The Benefit of the Doubt

When evaluating an argument or assertion logically, you start by examining the premises. If the conclusion of the argument follows from the premises, then the argument is considered valid, but the conclusion itself is still not proven until the truth of all of the premises is proven; if all the premises are true, the argument is both valid and sound. One common technique when evaluating the premises of an argument is to see if a premise implies more than the speaker intended or would accept-- in other words, you take the premise to its logical extreme, and see if the speaker will still stand by it. For example, if someone asserts that morality is purely culturally relative, to apply this technique against their assertion all you would have to do is cite practices which some cultures condone but which are otherwise considered abhorrent-- the forced gential mutilation of women in some parts of Africa (and elsewhere), or (to cite an example from recent events), condemning the victim of a brutal gang rape to the lash for "allowing her purity to be violated" and "being with unrelated men". Yes, these are extreme examples, but they are extreme examples allowed by the original premise or assertion-- if it is true that morality is purely culturally relative, then the abhorence we feel for these acts is simply the residual effect of our own culture's morality; to judge these acts as "wrong" would be to impose our own morality upon these cultures, therefore we can not legitimately make any moral judgements against such actions. If morality is culturally delimited.

The same holds true (or should hold true) in the realm of politics. When a piece of legislation is proposed, for example, our representatives should scrutinize it and take it to its literal and logical extreme (because if they don't someone else will; this is the most common cause of all legal "loopholes"-- if the literal specification of the legislation is not explicit enough in its intent, someone will find a way to use the law in a manner unforseen by those who proposed it). This is especially true when it comes to legislation which grants the government (say, for example, the executive branch) powers that it previously did not have. I'm thinking in this case of the "warrentless wiretapping" legislation currently being battled over between the legislative and executive branches. The executive branch maintains that not only does it require the ability to listen to our private conversations without the judicial oversight of the FISA court, but also that congress must grant retroactive immunity to telecom corporations which may have illegally enabled such wiretaps. Although the Democratically controlled congress did bend to the wishes of the administration and voted to extend the so-called "Protect America" act (which grants the use of warentless wiretaps), it did not grant the administrations sought-for protection for the complicit telecommunications companies.

On Fox News this Sunday, convervative pundit Bill Kristol accussed Congress of failing to give the administration the "benefit of the doubt" in regards to warrentless wiretaps and retroactive immunity for the telecoms. Quite frankly-- that is exactly what congress should do. Our government is composed of 3 separate, co-equal branches in order to provide the checks-and-balances necessary for ensuring that one branch does not exceed its constitutionally mandated power. Congress should never give anyone the "benefit of the doubt", especially an executive branch which has previously lied about its use of the power in question. In granting the "Protect America" act, congress already failed to employee the logical principle I outlined earlier-- they either dismissed or did not bother to consider the various ways in which allowing the executive branch to wiretap at whim (without the oversight of the FISA court) could be perverted-- e.g., listening to the conversations of political rivals. Had they given, as Mr. Kristol desires, the administration the "benefit of the doubt" on granting retroactive immunity to the telecoms, they would have failed completely at their constitutionally mandated function. "Give them the benefit of the doubt" is not an argument, especially when the "them" in question is a power-hungry administration which seems pathologically averse to the truth.