E.G.

At the Conservative Philosopher, there’s a short post by Keith Burgess-Jackson (KBJ) called "Bush-Hatin’ Paul."  (I’d link to it, but they don’t seem to have enabled permalinks at CP.)  KBJ’s post is related in an interesting way to my recent post about the demi-fallacy I’ve dubbed "begging the question against oneself."

Just so you don’t have to dig through CP’s archives, here’s KBJ’s post in its entirety:

Any philosopher will tell you that there can be more than one rationale (justification) for a given action or policy. An act of promise-keeping, for example, can be justified on both consequentialist and deontological grounds—because of the kind of act it is and because of its consequences. So why does Paul Krugman consider it morally problematic for President Bush to have—and assert—more than one rationale for Social Security reform? See here.  There are many reasons to reform Social Security. Why should President Bush pick just one of them? Don’t let Krugman hoodwink you. If there are five reasons to reform Social Security, then President Bush should emphasize all five. There is nothing whatsoever disreputable about this. Indeed, he would be a bad arguer if he ignored good arguments in support of his conclusion.

KBJ is here responding to a remark Krugman makes in the beginning of Krugman’s piece:

Social Security privatization really is like tax cuts, or the Iraq war: the administration keeps on coming up with new rationales, but the plan remains the same. President Bush’s claim that we must privatize Social Security to avert an imminent crisis has evidently fallen flat. So now he’s playing the race card.  [From here, Krugman goes on to debunk Bush’s recent claims that the present system is unfair to blacks since they die earlier and therefore are eligible to collect benefits for a shorter period of time.]

Both Krugman and KBJ seem to agree that Bush’s concern is to be a "good arguer," i.e. to convince as many people as he can that his view is the best one.  I assume both would agree that as a good arguer, Bush gives reasons he thinks others will accept without caring much whether they are the reasons he himself accepts.  As KBJ notes, this type of strategy is common among philosophers, and those with a philosophical background are likely not to see anything wrong with it.  But Krugman, an economist, apparently hasn’t done enough philosophy; he seems to take it to be intuitively obvious that there is something suspicious about this argumentative strategy.  I suspect Krugman’s intuitions on this point are widely held.  (This does not mean, of course, that those intuitions aren’t mistaken.)