The Ethics of Supporting Bush

With the perspective of six years of the Bush administration, is it possible to ethically support the Bush administration, or is such support inherently unethical?

Why or why not?

I support Bush as the lesser of the two evils that were available to choose from. Without that restriction I would pick someone with significantly better qualifications. It would be someone who is not religious, who is more rational, who is more principled, who is less pragmatic, who is more decisive, and who is more articulate.

On paper, the credentials of Bush and Cheney are beyond reproach with formal education at the best schools, experience in the legislature and the business world, and access to world leaders. But none of that seemed to matter in the end.

By your statement-- someone who is not religious-- I assume you mean someone who is not dogmatic. It appears that Bush's relgion in particular is Methodist through his wife's affiliation by convenience and for politicals ends. It's hard for me to accept that a serial liar-- and one who lies with such regularity, ease, and deadly consequences to so many people-- in any wise a moral person and a follower of Christ.

More principled? Are you sure? At his last press conference, the president said: “I can look in the mirror and I know that I made a decision based on principle not on public opinion”. I think what Bush means is that he is committed to upholding universal norms that transcend the clamor of the mob. What it really means is that he is infected with a virus that blinds him to such irrelevancies as facts, logic, the rule of law, and the will of the people.

More decisive? Bush's great virtue to his base is that he doesn't flip flop, that he doesn't do nuance, that he stays the course, that he doesn't ask for permission slips before acting with cowboy like dispatch. The flip side of this of course is that he doesn't consider the expereince and judgement of generals and former secretaries of state and that the mistakes he makes in consequence are of biblical proportions.

Do you need to have good communication skills to be effective? Lincoln had good communications skills, but Washington did not. I think it's a important skill but not a critical skill.

I support Bush as the lesser of the two evils that were available to choose from.

You seem to present the proposition as if it is a forced choice and if it is a single choice. Politics being the art of the possible is rarely a forced choice, say, between communism or fascism. A more reasonable approach is to figure out what is important to you in terms of your values and interests and then see which candidate, platform, or party best correlates to them. My beef with most partisans is that they correlate falsehoods and half-truths with the party they support.

Also, merely because you once supported a person or party, it doesn't mean that you are wedded to that. For most people, that isn't the case, and as circumstances warrent, they will switch their vote.

Whose ethics are we to use in making that judgment?

Your own. It is however a philosophical mistake that any two person's ethics (or principles) are equivalent. A klansman and a hit man have ethics, and it is more than a mere matter of opinion that yours are superior to theirs. What makes one person's ethics superior to another's? The answer are yet other principles that are not merely subjective, such rules of logic, emperical adequacy, rational coherence, categorical values, the reasonable person rule, community standards, and so on. There are of course flaws in any one of those standards, but taken together they suffice to render an ethical judgment.