Category Archives: Informal Fallacies

Anne Applebaum, Hasty Generalization

To the Catwalks!

Anne Applebaum has got Hollywood’s number:

>In fact, for the malcontents of Hollywood, academia and the catwalks, Chávez is an ideal ally. Just as the sympathetic foreigners whom Lenin called “useful idiots” once supported Russia abroad, their modern equivalents provide the Venezuelan president with legitimacy, attention and good photographs. He, in turn, helps them overcome the frustration Reed once felt — the frustration of living in an annoyingly unrevolutionary country where people have to change things by law. For all of his brilliance, Reed could not bring socialism to America. For all of his wealth, fame, media access and Hollywood power, Penn cannot oust George W. Bush. But by showing up in the company of Chávez, he can at least get a lot more attention for his opinions.

Take that Sean Penn and Naomi Campbell–the only malcontents of Hollywood and the catwalks (first time I’ve heard that as well) Applebaum bothers to mention.

Stanley Fish, Straw Man

Never knew you cared

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Stanley Fish reads two books on religion–one for, one against–and comes to a stirring, there-are-good-arguments-on-both-sides conclusion:

>Perhaps an individual reader of either will have his or her mind changed, but their chief value is that together they testify to the continuing vitality and significance of their shared subject. Both are serious inquiries into matters that have been discussed and debated by sincere and learned persons for many centuries. The project is an old one, but these authors pursue it with an energy and goodwill that invite further conversation with sympathetic and unsympathetic readers alike.

>In short, these books neither trivialize their subject nor demonize those who have a different view of it, which is more than can be said for the efforts of those fashionable atheist writers whose major form of argument would seem to be ridicule.

The chief value of these books on religion is that they are books on religion.

Academics, Begging the Question, General discussion

The original

Many people invoke the “plain text” (or some close variant) of the constitution in order to resolve questions about its meaning. Those people, insofar as they insist on that principle, are originalists. For a more edifying discussion of that topic than one can find here, see Brian Leiter’s law blog. Here’s an excerpt of his argument:

>. . . [O]nce we acknowledge (as Barnett rightly does) that a theory of constitutional interpretation must answer to a theory of constitutional legitimacy, then the constitution (as a written document, or as a document about which framers had some original intention, or as a document which had an original “public” meaning, and so on) drops almost entirely out of the picture: the theory of constitutional legitimacy tells judges how they should decide cases, and the written constitution is, at best, a proxy for what is constitutionally legitimate or is relevant because of its effect on the reasonable expectations of citizens (the latter being a factor bearing on constitutional legitimacy). In other words, Barnett’s theory of constitutional interpretation, because it (unlike most theories–Ackerman’s, Amar’s, etc.) has the correct moral structure is not really a defense of originalism, but a defense of whatever method of interpretation produces “legitimate” (i.e., morally authoritative) outcomes. The writtenness of the constitution, and its original meaing, might, indeed, figure at this point, but only in the way that Raz (who, in an odd way, echoes Posner) suggests: namely, because some moral value (some moral value that bears on authority) attaches to the fact that some understanding of the constitution (original or otherwise) has been stable, relied upon, figures in the public understanding of the society in which people plan their lives, etc.

Aside from the fact that nothing about the Constitution says it should be interpreted one way rather than another, once one adopts an interpretative theory, as Leiter suggests, one has left the text behind. All of this makes the following response mystifying:

>Notice that, while “justice” is the ultimate normative justification for originalism, the intermediate steps are crucial. If a written constitution is valuable for the reasons identified–to define and police the principal-agent relationship–then one cannot simply dispense with it in pursuit of greater justice. More precisely, agent-judges cannot on their own authorize agent-legislatures to exceed their proper powers as defined by the written Constitution in pursuit of greater “justice” than that document provides.

“Simply dispense” and “on their own” beg the question against Leiter, at least it seems so to me. The argument concerns how one ought to read the Constitution, part of that argument involves denying “an original” meaning in isolation from a more basic legal theory. Asserting that one ought to read the Constitution literally just ignores that point.

It turns out that point was made here by Larry Solum:

>Once we have the distinction between semantic and normative originalism in place, it is easy to see that semantic claims are at the heart of the New Originalism or original-meaning originalism. If the semantic claim were false, and the conventional semantic meaning of the text in context at the time of framing and ratification were not the “meaning” of the constitution, then it would be difficult for New Originalists to argue that there are good normative reasons to give this meaning authority. The difficulty is obvious: why should we have a normative commitment to something the Constitution doesn’t mean? If the original meaning is not the actual semantic content of the constitution, but is instead a construction or invention of originalist judges, then many of the normative arguments produced by originalists could be turned against originalism itself.

