Category Archives: Op-Eds and other opinions

Argument Analysis, Op-Eds and other opinions, Post hoc ergo propter

everyday logic

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Two bloggish items today on the role of logic in ordinary discourse. First, Michael Kinsley writes in the *Washington Post*:

Opinion journalism brings new ethical obligations as well. These can be summarized in two words: intellectual honesty. Are you writing or saying what you really think? Have you tested it against the available counter arguments? Will you stand by an expressed principle in different situations, when it leads to an unpleasing conclusion? Are you open to new evidence or an argument that might change your mind? Do you retain at least a tiny, healthy sliver of a doubt about the argument you choose to make?

Even more basically, Kinsley might suggest the following: have you arrived at your conclusion by a cogent or coherent argument? Is your characterization of the opposing points of view charitable and accurate? Have you drawn on commonly agreed on facts in the construction of your argument? And we could go on.

Kinsley's comment, nonetheless, is certainly welcome. Especially in light of articles that consider the pernicious, the outrageous, the preposterous Bill O'Reilly to be merely an entertainer. If only it were true.

Second, I was reminded of a trip I took three years ago to a little town in Indiana when I read in the liberal media that

Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.

And so Lisa's rock does not keep away tigers after all. The trip as you might imagine was an academic job interview. In the department was a recent Ivy League graduate in religion (it was one of those combined philosophy and religion departments) who asserted the mounting evidence for the causally efficacious role of prayer on health. Such was, as he pointed out, the subject matter of his research. I can't help but think that my shock at such a silly and possibly heretical thesis was written on my face. I wonder how the research was received down in Hoosier country.

George Will, Straw Man

Don’t say “vouch”

In January of this year, the Florida Supreme Court–yes, that’s the one–held in a 5-2 ruling that tax payer funded vouchers for private school violate the state’s constitution. I wonder what their reasons were. But why bother, when you’re George Will you can attack their motivations and the people who approve:

>But Florida’s Supreme Court fulfilled the desires of the teachers unions, and disrupted the lives of the 733 children and their parents, by declaring, in a 5 to 2 ruling, that the voucher program is incompatible with the state constitution. Specifically, and incredibly, the court held that the OSP violates the stipulation, which voters put into the constitution in 1998, that the state shall provide a “uniform, efficient, safe, secure, and high quality system of free public schools that allows students to obtain a high quality education.”

Gee, George. You say “incredibly” but you don’t bother to point to any of the court’s actual reasons for its positions. Unlike twice or thrice weekly columnists, and once a week TV pundits, courts publish detailed *arguments* for their positions. These arguments offer *reasons*. Sometimes they please people, sometimes they don’t. But that fact does not make them credible or incredible. They are incredible if they distort facts, or if they reason badly, or have no basis in the law.

But why bother with such details when you have the power of the simple assertion:

>The court’s ruling was a crashing non sequitur: that the public duty to provide something (quality education) entails a prohibition against providing it in a particular way (utilizing successful private educational institutions). The court’s ruling was neither constitutional law nor out of character, and it illustrates why the composition of courts has become such a contentious political issue.

As readers of this site know, a non sequitur is a logical fallacy. Like the straw man in the previous sentence; Will has hopelessly distorted the argument of the Florida Supreme Court. The following snippet from USA Today makes a point George didn’t:

>But Thursday’s ruling ultimately could affect these and other voucher programs. The court found that taxpayer support for private schools in general is unconstitutional because Florida’s constitution requires “a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high-quality system of free public schools.” Private schools aren’t “uniform when compared with each other or the public system,” the justices wrote. They’re also exempt from public standards on teacher credentials and requirements to teach about a wide range of subjects, such as civics, U.S. and world history and minorities’ and women’s contributions to history.

So missing from Will’s argument is a discussion of what the court meant by “uniformity,” one of the central legal issues in their ruling. And its absence surely makes the Florida court’s ruling look silly and arbitrary. And so Will can make the following Cornynesque assertion: “The court’s ruling was neither constitutional law nor out of character, and it illustrates why the composition of courts has become such a contentious political issue.” Having avoided the content of their argument by straw man, will can turn to attacking the motivations of the judges (all five democrat appointees) and the people who were pleased by the ruling (the NEA). A crashing non sequitur indeed. Don’t misspell misspelling.

None of this means the court’s decision was right–which it probably was however–but it’s certainly not wrong on Will’s childish and confused libertarian whining. After all–what happens if the state gains financial access to private education? Then they will have the means and the power to enforce “uniformity”; that means the science class will have to teach something other than creationism.

Appeal to Ignorance, False Dichotomy, Ignoratio Elenchi, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments, Straw Man

Maxima culpa (eorum)

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On the subject of straw men, the Associated Press could also have noted that the President is not alone in ridiculing his opponents–he is just less adept at it. In today’s *Washington Post*, Fareed Zakaria tears a page from the President’s play book; but befitting a professional opiniator, he does it with more subtlety.

