Because I am about to criticize Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations advocating the American invasion of Iraq, which has caused much grief with thousands killed, hundreds of thousands wounded, millions displaced, and billions [in dollars] wasted, I must say at the outset that I have long admired him.
True, I have wondered how he could successfully serve presidents as different as Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Yet he strikes me as a decent man who carries the title "General" [which he prefers to "Mr. Secretary"] with intelligence and dignity.
I think that he and his wife, Alma, an impressive person too, would be excellent neighbors, with whom we could leave the keys and not worry about a thing. Also, the work they are doing for this nation's children is both exemplary and effective. That says much!
This is why their recent appearance on the "Larry King Live!" television program, which is broadcast by CNN all around the word, made me regret his speech to the United Nations even more. He said to Larry King that things in Iraq have turned out worse than he expected, that he did not resign when he was Secretary of State in protest of the preparations for war because he thinks it inappropriate to leave when things get difficult and that in other parts of the world the State Department was accomplishing much good.
Larry King asked Mrs. Powell whether it is true that she holds, as widely reported, that the Bush administration "callously used" her husband. She said it is. As I now remember it, King asked Powell if he also felt that he had been treated this way. He nodded quietly.
I don't think the Bush administration literally forced Powell to say what he did, though it almost certainly applied much pressure. It seems unlikely that he consciously lied. Nor do I think that he was trying to "create a reality" by constantly talking about it without regard to the facts, something some political figures have been known to do.
At the time he gave the speech I think Powell believed what he said. But therein lies the problem. I don't think he had a moral right to believe what he did.
There is an "ethics of belief" and it matters. We do not have moral permission to believe anything. Our beliefs must correspond to the evidence as we see it. The whole of civilization rests upon this principle and so does our ability as individuals to live with ourselves.
W. K. Clifford, a nineteenth century thinker in England, was one of the first to talk about the "ethics of belief." He contended that a person of integrity matches his or her beliefs to the evidence and is only as adamant as the evidence allows. The man who sends people to the high seas while harboring doubts about the ship's adequacy violates the "ethics of belief," he held. This would be true even if the ship reached its destination safely. This man squelched his doubts and thereby put many people at risk.
Powell's speech and its aftermath match Clifford's scenario almost perfectly. That he had doubts about the wisdom of invading Iraq has been reliably reported. But to my best recollection, he did not express them to the United Nations. He made the case for going to war, with the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency sitting directly behind him, clearly within television's view, without putting before the assembled delegates from around the world his own uncertainties and perplexities.
An ethically superior speech would have surveyed the reasons for going to war and the reasons not to. Powell could have even reported which set of reasons was more convincing to him at the time and why. Sadly, it appears as though he violated the "ethics of belief" by making himself appear more certain than he actually was. The results have been disastrous, as more and more people are now seeing.
William James, who stands beside the likes of Jonathan Edwards and Josiah Royce as one of North America's best "home grown" philosophers, vigorously objected to Clifford's account of the "ethics of belief." Advancing what he called the "will to believe," which many have misunderstood and derided, James held that when the issue is important, when the evidence is equally balanced and when a decision is forced, it is ethically acceptable--even necessary--arbitrarily to choose either course of action and follow it wholeheartedly.
Because James was a doctor, it seems appropriate to offer a medical illustration. There have been times when physicians genuinely have not known which of two treatments is better even though both are better than all other alternatives and much better than doing nothing at all. In such cases it is ethically appropriate to choose either one or to flip a coin. Having made this "choice," we should follow the treatment plan as vigorously as possible until the new evidence shows that doing so is only making things worse.
Key to James' account of the "ethics of belief" is that the decision is "forced," that not to make it now is by that very refusal to make a choice anyway, one that may be worse than the other options one might have selected. But when Powell addressed the United Nations, making a decision about invading Iraq did not have to be made at that time.
This decision was not "forced." More time could have been given, and should have been provided, for the United Nations inspectors to complete their work. That things were hurried along, that a decision was made when it was, that it could have been made subsequently, when the evidence was more conclusive one way or another, contributed to our present woes.
Van Harvey, a longtime professor at Stanford University, has also made important contributions to the "ethics of belief" debate. One of these is that it is not ethically necessary for us to test every assertion for our selves before we act on it. We have a moral right to trust those whom we properly expect to know what is going on. Children are allowed, ethically speaking, to trust their parents, students their teachers, patients their doctors and nurses and so on. This trust is neither gullibility nor sentimentalism because it is presumptive, not absolute. We have moral permission to trust people such as these until we know we can't.
Of these three positions in the "ethics of beliefs" debate, and there are many others, this is the one that casts the darkest shadow of moral doubt over Colin Powell's speech. He was a person we should have been able to trust. Because his role as Secretary of State was akin to that of a parent, teacher or doctor, with all the extra responsibilities that this entails, it was his duty, perhaps more than any one else's, to tell us the truth as he best saw it. He did not do this because he allowed himself to believe something he had no right to believe. He ignored his own doubts, at least in public. The public Colin Powell misled the public.
All of this has to do with something Powell did, not who he is. Good people sometimes do wrong things just as bad people sometimes do right things. It is one thing to assess the action (deed) and a very different thing to judge the actor (doer). "The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart." ( I Samuel 16:7. New Revised Standard Version.)