patrick.ainge.com

I felt the need to share a small portion of David Luban’s excellent post over at Balkinization:

[T]he Bush administration is not big on European philosophers. So perhaps we can develop the philosophy in purely Bushian terms. To highlight its logic, I will present it in mathematical form, the way that Spinoza presented his ethics:

Axiom 1: We are good people.

Axiom 2: Our enemies are bad people.

Axiom 3: Anything that helps good people beat bad people is good.

Corollary 1: Whatever we do to beat our enemies is good.

Corollary 2: Whatever hinders us from doing what we do to beat our enemies is bad.

Theorem 1: Anything that makes us look bad is false.
(Proof: If it makes us look bad, it must be false, because, according to Corollary 1, what we do to beat our enemies is good, not bad.)

Corollary 3: It can’t be true that the Guantanamo prisoners killed themselves because of how we treated them.
(Proof: That would make us look bad. Whatever makes us look bad is false.)

Surprising Corollary 4: Facts that make us look bad are false.
(Proof: Follows directly from Theorem 1.)
(Comment: If you thought that facts can’t be false, you haven’t understood that truth and falsity are moral terms: truth is what good people say, falsity is what bad people say. If bad people state facts, those facts are false.)

Theorem 2: Laws that constrain us are bad.
(Proof: Follows directly from Corollary 2.)

Axiom 4: Good people support the rule of law, and that makes the rule of law good.

Corollary 4: We support the rule of law.
(Proof: By Axiom 1, we’re good people; and by Axiom 4, good people support the rule of law.)

Surprising Theorem 3: Laws that constrain us don’t exist.
(Proof: By Theorem 2, a law that constrains us would be bad. But by Axiom 4, the rule of law is good. Therefore there cannot be such a thing as a law that constrains us.)

Axiom 5: Anything that anyone uses against us is a weapon of our enemies.

Decisive Theorem: Any international forum or legal argument that might constrain us, or anything that might make us look bad, is a weapon of our enemies.

Axiom 6: We’re strong and our enemies are weak.

Corollary 5: Any international forum or legal argument that might constrain us, or anything that might make us look bad, is a weapon of the weak. To put it in other words, it is an act of asymmetric war against us.

QED