Category Archives: Weak Analogy

Kathleen Parker, Michael Gerson, Plain Bad Arguments, Weak Analogy

A pro-choice Catholic and a Rabbi walk into a bar

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Two columns in the Post.  One from the newly reborn Kathleen Parker, who argues, not that fallaciously, that perhaps lifting the stem cell ban was otiose, as researchers had already found a way around the central moral problem (for some), i.e., the creation of embryonic stem cells from embryos.  Or is it the destruction?  I'm not sure, because she unfortunately characterizes the moral problem in these two distinct ways.  This seems important because some people object to using (therefore destroying) stem cells, others object to creating embryos solely for the purposes of research, which seems, in some sense, much worse.  Nonetheless, other cells, she alleges, work just as well, so lifting the ban on whatever it was that was happening doesn't amount to much.  I have a feeling something in there is false or confused, but this doesn't strike me as a fallacious argument.  So good for Parker, at least we stayed on topic.

Same topic, different writer.  Michael Gerson makes the following very puzzling assertion:

It is probably not a coincidence that Obama has chosen a Roman Catholic — Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius — to implement many of these policies as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Obama has every right to a pro-choice Cabinet. But this appointment seems designed to provide religious cover. It also smacks of religious humiliation — like asking a rabbi to serve the pork roast or an atheist to bless the meal.

Sebelius, though strongly pro-choice, was capable of occasional compromise. But she consistently fought against the serious enforcement of Kansas's late-term abortion restrictions. Kansas became a magnet for late-term abortions.

Still, Sebelius insists that "my Catholic faith teaches me that all life is sacred." This puts her in the same category as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Biden — Catholics who assert the sanctity of life while defending legal abortion. It has also earned Sebelius a firm rebuke from her archbishop.

No, it's not like the Rabbi thing at all: Sebelius is strongly pro-choice, one might presume the rabbi in the joke or the atheist is not "pro pork" or "pro God."  There is much else about this column that would warrant criticism, such as the claim that pro life people's rights are being trampled upon when they lose arguments:

There is a common thread running through President Obama's pro-choice agenda: the coercion of those who disagree with it.

Indeed, laws are coercive.  Elections, someone said, have consequences.  Pointing that out doesn't mean those consequences (i.e., laws which are "coercive"!) are wrong.

Bad Explanations, Lack of Evidence, Plain Bad Arguments, Post hoc ergo propter, Unclassifiable, Weak Analogy

Where’s Foucault when we need him?

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George Will's been taking a beating lately–His character, his general ignorance of that of which he comments upon, and, our favorite, his logic have all come under increasing attack recently. Today we can give him a pass on his column. Its silliness is not entirely his fault. For some reason he devotes his column to fawning over the relatively uninteresting analogy between past sexual morality and the supposed moralizing about food by one expert in philosophy at the Hoover institute, Nancy Eberhardt who we are told by Will is "intimidatingly intelligent."

The idea seems to be that in the past we moralized sex, but left food to be a mere matter of taste. Now we moralize food, but leave sex to be a mere matter of taste. I think probably both claims are false, though I'm willing to bite that we have stopped moralizing a lot of sex, and some moralize a lot of their choices involving food.

But, then we run into this sort of confusion:

Most important of all, however, is the difference in moral attitude separating Betty and Jennifer on the matter of food. Jennifer feels that there is a right and wrong about these options that transcends her exercise of choice as a consumer. She does not exactly condemn those who believe otherwise, but she doesn’t understand why they do, either. And she certainly thinks the world would be a better place if more people evaluated their food choices as she does. She even proselytizes on occasion when she can. In short, with regard to food, Jennifer falls within Immanuel Kant’s definition of the Categorical Imperative: She acts according to a set of maxims that she wills at the same time to be universal law.

In heavy-handed contrast:

Even without such personal links to food scarcity, though, it makes no sense to Betty that people would feel as strongly as her granddaughter does about something as simple as deciding just what goes into one’s mouth. That is because Betty feels, as Jennifer obviously does not, that opinions about food are simply de gustibus, a matter of individual taste — and only that.

And again:

Most important of all, Betty feels that sex, unlike food, is not de gustibus. She believes to the contrary that there is a right and wrong about these choices that transcends any individual act. She further believes that the world would be a better place, and individual people better off, if others believed as she does. She even proselytizes such on occasion when given the chance.

