate the other by “I am not better off being fit” (misconstrue the obvious sense of my sentence). These two transformations generate a seeming “flip-flop” where none necessarily exists.
Once again, I am not claiming that John Kerry does not “flip flop.” All I would claim is that these cases of supposed flip-floppery do not bear up under careful scrutiny.