President Obama described Cheney et al as the 'anything goes' faction.
‘Anything goes’ is a musical comedy by Cole Porter about farcical antics on an ocean liner traveling from New York to London, one which was later put to film by Lewis Milestone, who is most famous for his film ‘All quiet on the Western Front.’
‘Anything goes’ is also famously the motto of Paul Feyerabend’s brilliant book on the so-called scientific revolution called Against Method and published by the premier British Marxist press New Left Books (‘Verso’).
President Obama in his important speech at the National Archives about the constitution and war made this characterization of the (Vulcan or Cheney-Bolton ) right:
‘On the one side of the spectrum, there are those who make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism, and would almost never put national security over transparency. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are those who embrace a view that can be summarized in two words: "Anything goes." Their arguments suggest that the ends of fighting terrorism can be used to justify any means, and that the President should have blanket authority to do whatever he wants -- provided it is a President with whom they agree.’
‘Anything goes’ is a musical comedy by Cole Porter about farcical antics on an ocean liner traveling from New York to London, one which was later put to film by Lewis Milestone, who is most famous for his film ‘All quiet on the Western Front.’
‘Anything goes’ is also famously the motto of Paul Feyerabend’s brilliant book on the so-called scientific revolution called Against Method and published by the premier British Marxist press New Left Books (‘Verso’). In it, Feyerabend illustrated how Galileo, often indicated as the inventor of the ‘scientific method’, had in fact faked his data as part of his strategy of getting the public of his time to believe his theories about the planets being substantive pieces of rock in a vacuum moving according to mechanical laws.
Feyerabend, called a ‘methodological anarchist’, or calling himself that, was probably most clearly illustrating the ‘methodological anarchy’ directing in part or whole the project of scientific investigation as an attack on the Tory right-wing philosopher Karl Popper.
Feyerabend was referring in a broad sense to the so-called positivist model of natural scientific and analytic philosophical research (e.g., Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic); and it is particularly problematic to shift from an analysis of positivist natural science models to the ‘practical sciences’ of ethics and politics, in which the ‘law’ may or may not fit depending upon whether one insists on a ‘positivist’ model or not (e.g. the school of John Austin).
Obama or his speech writer have thus actually chosen ‘critics’ from the left, critics of an ‘anything goes’ approach in the most general form, as a means of characterizing one side of the spectrum, that defending torture as an instrument of US foreign policy, i.e., what common sense would call the ‘right’ side of the spectrum.
Besides Galileo, the other important renaissance person rattling around in this important passage of Obama’s speech is Machiavelli. Machiavelli, of course is credited with the ‘modern’ doctrine of the ‘means justify the ends’; fewer know that he was the chief diplomat for the Republic of Florence, and later, when that republic was over-thrown by the proto-bourgeois family of the Medici, he was tortured, and then exiled. But in the Prince, he does not argue that the ends should justify the means. He merely points out that if one operates according to the theological virtues, or platitudes as he considered them – his list could be translated including the so-called theological virtues as piety (pieta), faith (feda), charity (carita), religion (religion) - then realistically we can expect the argument that the ends justify the means to work (ch. 18).
Machiavelli is notably silent in this famous passage on the classical virtues of prudence/wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice. These are classically the virtues of a republic as inspired by the classical democratic constitution; and Machiavelli, in the book where he defends republics, his ‘Discourse on Livy’, has this to say about the virtues of trying those who commit crimes against the Republic:
‘No authority more useful and necessary can be granted to those appointed to look after the liberties of a state than that of being able to indict before the people or some magistrate or court such citizens as have committed any offence prejudicial to the freedom of a state. ...One notes in the [the story of Coriolanus] how useful and necessary it is for republics [contrasted here as usual with principalities or ‘unitary executives’] to provide a legal outlet for the anger which the general public has conceived against a particular citizen, because when no such normal means are available, recourse is had to abnormal means, which unquestionably have a worse effect than does the normal method.’ (Discourses on Titus Livy, I.7, ed. B Crick).
Machiavelli in his critique of the platitudinous theological virtues in his Prince did not include the middle theological virtue of ‘hope’ between ‘faith’ and ‘charity’.
By focusing on Cheney and Bolton, though not by name, Obama might be said, despite the role of the American Enterprise Institute, to be triangulating ‘neo-conservatives’ vis-à-vis the true war politicians like Cheney and Bolton. But there is no text or tradition associating 'anything goes' with the right, except via critics of the right.
Nixon was no philosopher, and Prof. Rice is not the most brilliant political scientist unless she is being kept in check by her Hoover Foundation 'chief of staff.'