Despite the detractors, Trump doing well

[Dill]

(07-04-2018, 10:24 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: There are people that argue the action was not a good one because the president did not have the authority to take it without congressional approval. That is just one angle the attack can be viewed in a negative way.

Whether something is good or bad is always going to be subjective. This was kind of my point before we started getting into the minutae. Almost everything done by the administration can be seen, legitimately, as good or bad. It's an opinion.

(07-04-2018, 10:09 PM)bfine32 Wrote: I think objective has morphed into: Something without bias and something I agree with. For instance I think the retaliation against Syria was objective (especially if you're in the camp of Trump and Russian collusion). It was a proactive move and showed the world we were not to be trifled with. What other kind of evidence could you look for? It also cured cancer?  

In discussions like this, which are really about basic epistemology, it is maybe a good thing to start out by clarifying the difference between judgments of fact and judgments of value, and the different kinds and degrees of inference which can be made from each. It is never a "fact" that some action is good or bad. That is ALWAYS a value judgment and based upon values, even it is about a "fact." That it is in this sense "subjective" (not an empirical determination) does not at all mean that it is "simply opinion" or varies randomly from individual bias to individual bias.

Acknowledging this helps to prevent confusion between logically valid value judgments on the one hand, and plain old "subjectivism" on the other, or reduction of policy issues to "facts" vs "opinions"--the latter being dismissive and often obscuring the important difference between good and bad judgment, informed and uninformed reasoning. Further, facts never just present themselves; they always emerge in some kind of framework that reflects our interests and knowledge, making some otherwise ignored feature of the world around us salient. In that sense they are subjective from the get go. I may see exactly the same light, grey and dark splotches on an ex-ray as a cancer researcher, yet he may see any number of "facts" in them that I do not, because of how his scientific vision already frames what he sees. That "framing" is in the researcher's head as much as in the splotches. And it is not the less "objective" for that. Facts always exist in relation to some framework of knowledge, scientific or otherwise.

Evaluating the "splotches" of Trump's policies and behavior is not all that different in principle from evaluating the ex-ray. What sort of knowledge-framing makes policy facts apparent, or not? Even when people agree on the facts, like Trump ordered a Syria strike on such and such a date and it occurred, there are other facts or "factors" one has to take into account before one can decide it was good or bad or even successful. 

Policy actions, especially foreign policy actions, ought to be aligning with clearly defined goals and values--in this case, foreign policy goals for the Middle East which should be part of a larger set of policy goals and American values.  Whether and the degree to which such actions can be shown both to align with values and achieve goals is how we "objectively" measure such policy. That is a framework which produces the relevant "facts."

Hollo makes an excellent point in asserting that what we call "objective" ought to be connected in some way to facts, to knowledge of facts; that assertion is itself a "value," an ethical standard, a rule for judging. What Trump's Syria strikes "showed the world" can never be simply assumed, and any claims about that ought to take into account what "the world" actually says about a given strike, how it actually responds.  To most Europeans, a  Trump-style Syria strike may only mean the US leader is erratic. And as Xi, Putin and Kim have shown the world, the US can indeed be trifled with.  When set in a proper analytic framework which compares the claimed criteria policy goals for striking Syria with other situations that also, or better, meet the criteria but are ignored, the "fact" of the strike can appear "subjectivist" and erratic in terms of motivation. That may not be good if we want consistent, rational foreign policy. The question Trump's actions raise, of course, is whether that is what his administration cares about.  

That so many in the foreign policy establishment find so many of Trump's policies bad is not prima facie evidence of their biased judgment or "hatred."  As if every president automatically has both good and bad policies in roughly equal amounts and "bias" appears in always only noting the bad.  So "naming a good thing Trump did" is not really a step in any objective analysis of Trump's policies nor likely to settle questions of "bias." It is an effort to assess the fairness of Trump criticism on the volume of that criticism, rather than referring it to Trump's actual behavior and policy.  It "de-objectifies" evaluation in search of "fairness" in proportion, regardless of the facts.