And to beat the horse within an inch of its life:

Most important, once again, is the difference in moral attitude between the two women on this subject of sex. Betty feels that there is a right and wrong about sexual choices that transcends any individual act, and Jennifer — exceptions noted — does not. It’s not that Jennifer lacks for opinions about sex, any more than Betty does about food. It’s just that, for the most part, they are limited to what she personally does and doesn’t like.

And to make it clearer still:

As noted, this desire to extend their personal opinions in two different areas to an “ought” that they think should be somehow binding — binding, that is, to the idea that others should do the same — is the definition of the Kantian imperative. Once again, note: Betty’s Kantian imperative concerns sex not food, and Jennifer’s concerns food not sex. In just over 50 years, in other words — not for everyone, of course, but for a great many people, and for an especially large portion of sophisticated people — the moral poles of sex and food have been reversed. Betty thinks food is a matter of taste, whereas sex is governed by universal moral law of some kind; and Jennifer thinks exactly the reverse.  

Fortunately she doesn't draw any substantial conclusions from this. With that sort of genial Brooksy, "foibles of the human race exposing, concealed smirk," she contents herself with running this analogy to its exhaustion while ignoring relevant points of disanalogy, and doing little more than pointing out this curious social change, which perhaps seems to be neither curious, nor a social change, with closer scrutiny. But she closes with this whopper of a post hoc propter hoc fallacy wrapped in a bacony strip of psychoanalyzing explanation and deep-fried in a vat of greasy rhetorical questions:

The rise of a recognizably Kantian, morally universalizable code concerning food — beginning with the international vegetarian movement of the last century and proceeding with increasing moral fervor into our own times via macrobiotics, veganism/vegetarianism, and European codes of terroir — has paralleled exactly the waning of a universally accepted sexual code in the Western world during these same years. 

Who can doubt that the two trends are related? Unable or unwilling (or both) to impose rules on sex at a time when it is easier to pursue it than ever before, yet equally unwilling to dispense altogether with a universal moral code that he would have bind society against the problems created by exactly that pursuit, modern man (and woman) has apparently performed his own act of transubstantiation. He has taken longstanding morality about sex, and substituted it onto food. The all-you-can-eat buffet is now stigmatized; the sexual smorgasbord is not. 

In the end, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the rules being drawn around food receive some force from the fact that people are uncomfortable with how far the sexual revolution has gone — and not knowing what to do about it, they turn for increasing consolation to mining morality out of what they eat. 

Perhaps it's just me, but I find it surprisingly easy to avoid this conclusion. 

 

George Will, Plain Bad Arguments, Weak Analogy

You’re on your own

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It wasn't long ago that George Will called Obama's very catchy "you're on your own" line (from his acceptance speech) a straw man of the (discredited) Republican philosophy of government.  So I was struck when I read this encomium to being on one's own (creepy lines in bold).

When Medicare was created in 1965, America's median age was 28.4; now it is 36.6. The elderly are more numerous, and medicine is more broadly competent than was then anticipated. Leavitt says that Medicare's "big three" hospital procedure expenses today are hip and knee replacements and cardiovascular operations with stents, which were not on medicine's menu in 1965.

After being elected to three terms as Utah's governor, but before coming to HHS, Leavitt headed the Environmental Protection Agency. He came to consider it a public health agency because the surge in Americans' longevity in the last third of the 20th century correlated with cleaner air and fewer waterborne diseases. Longevity is, however, expensive, and demography is compounding the problem.

In the 43 years since America decided that health care for the elderly would be paid for by people still working, the ratio of workers to seniors has steadily declined. And the number of seniors living long enough to have five or more chronic conditions — 23 percent of Medicare beneficiaries — has increased. Many of those conditions could be prevented or managed by better decisions about eating, exercising and smoking. The 20 percent of Americans who still smoke are a much larger percentage of the 23 percent who consume 67 percent of Medicare spending. Furthermore, nearly 30 percent of Medicare spending pays for care in the final year of patients' lives.

If only we could find some kind of completely tone-deaf market analogy for how medicare should work:

Suppose, says Leavitt, buying a car were like getting a knee operation. The dealer would say he does not know the final cumulative price, so just select a car and begin using it. Then a blizzard of bills would begin to arrive — from the chassis manufacturer, the steering-wheel manufacturer, the seat and paint manufacturers. The dealership would charge for the time the car spent there, and a separate charge would cover the salesperson's time.