George Will, Straw Man

School rites

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George Will, sometime libertarian, writes:

>In today’s political taxonomy, “progressives” are rebranded liberals dodging the damage they did to their old label. Perhaps their most injurious idea — injurious to themselves and public schools — was the forced busing of (mostly other people’s) children to engineer “racial balance” in public schools. Soon, liberals will need a third label if people notice what “progressives” are up to in Utah.

>There, teachers unions, whose idea of progress is preservation of the status quo, are waging an expensive and meretricious campaign to overturn the right of parents to choose among competing schools, public and private, for the best education for their children.

The “campaign” they’re waging involves a referendum on a school choice law. People can vote for it and people can vote against it. But people can choose private schools right now if they can afford them. But more basically, “meretricious” is not a term Will, what with his perpetual dishonesty about anyone’s view but his own, ought to be using. Of him, one might say:

>Intellectually bankrupt but flush with cash. . .

But that was his line (later in the piece). The idea that there is a right to choose among competing schools (some of them–nay the majority of them–religious) using public money is an astounding one–especially for a simple-minded constitutional minimalist, such as Will is (when it comes to the limiting rights of other people). Indeed, allowing parents to take public tax money to private schools, one might reasonably argue, greatly expands the reach of the government into the private sector: private schools, what with their “competitive” edge, are now public schools. Do they need federal money to compete?

Begging the Question, Michael Gerson

Principle limitation

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This claim strikes me as a fairly disingenuous interpretation of “Catholic Social Thought”:

>The difference between these visions is considerable. Various forms of libertarianism and anti-government conservatism share a belief that justice is defined by the imposition of impartial rules — free markets and the rule of law. If everyone is treated fairly and equally, the state has done its job. But Catholic social thought takes a large step beyond that view. While it affirms the principle of limited government — asserting the existence of a world of families, congregations and community institutions where government should rarely tread — it also asserts that the justice of society is measured by its treatment of the helpless and poor. And this creates a positive obligation to order society in a way that protects and benefits the powerless and suffering.

It will all depend, of course, on what one means by “limited” or even perhaps, “principle.” Both liberals and conservatives want “limited” government “in principle”. Pointing out that principle in defense of this or that merely demonstrates the degree to which one fails to understand that reference to ambiguous principles resolves nothing.

Ad Hominem Abusive, False Dichotomy, Sebastian Mallaby, Straw Man

As if it were yesterday

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Sometimes it seems like so long ago that we marched off to war in Iraq. For some, that distance has blurred their memory of events. Writing the "grown-ups" or, as it has become known in the blogosphere, the "very serious persons," foreign policy piece, Sebastian Mallaby, professional contrarian, illustrates that very smart looking people can make some really silly arguments:

Clinton's rivals are contemplating history and deriving only a narrow lesson about Bush: Don't trust him when he confronts a Muslim country. But the larger, more durable lesson from Iraq is that wars can be caused by a lack of confrontation. The Iraq invasion happened partly because the world had lost the stomach to confront Saddam Hussein by other means. By 2002, the sanctions on Hussein's regime had been diluted, and there was pressure to weaken them further. Hussein was no longer "in his box," to use the language of the time: If you believed that a resurgent Saddam Hussein presented an intolerable threat, it was worth taking the risk of unseating him by force, sooner rather than later.

Alone among the Democratic candidates, Clinton has the honesty to insist that the case for war was reasonable at the time — even if, with the benefit of hindsight, the invasion has proved disastrous. In sticking to that politically difficult position, Clinton is saying that, despite its awful risks, war can sometimes be the least bad choice. She is not running away from military power, even in a political climate that makes running attractive.

That's not how I remember it. Nonetheless, more annoying that Mallaby's ignorant contextualizing of history ("at the time") is his pointless hypothetical ("If. . . "). The point of history is not to relive it, but to learn from it: one can learn from history because we know what happened. And you can't forget that all of the things said by Bush, et alia, about a resurgent Saddam were false–false in the sense of not being true.

If you believed that they were true, indeed, then you believed that Saddam posed a threat. But you had a false belief. And more than that. Bush's false belief about Saddam was rather less justified than Joe Citizen's: Bush and his war making party had access to facts that made the case for war against Saddam even less justified than it otherwise appeared. Mallaby writes all of this on the manifestly silly premise that any opposition to Bush's policies–foreign or domestic–can only be explained by the silly ad hominem of Bush derangement syndrome.

I suppose it's "deranged" and "immature" to have been right.

Accident, George Will, Straw Man

Big boss man

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Commenters on the Washingtonpost.com website make all of the good points about George Will’s latest failure to understand that general rules of human behavior have obvious limitations while the imagination of those who would like to cheat does not.

>Restrictions on freedoms, and especially freedoms as fundamental as those of the First Amendment, require serious justifications. So the question is: To what pressing problem did the university’s $100 limit respond? Or is it merely another manifestation of the regnant liberalism common on most campuses — the itch to boss people around?

