DEAD PARROT BULLETIN, 3/28/04

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Bringing rigorous intellectual analysis to bear on the moral philosophy of George W. Bush seems, as sport, about on a par with shotgunning tame pheasants at their point of release from the cage. The fat, lazy birds can barely get it together to fly. But Bush, as Peter Singer points out in his introduction to The President of Good and Evil (Dutton, 2004), is "America's most prominent moralist"; and because of his enormous power to make the rest of us live out the consequences of his code, we have no choice but to take it seriously and examine it on its own terms.

Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton, made his name three decades ago with Animal Liberation, the founding work of the animal rights movement. An unlikely hand with a shotgun, he nevertheless takes no prisoners in this exacting and uncompromising new book. "Good" and "evil" (by June, 2003, Bush had used the noun form of the latter no fewer than 914 times in presidential speeches) are of course high-order abstractions; but there is nothing rarefied or academic about Singer's arguments. The President of Good and Evil is founded on fact, bolted together with logic, and written in straightforward, non-technical language. Singer starts with what Bush says about right and wrong and tests it against what the Bush administration has actually done. The picture that emerges--of self-righteous posturing and class reflex, of confusion and contradiction, of careless muddle and sheer hypocrisy--resembles nothing more than a pile of bloody feathers.

Though Singer says he has limited himself to focusing "on those issues that most sharply raise fundamental ethical principles," the book actually offers a quite comprehensive overview of the major themes of the Bush presidency. A look at Singer's treatment of two of these themes will suffice to give a sense of his method.

1) The "Tax Relief" Theme

In his effort to register the compassionate side of "compassionate conservatism," Bush has done a lot of talking about a national ideal of equality. "We will tell every American, 'The dream is for you,'" he told an audience in Indianapolis in 1999. In his inaugural address, he promised that he would "work to build a single nation of justice and opportunity." Singer devotes one of his best chapters to showing the inconsistency between this glossy rhetoric and the series of upper-class tax cuts that the administration and its congressional allies have passed. The slogan "It's your money" with which Bush has sold these cuts is a crude and deceitful oversimplification, sweeping under the rug the extent to which income is a social construct, possible only because a government dependent on taxes has created the conditions that permit people to work and be paid--the conditions, that is, of civil society.

A key point in the Bush tax relief program is the repeal of the estate tax--a move that runs directly counter to Bush's professed vision of extending the American dream. "If we want to enhance equality of opportunity," Singer argues, "it is hard to think of a better way to start than with a tax on inherited wealth. Such a tax makes society fairer because it taxes people who are receiving a benefit that they have done nothing to deserve." But conservatives, who experience delicious spasms of indignation at the idea of welfare for the poor, believe that the children of the wealthy have a natural right to what Singer quotes Warren Buffet as calling "a lifetime of food stamps based on coming out of the right womb."

America is substantially farther from being an equitable society than it was 25 years ago. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the after-tax income of the wealthiest 1 percent rose 157 percent between 1979 and 1997; middle class income went up 5 percent; the income of the bottom fifth went down. Yet, starting as soon as he took office, the president who pledged to work for a "single nation of justice and opportunity" chose to squander an enormous budget surplus, which could have been used to address some of the inequities--by providing, for example, better health care, better public transportation, and a cleaner, safer environment--on tax cuts that have widened the gap. "The number of Americans living in poverty rose in 2001," Singer notes, "and increased again in 2002."

2) The "Respect for Life" Theme

Bush's repeated claims that an important part of his mission as president is to promote a "culture of life" have led him into an impenetrable briar patch of contradictions. Singer, who is on his own turf here, relentlessly exposes every twisted rationale. In August, 2001, Bush announced his decision that no further human embryos were to be destroyed in stem-cell research, even though the research promises therapies for lethal or crippling diseases that affect as many as 128 million Americans. To his credit, Bush did not try to conceal the possible benefits; in fact, the "128 million" figure appeared in a White House fact sheet. He simply said that embryos are human life and therefore "something precious to be protected."

Singer accepts the premise but questions the conclusion. He points out that approximately three million embryos die of natural causes every year in the U.S. and that Bush shows no interest in preventing these losses. He asks why human lives are necessarily more valuable than those of the animals that federally funded researchers sacrifice by the millions. If the answer is that humans have a capacity for thought and feeling and other high-level mental activities, then embryos, which have no such capacity, should be able to claim no privilege over other species. If the potential of embryos is the point, then logic would require Bush to insist that every one of the extra embryos routinely produced by in vitro fertilization clinics be implanted in some willing or unwilling woman's uterus. Of course he made no such case. As political theater aimed to please the religious right, the stem cell decision needed no untidy plot complications.

In fact, the politics of "respect for life" play out in a peculiarly gerrymandered district, where some lives are deemed more worthy of protection than others. The sentimental preference for the imaginary lives of embryos over the real lives of 128 million sick people is only one case in point. Singer recalls the glee with which Bush more than once spoke of the death warrants he signed as Texas governor and of his opposition to a bill that would have spared severely retarded criminals from execution. Capital punishment, Bush insisted in his third debate with Al Gore, "saves other people's lives." Singer reviews the studies of murder rates in jurisdictions with and without the death penalty and finds this claim almost certainly false. More sharply, he notes that when Bush in 1997 okayed the execution of a 33-year-old man with the mental capacity of a 7-year-old, he "was deliberately causing the death of a morally innocent human being as a means of saving the lives of others. That is, of course, exactly what he refuses to support in the case of human embryos."

In the hierarchy of the protected, Iraqi civilians rank more or less even with retarded murderers. Dead Parrot has often addressed the ludicrous claim that we waged a clean war in which vengeance fell with laser-guided precision on the heads of the guilty alone. Singer sifts some of the same overwhelming evidence to the contrary and also comes up with a point we had not seen before: the NY Times reported (7/20/03) that "There was a procedure in place that required the approval of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for air attacks that were considered likely to kill more than thirty civilians. More than fifty such attacks were proposed, and Rumsfeld approved all of them." In other words, the administration not only knew that its claim about shielding civilians was false but had systematized the conditions for killing them. If Iraq had been inhabited solely by embryos, Rumsfeld might have been more choosy.

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The President of Good and Evil probes many more such sophistries. Does Bush believe in "trusting individuals to make decisions"? Yes, but only if he personally approves of the decisions they make. (On issues like physician-assisted suicide, medical marijuana, and single-sex marriage, he is a straight big-government man.) Does Bush believe that he presides over "the greatest and freest nation in the world"? Yes, and the American citizens and foreign nationals that he has incarcerated indefinitely by executive fiat don't count. Does Bush believe in acting aggressively to repel a threat, even before all the facts are in? Yes, unless the threat is global warming, which he finds it politically expedient to ignore. Does Bush believe that his own religious faith is a guide to public policy? Yes--and so does Osama bin Laden.

The best thing about The President of Good and Evil is its recognition that language is an indispensable ethical tool. Singer values words, weighs them carefully, and will not accept their empty, sloppy, or disingenuous use by others. It's too bad that Bush's teachers at Andover and Yale failed to imbue him with similar scruples.