Since the Mark Foley scandal, many have spoken of Republican hypocrisy — condemning gay marriage but condoning Foley's soliciting sex from underage boys. Smoldering under the surface, though, was hypocrisy so grievous I call it "hypocrisy on stilts."

On Oct. 14, The New York Times ran John Tierney's attack on scientists who believe we face devastating global climate change if we do not alter our CO2 emissions policies. Tierney wrote, " … We need to balance uncertain future benefits against certain costs today."

His immediate target is Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth." In the language of cost-benefit analysis, Tierney said the impact of global warming may be the partial destruction of the planet, but this is "uncertain," while the costs of combating climate change are immediate and certain.

Tierney admits the "significance" of the risk of climate change near the end of his article when he says, "Global warming is a real danger … It is worth paying for some insurance against drastic climate change." I understand Tierney to mean no one who has examined the evidence could reasonably assign a probability of less than 10 percent to 20 percent to the sort of scenario Gore describes in his film. Tierney's position clearly reflects the policy of the Bush administration.

Now, consider another administration policy reported in Ron Suskind's recent book "The One Percent Doctrine." According to the "Cheney Doctrine," "If there was even a one percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction … the United States must now act as if it were a certainty. This was a mandate of extraordinary breadth." Cheney is talking about some limited, though possibly large, number of people being killed — not everyone. ("WMD" can mean many things.)

We face many risks. As individuals and as a nation, we need to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Sometimes, probability can be assessed accurately. If you load four bullets in a five-shot revolver, spin the cylinder, point the pistol at your head and pull the trigger, the probability is high that you will shoot yourself. Often, probabilities are less clear. Driving your car down the street is risky.

We know that more than 40,000 people a year die in traffic accidents and many more are injured, but the probability of dying or being hurt in a particular auto trip is notoriously difficult to compute. Yet, even though the result could be horrendous (death or very serious injury), virtually every adult with access to a car takes that risk hundreds of times a year. Although the probability of being killed or injured in any one of these trips is much less than 1 percent, the likelihood of death or injury over a long portion of our lives arguably approaches 1 percent. Yet, we value our freedom of movement enough to continue to drive.

We know that combating global warming will carry heavy economic costs. On the other hand, following the "One Percent Doctrine" in a war the Bush administration says will last "decades," will cost us so many of our civil liberties that we will literally cease to be the United States of America. The counter argument that you have no rights if you're dead would only apply if essentially every American were killed, which is not envisioned in the scenarios Cheney addresses. The problem seems to be that these costs to political rights are not thought of in economic terms, while those associated with combating global warming are. Cost-benefit analysis typically focuses only on financial gains and costs.

I am not criticizing the Cheney doctrine, though I think it is a self-defeating choice for a comprehensive national policy. Nor am I attacking Tierney, though he is demonstrably wrong. I am just pointing out that these two positions are so clearly inconsistent that embracing both amounts not just to hypocrisy — it amounts to "hypocrisy on stilts."

Abraham Lincoln would not have accepted this sort of financial cost-benefit reasoning. He said this country was founded on an idea — a set of principles embodied in our Constitution. To be a patriot, Lincoln believed, meant being willing to give up your life in defense of the rights enshrined in our founding document. He called this "covenanted patriotism" because it is based on a covenant with our fellow citizens to stand together in defense of the Republic. This means the various Patriot acts are arguably unpatriotic from Lincoln's perspective. They give away too many political rights. Cheney's "One Percent Doctrine" flies in the face of Lincoln— but, more to the point, it is radically inconsistent with this administration's position regarding global warming.

In response to likely replies to this piece: 1) No, McCarthy was not right. 2) I am not talking about Iraq here. We are not fighting for our constitutional political liberties there.

The only answer to my charge is the claim that we don't really know "exactly" what the effects of climate change will be or "exactly" when they will occur. Right — and we didn't know "exactly" where terrorists would fly planes into buildings — and "exactly" when. We just knew terrorists were trying to do this.

James Roper, an MSU philosophy professor, can be reached at roper@msu.edu.