After a string of *culpae eorum* (their, not his, faults) regarding the failures of intervention in Iraq, Zakaria asserts:

>And yet, for all my misgivings about the way the administration has handled this policy, I’ve never been able to join the antiwar crowd. Nor am I convinced that Iraq is a hopeless cause that should be abandoned.

Note that “hopeless” and “abandoned” sound a lot like “cut” and “run”–only less Texan. Nowhere in the piece does Zakaria address the reasonable (but not necessarily correct) alternatives to his strategy of staying the course–outside of, that is, the phrase “antiwar crowd.” So, one might surmise that the only other option to continuing with our increasingly disastrous (body count, political instability, etc.) intervention is the anti-war crowd. Despite his more reasoned tone then, Zakaria has used the straw man “some say” technique as the president, and as such, it is impossible for the reader to determine whether his three arguments for staying are any good.

Luckily, however, one doesn’t need to have present to mind an alternative to see just how bad these reasons are.

The first:

>So why have I not given up hope? Partly it’s because I have been to Iraq, met the people who are engaged in the struggle to build their country and cannot bring myself to abandon them.

And the oaths of TV pundits are written on water.

Second:

>there is no doubt that the costs of the invasion have far outweighed the benefits. But in the long view of history, will that always be true? If, after all this chaos, a new and different kind of Iraqi politics emerges, it will make a difference in the region.

It may or may not always be true that Iraq will be a disaster. But it’s very likely that it will be. It’s only getting worse. The possibility of it not being the case is hardly reason to stay. And it has made a difference in the region–it has emboldened Iran and served as a training ground and recruiting depot for all sorts of new terrorists.

Finally:

>These sectarian power struggles can get extremely messy, and violent parties have taken advantage of every crack and cleavage. But this may be inevitable in a country coming to terms with very real divisions and disagreements. Iraq may be stumbling toward nation-building by consent, not brutality. And that is a model for the Middle East.

A “sectarian power struggle” sounds like code for bloody religious civil war where the victor is determined by brutality and force of arms (and perhaps Iranian intervention, among other such things). How this means they are stumbling toward nation-building by consent is simply a mystery. All of the evidence Zakaria cites points in the other direction.

But again, these three really bad reasons only make marginal sense in the context of an absurd alternative. Perhaps one as knowledgeable of foreign affairs as Zakaria could find the time to research some of them.

Charles Krauthammer, Slippery Slope

Slippery implication

I also remember reading this essay ten years ago in, I think, *Time*:

>As Newsweek notes, these stirrings for the mainstreaming of polygamy (or, more accurately, polyamory) have their roots in the increasing legitimization of gay marriage. In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is *utterly logical* for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one’s autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement — the number restriction (two and only two) — is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice.

And so I’ve noticed that Charles Krauthammer confuses the fallacious slippery slope with strict logical implication. Just because society grants rights to gay marriages between *two* persons of adult age (even by the judicial fiat of legitimate constitutional interpretation–see the first ten amendments to your U.S. Constitution for details) does not imply anything about *three* or *fifty-three* persons of adult or other age. As Krauthammer’s otherwise silly piece points out, marriage rites are conventional and so don’t obey the kind of implicational structure he suggests they do:

>On the other hand, polygamy was sanctioned, indeed common, in large parts of the world through large swaths of history, most notably the biblical Middle East and through much of the Islamic world.

So he does realize that gay marriage does not imply polygamy (or polyandry) and vice-versa. The connection is not logical or causal but merely psychological. Krauthammer’s argument–though studded with n0t-that-there’s-anything-wrong with-thats–does little to camouflage its illogical appeal to simple prejudice.

E.J.Dionne, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments

Bad Times

Things are going really badly for Republicans and the Bush administration, so notes E.J.Dionne in the *Post*, but he adds that it’s not “flatly false” to claim that things are going so hot for Democrats either. He makes this surprisingly weak-kneed remark in the context of a discussion of the phony “balance” stories that infect the national argument; bad news for the Bush administration must necessarily be accompanied by bad news (however contrived) for the Democrats, otherwise, charges (however specious) of “liberal media” will fly. And so Dionne complies.

And then he complies some more. After, correctly again, pointing out that this form of rancid (to borrow from The Daily Howler) national discourse rests on a false premise, Dionne concedes:

>The Democrats’ real problem is that they have failed to show how their critique of the Republican status quo is the essential first step toward the alternative program they will owe the voters in the presidential year of 2008.

