President of Good and Evil The Ethics of George W. Bush

Chapter 1 Introduction We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. oGeorge W. Bush, United States Military Academy, West Point, June 1, 2002 George W. Bush is not only Americais president, but also its most prominent moralist. No other president in living memory has spoken so often about good and evil, right and wrong. His inaugural address was a call to build ia single nation of justice and opportunity.i A year later, he famously proclaimed North Korea, Iran and Iraq to be an iaxis of evil,i and in contrast, he called the United States ia moral nation.i He defends his tax policy in moral terms, saying that it is fair, and gives back to taxpayers what is rightfully theirs. The case he makes for free trade is inot just monetary, but moral.i Open trade is a imoral imperative.i Another imoral imperative,i he says, is alleviating hunger and poverty throughout the world. He has said that iAmericais greatest economic need is higher ethical standards.i In setting out the iBush doctrine,i which defends preemptive strikes against those who might threaten America with weapons of mass destruction, he asserted: iMoral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place.i But in what moral truths does the president believe? Considering how much the president says about ethics, it is surprising how little serious discussion there has been of the moral philosophy of George W. Bush.Bushis tendency to see the world in terms of good and evil is especially striking. He has spoken about evil in 319 separate speeches, or about 30 percent of all the speeches he gave between the time he took office and June 16, 2003. In these speeches he uses the word ievili as a noun far more often than he uses it as an adjectiveo914 noun uses as against 182 adjectival uses. Only 24 times, in all these occasions on which Bush talks of evil, does he use it as an adjective to describe what people doothat is, to judge acts or deeds. This suggests that Bush is not thinking about evil deeds, or even evil people, nearly as often as he is thinking about evil as a thing, or a force, something that has a real existence apart from the cruel, callous, brutal and selfish acts of which human beings are capable. His readiness to talk about evil in this manner raises the question of what meaning evil can have in a secular modern world. My professional interest in the presidentis ethics dates from his intervention in my own field, bioethics, in his first special prime-time televised address to the nation as president on August 9, 2001. The speech was devoted to the ethical questions raised by stem cell research. I was preparing to teach a graduate seminar on bioethics when I learned that Bush was going to speak to the nation on that topic. Issues about the moral status of human embryos were part of the syllabus for my course, and I thought it might be interesting for my students to read and discuss what the president had to say. As an educational tool, that worked well, for the speech provides a clear example of an unargued assumption that is very common in the debate about abortion and early human life. Following the events of September 11, 2001, the nation turned from its discussion of stem cells to terrorism and how to respond to it. But once Bushis ethics had caught my attention in one field, I paid more attention to all the other issues that he saw in moral terms. To what extent, I asked myself, does the president have a coherent moral philosophy? Is there a clear moral view lying behind the particular views he expresses, and if so, what is it? This book expounds George W. Bushis ethic as it is found in his speeches, writings, and other comments, as well as in the decisions he has made as an elected official. It does not attempt the impossible task of covering everything he has said and done, or even every major issue of his presidSinger, Peter is the author of 'President of Good and Evil The Ethics of George W. Bush' with ISBN 9780525948131 and ISBN 0525948139.