Leavitt says that until health-care recipients of common procedures can get, upfront, prices they can understand and compare, there will be little accountability or discipline in the system: "In the auto industry, if the steering-wheel maker charges an exorbitant price, the car company finds a more competitive supplier. In health care, if the medical equipment supplier charges an exorbitant price, none of the other medical participants care."

The auto industry?  The one with the huge bailout?  Anyway, back to the ice floe:

Rather than ruining the new year by dwelling on Medicare's unfunded liabilities of about $34 trillion (over a 75-year span), ruin it with this fact: In the next 50 years, Medicaid, the program for the poor — broadly, sometimes very broadly defined — could become a bigger threat than Medicare to the nation's prosperity.

This is partly because of the cost of long-term care for the indigent elderly, some of whom shed assets to meet Medicaid's eligibility standard — sometimes as high as income under 200 percent of the federal poverty level. And many states, eager to expand the ranks of the dependent with the help of federal Medicaid money, use "income disregards" to make poverty an elastic concept. For example, they say: A person who gets a raise that eliminates his eligibility can disregard the portion of his income that pays for housing or transportation.

Governments with powerful political incentives to behave this way will play an increasingly large role in health care. As is said, if you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it is free.

Indigent elderly, since you're a threat to our nation's prosperity, "you're on your own."

Accident, Contradictions, Equivocation, Red Herring, Weak Analogy

Plagiarism

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Paying a stranger to write a paper for you when you're a college student is called plagiarism.  The other day NPR's On the Media did a story on someone who ghost wrote what he called "model papers."  When pressed about what would justify his actions, he produced a blizzard of sophistry:

BOB GARFIELD: Let me just quote from you here. Quote, “Writing model term papers is above-board and perfectly legal. Thanks to the First Amendment it’s protected speech, right up there with neo-Nazi rallies, tobacco company press releases and those ‘9/11 was an inside job’ bumper stickers.”

So, I mean, I don't want to be putting words in your mouth, but I think what you’re saying is legal but repulsive, sleazy.

NICK MAMATAS: Oh, sure.

BOB GARFIELD: Unethical, morally disgraceful. Am I leaving anything out?

NICK MAMATAS: No, that pretty much sums it up, yeah.

BOB GARFIELD: So Nick, how do you rationalize your behavior? I mean, it sounds kind of whorish to me.

NICK MAMATAS: Mm, well again, I also think that prostitution should be legal, and I've written several term papers about that over the years.

As far as my own work in term papers, basically I felt my other writing was more important. You know, everyone makes these decisions. What about people who work in munitions factories, or who work for defense contractors?

So we all make these decisions. It’s just a cost benefit analysis. In the end, I felt I benefited from writing these papers ‘cause it allowed me to work at home and write novels and short stories and articles. And the people who were buying the papers, well, they – that was their decision. They could take that as a model paper, and many of them did. They could hand it in and roll the dice, ‘cause I was always happy, always thrilled, actually, to hand in a paper to a professor. If the client, you know, was trying to pull one over on me, or was even nasty to me sometimes, I'd just sort of like secretly fax it.

So Mr. Mamatas seems to think that ghost writing term papers is morally disgraceful, yet despite not being morally justified, it's morally justified.  What follows are his justifications and in parentheses what I think is their appropriate interpretation.

(1) He was able to do his other writing with the income from writing "model papers" (I only lied and cheated because it benefited me!—something is morally justified if you benefit in some way from it).

(2) Everyone makes cost/benefit decisions (a general and irrelevant rule which doesn't apply to my circumstance in particular applies to it).

(3) Other people work for munitions factories and defense contractors (other people have jobs I have improperly characterized as morally questionable so that makes it ok for me to have a self-evidently morally unjustifiable job).

(4) Whether the paper which was produced for the sole purposes of cheating–otherwise there would be no income, as professors provide model papers all of the time–was used for its stated purpose depended on the person who turned it in, not on the person who profited from that person's attempted deceit (I produced papers for entertainment purposes only, should anyone actually use it for its intended purpose, the purpose for which I produced it and the reason I was paid for it, well, I can't be held responsible for that).

(5) There is no honor among thieves, if you're mean to Mr.Mamatas, he'll turn you in (I'm not only a dishonest person in regards to honest people, I'm a dishonest person in regards to dishonest people–so it's ok).

Reporting, Weak Analogy

Never been kissed

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Here's a couple that makes a Jane Austin novel look like an adult film.  