And this is precisely the kind of second-order horse race commentary typical of Dionne. Rather than drive home the conclusion that the premise of the argument the Republicans most often make (in print, on cable television and talk radio) is hollow and wrong, Dionne steps outside of the argument and concedes (without citing any evidence other than the Republicans he is criticizing) that the Democrats have no positive vision. He continues:

>This failure has made it easier for Republicans to cast anti-Bush feeling (aka, “Bush hatred”) as a psychological disorder. The GOP shrewdly makes the president’s critics look crazed and suggests that opposition to Bush is of no more significance than, say, the loathing that many watchers of “American Idol” love to express toward Simon Cowell, the meanest of the show’s judges.

Dionne believes and so ought to argue that the Republican argument is intellectually irresponsible, wrong, fallacious, pernicious–outrageous. But he concedes to the Republican strategy he criticizes when he says that it’s not “flatly false” to claim things aren’t going well for the Democrats. If Dionne could be considered the typical Democrat, they’re right.

Charles Krauthammer, Plain Bad Arguments

At the movies

With so much going wrong for the results of real world arguments of his Republican fans (Iraq, Katrina, Scooter, DeLay, Cheney’s aim, illegal spying, and so on), Charles Krauthammer has turned to the art of fictional film criticism. His piece takes aim at *Syriana* in particular (though he also mentions *Paradise Now*, a foreign film about suicide bombers, as well as Spielberg’s *Munich*). Reading his piece we were reminded of the subtle work of another newspaper blowhard–Richard Roeper. Roeper’s frequent complaint about films is that he “doesn’t buy it.” Poor Roger Ebert must then remind him that it’s a fictional film, so it’s not true, and there’s nothing “to buy.”

Sure, films like that can level criticism, but one way *not* to read it is this:

>The most pernicious element in the movie is the character at the moral heart of the film: the beautiful, modest, caring, generous Pakistani who becomes a beautiful, modest, caring, generous . . . suicide bomber. In his final act, the Pure One, dressed in the purest white robes, takes his explosives-laden little motorboat headfirst into his target.

For Krauthammer, anything short of spitting condemnation of terrorism constitutes self-loathing anti-americanism. The film’s failure to condemn the bomber constitutes an endorsement to Krauthammer’s woefully shallow dichotomous mind. For our part, the youth’s falling in with radical Islamic terrorism was a tragedy in the real sense of the term. His generosity and spirituality were exploited to nefarious ends. And, as is the case with all tragedies, he was the agent of self-destruction. The view identifies to some extent with him (but not his aims) because that is what fictional tragedies are all about. So, at the very least, Krauthammer is guilty of genre confusion: fictional tragedies must be assessed in different ways than actual documentaries.

At the moment, there are too many real world problems caused by views akin to those of Krauthammer and his Republican friends for him to be trying to unearth evidence of Hollywood anti-americanism. Perhaps he should turn his attention to those and save the aisle seat for Roger Ebert.

E.J.Dionne, George Will, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments

Robin Hood

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Try to guess who wrote the following:

>Sims’s idea reminds Democrats that a commitment to active government is not simply about redistributing wealth.

In case you thought it was the author of this:

>He annoys the establishment because he, unlike it, believes things. He believes that the establishment is proof of a conservative axiom: Any political group or institution that is not ideologically conservative will become, over time, liberal. That is so because, in the absence of a principled adherence to limited government, careerism — the political idea of the unthoughtful — will cause incumbents to use public spending to purchase job security.

You’d have been almost right. Despite their ideological differences, each seems to embrace the same shallow caricature relentlessly broadcasted by the pith and vinegar right wing argument army. The first, in case you you’re still wondering, is E.J.Dionne–liberal columnist. The second, of course, is none other than Dionne’s *Post* colleague George Will.

Dionne finds it refreshing, even instructive to *Democrats* (not just to those who have swallowed the Republican talking point whole), that there exists a Democrat who does not merely steal from the rich to give to the (undeserving) poor.

Such hokum one might expect of Will. If for him purchasing job security is identical with being liberal, then Tom DeLay, and all of the other criminally indicted and soon to be indicted of the party he so frequently shills for are liberals. Rather than embracing such shallow caricatures, Dionne ought to use his space in the *Post* to call Will and others out on such obvious dishonest and malicious equivocations.

That Dionne adopts such empty talking points as this merely underscores the spinelessness of most of the liberal commentariat.

E.J.Dionne, Op-Eds and other opinions, Paul Krugman, Plain Bad Arguments, V.D.Hanson

UNbelievable

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Yesterday I almost wrote a post on E.J.Dionne’s column. Outside of Paul Krugman (whose locked up behind the wall of Times Select), it was the first vigorously argumentative piece by a “progressive” commentator in recent memory. And of course by that I mean it advanced an argumentative thesis rather than a blandly centrist explanatory one. For all of their faults–and those are many–conservative commentators at least give the appearance of an argument.