The reason for this? Some kid broke the universities rules regarding spending for a school election. Are the rules fair? Maybe not. But that’s got nothing to do with the McCain-Feingold campaign law:

>Thus do the grossly anti-constitutional premises of McCain-Feingold seep through society, poisoning the practice of democracy at all levels

Nor is “you’re not the boss of me” the proper response to rules you don’t agree with.

David Broder, Ignoratio Elenchi

Armed with information

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A PBS show about a successful but financially strained state run health care program for the poor in Tennessee featured someone–a state representative dead set against the program–who said: not all problems can be solved with money. Fair enough. But all money problems can be solved with money, and that was a money problem. David Broder isn’t far away from that when he writes:

>What I learned about Leavitt in his years as governor is that he is blessed with vision that sees future policy challenges and developments more clearly than most politicians. In this case, he is visualizing a radically different kind of medical marketplace, in which families armed with specific information about the treatment success and prices of hospitals and doctors can shop at will for the best quality and most affordable care.

There’s no shortage of information about health care success. Here’s one that even I know: seeing a doctor for basic health care needs increases one’s healthness quotient. The primary shortage, as anyone can tell you, is access to affordable health care for millions of employed as well as unemployed people.

Michael Gerson, Straw Man, Things that are false

So cool it’s uncool

Michael Gerson, protege of the great David Brooks, visits a coffee shop near his home in Northern Virginia. He sees pictures of radicals, makes some remarks about how they were Stalinists, or something, and draws the conclusion that the left suffers from radical chic. Not only that, but the right is so cool its uncool: it’ll never be popular man. That’s right, you’d never be cool enough to wear a Reagan shirt.

But only late in the piece does he notice the obvious:

>Some on the left are suspicious of this trend, which social critic Thomas Frank calls “commercialized dissent.” “It is,” he told me, “symbolic of the eternal revolution of the market” and its “constant search for the new.” “The ideology expressed is generally not liberalism; it is the ideology of the market, libertarianism.” Political trendiness of the Body Shop and Whole Foods variety, in short, has little serious emphasis on economic or social justice.

A t-shirt with Che Guevera is not the same as membership in the Democrat(ic) party or the affirmation of its non-work camp or internment policies. No matter, the right has branding problems of it’s own:

>But there also should be concerns on the right. On its current track, the emotional branding of the Republican Party among the young will soon be similar to Metamucil. The party’s emphasis on spending restraint and limited government may be substantively important, but these themes are hardly morally inspiring. And the Iraq war is a serious drawback among younger voters — except, of course, among those 20-somethings with buzz cuts who actually fight the war. Appealing to cause-oriented consumers will require addressing issues such as global poverty and disease, global warming, and economic and racial justice. This reality of the market is also a reality of American politics.

“Spending restraint and limited government” is about as true as saying the democrats are the party of “big government.” But the weirder thing is the claim that those fighting the Iraq war do not find it a drawback, as if they (and not the belligerent scribes at NRO and elsewhere) were the real cheerleaders for the cause of being in Iraq (and later Iran and Syria).

Equivocation, George Will, Suppressed Evidence

Sicut Philosophus docet in II Ethicorum

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George Will, comedian:

>Explaining a simple proposal to help people squirrel away gold for their golden years, Hillary Clinton said that a person “should not require a PhD to save for retirement.” But can even PhDs understand liberalism’s arithmetic and logic?

This is funny. He says little about either arithmetic or logic, but a lot about the meanings of words:

>SCHIP is described as serving “poor children” or children of “the working poor.” Everyone agrees that it is for “low-income” people. Under the bill that Democrats hope to pass over the president’s veto tomorrow, states could extend eligibility to households earning $61,950. But America’s median household income is $48,201. How can people above the median income be eligible for a program serving lower-income people?

The Stagirite offers again some simple and obvious instruction:

>How this is to happen we have stated already, but it will be made plain also by the following consideration of the specific nature of virtue. In everything that is continuous and divisible it is possible to take more, less, or an equal amount, and that either in terms of the thing itself or relatively to us; and the equal is an intermediate between excess and defect. By the intermediate in the object I mean that which is equidistant from each of the extremes, which is one and the same for all men; by the intermediate relatively to us that which is neither too much nor too little- and this is not one, nor the same for all. For instance, if ten is many and two is few, six is the intermediate, taken in terms of the object; for it exceeds and is exceeded by an equal amount; this is intermediate according to arithmetical proportion. But the intermediate relatively to us is not to be taken so; if ten pounds are too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds; for this also is perhaps too much for the person who is to take it, or too little- too little for Milo, too much for the beginner in athletic exercises. The same is true of running and wrestling. Thus a master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate and chooses this- the intermediate not in the object but relatively to us.

“Low income” is much like quantities of food for ancient Greek wrestlers: it’s relative to how big you are (your family that is) and where you live.