The "no-kissing" rule came up as a way to prevent things from getting out of hand.

You see, Fabien and LaLuz both teach abstinence courses to Chicago Public Schools teens. And they say they practice what they preach.

To avoid temptation while dating, they made sure they were never alone with each other in a house. When they watched movies on the couch, they snuggled sitting straight up, never lying down.

"It really tested us and encouraged us to grow closer in our hearts and our minds, just expressing things verbally," Fabien said.

He found other ways to show LaLuz his passion—like by cleaning her car. And washing the dishes.

Despite abstaining, they have no anxieties about their upcoming Bahamas honeymoon.

Yes, they've heard "test drive the car before you buy," but LaLuz has her own analogy.

"You can't take the car out of the parking lot until you pay for it," she said.

You can't really test drive the car in the parking lot however.  But maybe women (or men) aren't like property in the first place. 

Anyway–here's an interesting article about the success or (rather the failure) of abstinence-only education programs.  

Post hoc ergo propter, Weak Analogy

Politiculous

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On the whole this site concerns itself with top-shelf newspaper punditry primarily because as one descends into syndication things get pretty bad.  So bad, at times, one wonders whether it's even fair to bring our very undergraduate skills of logical analysis to bear.  But sometimes, however, it's just entertaining.  If anything, Bill Maher's Religulous shows us that.  Someone could do the same thing for the poltical world.  Here's one place to start:

An e-mail: "OK, I'll say it…I believe today's massive decline was, in part (and maybe a big "in part"), in fear that the debate tonight won't go well for McCain and the implications that will have for an Obama victory. The likelihood of a recession has been talked about and, probably, factored in to a lot of folks' thinking already… …if tonight's debate tracks well for McCain, you'll see a positive response tomorrow; if it doesn't, hold on; it won't be pretty. Call it: 'Flight to Safety (from Socialism).'"

That's an email an editor at William F.Buckley's National Review thought important enough to repost online–without howls of laughter or at least notes of compassion for the person's diminished intellectual capacity.  So here's the problem, if one were to do a Religulous of politics, where would one begin?

Charles Krauthammer, Weak Analogy

Hard power

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A people oppressed by years of military rule is a little like a hostage: they're oppressed against their will (no surprise), and they're subject to all sorts of unspeakable brutalities (including murder).  But that's pretty much it.  However difficult it is to rescue hostages (and it's very difficult I'm sure), it's rather easier than rescuing an oppressed people with "democracy" or "humanitarian intervention").  For that reason, Charles Krauthammer's analogizing the Columbian hostage rescue (which used "hard power"–no shooting, however!) to the invasion of Iraq (which used shooting) makes one cringe:

And who's going to intervene? The only country that could is the country that in the past two decades led coalitions that liberated Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan [The only country?  Not only are these situations significantly different from each other, but, Europe participated in all four of them–eds]. Having sacrificed much blood and treasure in its latest endeavor — the liberation of 25 million Iraqis from the most barbarous tyranny of all, and its replacement with what is beginning to emerge as the Arab world's first democracy — and having earned near-universal condemnation for its pains, America has absolutely no appetite for such missions.

And so the innocent languish, as did Betancourt, until some local power, inexplicably under the sway of the Bush notion of hard power, gets it done — often with the support of the American military. "Behind the rescue in a jungle clearing stood years of clandestine American work," explained The Post. "It included the deployment of elite U.S. Special Forces . . . a vast intelligence-gathering operation . . . and training programs for Colombian troops."

Upon her liberation, Betancourt offered profuse thanks to God and the Virgin Mary, to her supporters and the media, to France and Colombia and just about everybody else. As of this writing, none to the United States.

All of this to claim the French are sissies (yet again).  But, as certainly the French know, libertating a hostage from a captor has one clear marker of success: the hostage's life and freedom.  The success metric of an invasion?  Perhaps when they see us, their liberator, as their oppressor.  For then they are truly free.

Ignoratio Elenchi, Politicians, Weak Analogy

Water Bored

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Senator Kit Bond of Missouri on waterboarding:

GWEN IFILL: I just would like to — but do you think that waterboarding, as I described it, constitutes torture?

SEN. KIT BOND: There are different ways of doing it. It's like swimming, freestyle, backstroke. The waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through, but that's beside the point. It's not being used.