Today, for instance, in the Chicago Tribune, we find the following in the context of an argument on appeasing Iran from Hoover Institute fellow Victor Davis Hanson:

> Likewise, the moral high ground today supposedly was to refer both the Iraqi and Iranian problems to the UN. But considering the oil-for-food scandals and Saddam Hussein’s constant violations of UN resolutions, it is unlikely that the Iranian theocracy has much fear that the UN Security Council will thwart its uranium enrichment.

This is a factual and a logical morass. In the first place, despite Saddam’s earnest desires, the UN successfully thwarted his plans for weapons of mass destruction. We know this because there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There were “program related activities”, perhaps meetings whose subject was how neat it would have been to have had purchased more of them or hid them better. But there were no weapons. All courtesy of the United Nations.

The oil-for-food program, however shameful, concerns another matter altogether; it did not have to do in the first instance with the successful containment and inspection regime. It had to do with mitigating the consequences of a severe embargo. Corrupt it was, but it did not have as its goal, as Hanson confusedly suggests, the removal from power or the domestic weakening of Saddam (and so by analogy here creating fear in the hearts of the Iranian theocrats). Rather, it was well known that all such activities merely strengthened Saddam and enriched corrupt UN officials as well as others (Americans included).

So, dear Professor, if you’re going to make fun of the UN for a being corrupt and ineffective entity, make sure not to pick out one of their successes as evidence of that fact.

George Will, Ignoratio Elenchi

Missed opportunity

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After recounting the several independently sufficient reasons the current administration’s wiretap program violated the law, George Will comes to the following inexplicable conclusion:

>But 53 months [after September 11th], Congress should make all necessary actions lawful by authorizing the president to take those actions, with suitable supervision. It should do so with language that does not stigmatize what he has been doing, but that implicitly refutes the doctrine that the authorization is superfluous.

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from Will’s own premises, however, seems to be another one. To this point the President has been engaged in a pattern of illegal activity (of, by the way, dubious use as intelligence). Such illegal activity, for the reasons Will has detailed, ought to be stigmatized by Congress. Second, a legal structure for that type of intelligence gathering already exists (the President can even get a warrant *after* surveillance). Furthermore, the current “monarchical” (that’s Will’s word) administration shouldn’t be rewarded for its clueless and lawless attempts at protecting the American people by undermining civil liberties. Finally, the Republican Congress can be trusted even less than their constitutionally challenged leader.

Had Will meant to argue *for* the President’s action, then perhaps he should have outlined reasons he of all Presidents should be trusted with even greater authority than the law now allows. None of the reasons he has outlined indicate this.

Plain Bad Arguments, Stanley Fish

Cartoon liberalism

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Stanley Fish, professor of law at Florida International University, illustrates a logical confusion as fundamental and pervasive as it is difficult to identify. In short, Professor Fish confuses the way a belief is held by some people with the logical character of that belief. Take the following, for instance.

>Mr. Rose may think of himself, as most journalists do, as being neutral with respect to religion — he is not speaking as a Jew or a Christian or an atheist — but in fact he is an adherent of the religion of letting it all hang out, the religion we call liberalism.

>The first tenet of the liberal religion is that everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas) is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously. This is managed by the familiar distinction — implied in the First Amendment’s religion clause — between the public and private spheres. It is in the private sphere — the personal spaces of the heart, the home and the house of worship — that one’s religious views are allowed full sway and dictate behavior.

Here Fish is speaking of the attitude of Westerners to the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed published recently in Denmark. There seem to be two basic confusions. First, Fish confuses the *political* neutrality of liberalism toward different kinds of metaphysical or theological claims with the *psychological* neutrality of individuals who affirm one or other (and there are many indeed) variation on liberalism. Individuals who embrace one or other of the liberal views caricatured by Professor Fish may do so as if it were a religion, but that doesn’t mean that the view is a religion–a religion, that is, of the sort characterized by liberalism.

Second, Fish employs the surprisingly amateur anti-liberal device of calling any recommendation for action, qua recommendation for action, a moral claim.

>This is itself a morality — the morality of a withdrawal from morality in any strong, insistent form. It is certainly different from the morality of those for whom the Danish cartoons are blasphemy and monstrously evil. And the difference, I think, is to the credit of the Muslim protesters and to the discredit of the liberal editors.

It’s vacuous to assert that all systems involving beliefs and actions are of the same logical order. If all action-inducing claims are moral claims, then none of them are. Liberals, of all stripes, consider this distinction between controversial moral claims and political structures to be the aim of their many and varied arguments for the superiority of their view. They may be wrong. But they’re wrong on the merits of their arguments, not because, as Fish alleges, they don’t have an argument.