It's Not That Bad

Here's one more response to Ted H., this time regarding his criticism of Juan Cole's "chicken hawk" argument. Here's his objection to Cole, quoted at length:

...[E]ach one of us had to take a position on the Iraq War.  ...imagine you considered the case on its merits (of course, unlike Jonah, reading lots of books!) and came to the conclusion that war was justified.  ...But now imagine you've realized that you're not disposed to change your life and join the military.  What should you do?  Well, maybe you should try harder to convince yourself to join.  But say that doesn't work: you're just not going to do it.

Do your dispositions really give you an intellectual obligation to change your opinion of the war?

Two different things are being conflated in Cole's maneuver.  Yes, someone who supported the war does thereby have a reason to actively fight it.  And such a person can be criticized for not acting on this reason.  But someone who is not willing to act on the reason does not have an obligation to withdraw support for the war.

As philosophers put it, Cole's maneuver — the 'chicken hawk' maneuver — conflates practical and epistemic reasons.  Yes, supporting the war gives you a practical reason to fight it.  But the fact that you're not fighting the war does not give you an epistemic reason to withdraw your support for it.

It's worth stating right up front that Cole's argument is "fallacious," both in the sense that Ted argues for and in a sense implied by the Latin root of the term "fallacy": it is a rhetorical stratagem, rather than a purely rational argument. The stratagem has an obvious practical value: it can be used to confront and embarrass people who are cheerleading for the war from the safety and comfort of their homes. In the context of Cole's use of the argument, we needn't assume that Cole intended to do anything more than that.

Cole did seem to be overreaching a bit when he said that any young man who supported the war had an obligation to go fight in it. But Ted disposes of that business pretty straightforwardly. Why bother making the argument at all, then? Why does it have the power to embarrass? (It certainly did seem to embarrass Jonah Goldberg sufficiently that he made excuses for his non-combatant status. These excuses should have shamed him even further, if he were capable of recognizing just how pathetic and self-serving they were; or indeed if he were capable of shame in the first place.)

The "chicken hawk" stratagem embarrasses because it calls attention to two important aspects of the current war (and most other wars). One aspect is social/political, the other epistemological.

The social/political point is simply that members of the "chattering classes," whatever their opinions of the war, are unlikely to bear the serious burden of actual service. "Pundits" like Jonah Goldberg do not run much risk of having to give up months (years?) of their lives, or their family members' lives, in order to fight the war. By and large, they do not face the danger of death or mutilation on the battlefield; nor do their loved ones face that danger. Surely Ted has heard the Civil War phrase "Rich man's war; poor man's fight." The chicken hawk argument brings out rather starkly that it is easy to whip up enthusiasm for a war in which the costs will be borne by others. The situation is a moral hazard, of sorts.

More important, though, is the epistemological concern. It's one that Paul Fussell has made in a different context (in his essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb"). The concern here is that someone who has no first-hand knowledge of the human costs of war, no likelihood of getting that knowledge, and no loved ones who can provide vivid second-hand knowledge, runs the risk of systematically undervaluing those costs.

So while Ted would like to consider the case of someone who has made up his mind about the war and then discovers himself unwilling to fight, the "chicken hawk" questions whether the decision that war is justified is epistemologically proper, whether or not it has been made with full information. And I suspect that this underlies the social/political point, as well. Someone who will not bear the most serious costs of the war may be tempted to give those costs insufficient weight when trying to decide whether or not war is justified. (There's more to the social/political point, of course; someone could fully understand those costs and still be gung-ho for the war simply because he doesn't care about his fellow citizens' suffering. I'm not sure if that would count as moral justification; it sounds like the realpolitik that Ted rightly condemns.)

The epistemological content of the chicken hawk stratagem gives it even more resonance in the context of Cole's use of it, namely questioning Goldberg's competence to render judgment on any aspect of the Iraq war. Given that Cole smacked Goldberg around like a red-headed stepchild in this exchange, perhaps Ted's critique is misdirected.

One final note. Ted remarks at the outset that he disagrees with Jonah Goldberg "about almost everything," and agrees with Juan Cole about much. But rather than talk about the many ways in which he disagrees with Goldberg, or the many ways in which he agrees with Cole, he spends his time explaining just what Cole has done wrong. This is a long-standing habit in Ted's blog, and may explain why he got such a lot of unpleasant responses from his readers. What, exactly, is the point of nitpicking over Cole's tiny divergences from a Platonic ideal of rational debate, while lumping over Goldberg's daily idiocies? Whether or not Ted intends it, this has the effect of holding the intelligent, well-informed Cole to a much higher standard than Goldberg. Is it that surprising that commentators regard him as hostile to the sensible and well-informed liberal view, and friendly to the ideologically hidebound and ignorant right-wing view?

Please do not make this argument any more. It is bad.