There are some who say that, in extreme circumstances, if there is threat of an imminent major attack on the United States, it might be used, but I certainly would not favor it in any circumstance…

Is it like freestyle and backstroke swimming because water is involved?  Or is it like those things because there are different ways of doing it?  This is more than just a perverse water analogy.  It's a complete non sequitur–the question asks whether water boarding as Ifill described it is torture, but Senator Bond replies to a different question–and then suggests his reply is besides the point.  Maybe we could put this another way.

GI: Do you eat herring, Sen. B?

Sen B. There are lots of kinds of herring–pickled, creamed, smoked.  But the different kinds of herring has nothing to do with this.  My store doesn't carry herring.

Maybe there are circumstances in which herring could be sold at my store, but I wouldn't favor that. 

Michael Medved, Religion, Things that are false, Weak Analogy

State religion

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It's Sunday, but instead of complaining about George Will's complaining–we'll do that tomorrow maybe–let's just read Michael Medved and marvel:

Actually, there’s little chance that atheists will succeed in placing one of their own in the White House at any time in the foreseeable future, and it continues to make powerful sense for voters to shun potential presidents who deny the existence of God. An atheist may be a good person, a good politician, a good family man (or woman), and even a good patriot, but a publicly proclaimed non-believer as president would, for three reasons, be bad for the country.

Hollowness and Hypocrisy at State Occasions. As Constitutional scholars all point out, the Presidency uniquely combines the two functions of head of government (like the British Prime Minister) and head of state (like the Queen of England). POTUS not only appoints cabinet members and shapes foreign policy and delivers addresses to Congress, but also presides over solemn and ceremonial occasions. Just as the Queen plays a formal role as head of the Church of England, the President functions as head of the “Church of America” – that informal, tolerant but profoundly important civic religion that dominates all our national holidays and historic milestones. For instance, try to imagine an atheist president issuing the annual Thanksgiving proclamation. To whom would he extend thanks in the name of his grateful nation –-the Indians in Massachusetts?

Well, he probably ought to thank the Indians in Massachusetts, but that's another matter.  The more basic point is this: last time I checked, there is no "Church of America," so that analogy does even rise to the level of weakness.  Solemn occasions are somewhat like church–you can't get up and go to the bathroom, you sit or stand watching a podium where someone talks–but that's about it.  Besides, if those things make something "church," if only analogously, then as one who talks somewhat ceremoniously to a group of people who may or may not have to go to the bathroom, I'm a priest. 

George Will, Straw Man, Things that are false, Weak Analogy

Write No More Forever

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We normally try to keep current around here, but amidst the revelry and excess of our Spring Break, we missed something.  Okay, we missed a few things, but George Will’s performance of March 16, on ABC’s "This Week with George Stephanopolous," is worth back-tracking a bit.  Will is holding forth on matters of race and politics and then this happens:

If you want to know what America would look like, if liberals really had their way in running it, look at what they’re doing in their own nominating process on two counts. First, they cannot get to a majority because they have exquisitely refined rococo rules about how to achieve fairness. Secondly, they have worked for 20, 30, 40 years to make us all exquisitely sensitive to slights real or imagined, so that you run a 3 AM ad and someone says there’s not enough black people in it or where’s the Hispanics and it must be a racist ad. Hillary Clinton says something absolutely unexceptionable which is it took Lyndon Johnson also to pass the civil rights act. Denounced as racist. The Democrats are reaping what they have sown.

Fairness?! Equality?! Sensitivity?! Heaven forfend!

Ye gods. This logic is going to make Bright Eyes cry.

First, the primary process is to liberal governance as our making a mean Guinness stew is to operating a restaurant. Sure, it’s part of the process, but just as our Guinness stew prowess doesn’t indicate our ability to take over for Vongerichten, neither does the Democratic primary process indicate the inability of either Sen. Obama or Sen. Clinton–or any other liberal politician, for that matter–to properly govern the country.

Second, snide attacks and smug elitism are no argument. Will’s tritely insulting claim about sensitivity treats as a disadvantage an awareness that has, at least in part, helped us to advance from a country where blatant displays of racism and sexism and the genocide of indigenous persons are the norm, to a country where no matter what happens, the Democratic nominee for president of the United States will be either a woman or an African American man.  Without specific attempts to make people aware of the deep race and gender divides in this country, we never get to the place where Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are the nominees for President. Yet Will dismisses these effects with a wave of the hand, instead twisting liberal social policies in service of an undergraduate view of liberalism and democratic process.