Category Archives: George Will

Appeal to the People, Fallacies and Other Problems, George Will, Red Herring, Straw Man

Phoning it in

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George Will phones it in today with a boiler-plate global warming denying column.

There really isn't anything of interest in the column, though I found myself wondering why it is that the particular argument he recites have any probative relevance to the question of global warming.

The occasion for his cutting and pasting was some remarks by Secretary of Energy Chu on the likely disruption and ultimate disappearance of agriculture in California if global warming continues unchecked.

After blithely ignoring any evidence for Chu's claim, or even (of course) accurately representing them, Will trots out several predictions that proved, it seems, to be false: Global Cooling and Ehrlich's bet about the price of commodities.

Both have not come true, though one wonders whether it is the prediction itself that has failed to come true or the time-frame of the prediction. 

But, even if we assume that both of the underlying claims are false–that the earth was entering a cooling phase in the 1970's and that there will be shortages of non-renewable commodities in the future, what does that tell us about Chu's worries? Neither failure tells us anything about the degree to which we should trust climate science and the consensus around the general theory of anthropogenic climate change. They are essentially irrelevant.(What's the best description of these fallacies? Red Herrings?)

As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.

Deniers love to claim that every local short term climate change is advanced as "evidence of man-made global warming," despite the frequent denials by climate scientists that the case rests on local short term climate variations. (Yes, the media often represents climate science this way, but that cannot be taken to be an accurate representaiton of climate science). Nevertheless, it provides a nice straw man for Will to defeat. 

An unstated premise of eco-pessimism is that environmental conditions are, or recently were, optimal. The proclaimed faith of eco-pessimists is weirdly optimistic: These optimal conditions must and can be preserved or restored if government will make us minimize our carbon footprints and if government will "remake" the economy. 

Seems to me that this is not an unstated premise, but a pretty explicit claim–that human life has come to thrive within a tiny window of climate variation and that it will not thrive if dramatic change occurs. This is a nice rhetorical move, but seems to be some sort of straw man as well.

Because of today's economy, another law — call it the Law of Clarifying Calamities — is being (redundantly) confirmed. On graphs tracking public opinion, two lines are moving in tandem and inversely: The sharply rising line charts public concern about the economy, the plunging line follows concern about the environment. A recent Pew Research Center poll asked which of 20 issues should be the government's top priorities. Climate change ranked 20th.

This paragraph just beggars even Will's limited rational capacities! The argument seems to be that  a short term calamity make you less concerned about long term calamities. It would seem to be true: if I break my leg, I will worry more about getting this healed, than lowering my cholesterol. But my elevated cholesterol may still be the thing that kills me in the long term. It isn't clear what Will thinks we should conclude from this, but all of the things I can conceive as possibilities, seem remarkably silly. I suppose that this is some sort of ad populum fallacy.

Real calamities take our minds off hypothetical ones. Besides, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization, there has been no recorded global warming for more than a decade, or one-third of the span since the global cooling scare.

The last claim–if it is true–might provide some reason to accept Will's cautioning. Perhaps someone can find this assertion here.

Bloggers, George Will, Specious allegations of fallacy

Michaeli placet!

I think it's safe to say that many don't get the distinction between a logical problem and a factual one.  A logical problem involves the strength, plausibility, or validity of an inference from one fact to another fact; a factual problem concerns whether a given fact is in fact a fact.  Here's an example (from Marc Ambinder's blog) apropos of yesterday's post:

The Logic Of George Will

His argument:

John McCain probably was eager to return to the Senate as an avatar of bipartisanship, a role he has enjoyed. It is, therefore, a measure of the recklessness of House Democrats that they caused the stimulus debate to revolve around a bill that McCain dismisses as "generational theft."

P1: John McCain enjoyed being bipartisan in the past.

P2: [All people who enjoy things in the past will want to continue doing them in the future.]

C1: Therefore John McCain wanted to continue being bipartisan.

P3: John McCain did not continue being bipartisan.

P4: [Only recklessness by House Democrats could cause John McCain not to be bipartisan.]

C2: Therefore House Democrats are reckless.

Huh?

There is nothing wrong with Will's logic here (there is almost everywhere else in yesterday's piece–such as his comparing the quantity of money spent on the stimulus with the size of the federal budget twenty five years ago).  The problem with Will's argument is that P1, P2 and C1 are just false. 

The argument however is something of a topical inference.  A topical inference, on Boethius's definition (cf. De topicis differentiis), rests on an implied maximal proposition.  I'm at a loss for the moment to find in Boethius's text the exact one (there are many of these maximal propositions) which would apply here.  But it seems to me in the first place that this is not, as Ambinder suggests, an enthymeme with P2 as a supressed premise (besides, if it were it would still be valid).  The inference here rests on the notion that McCain is maximally conciliatory such that to scare him away really means something. Here, perhaps, is an appropriate analogy.  Imagine you have a brother who does not enjoy any kind of breakfast comestible, if he eats and enjoys the new one you offer him, it will really say something about that particular food.  That's basically what Will is arguing, but it turns out that your brother likes everything, so your inference, while a good one, fails.

**edited for clarity.  

George Will, Straw Man

Generalissimus

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In honor of Lincoln's birthday, a discussion of logic.  The other day on the Political Animal blog of the Washington Monthly, one of my favorite liberal blogs (it's a good blog, and it features a real philosopher), I encountered the following:

THE GOP MAINSTREAM…. Given the attention of late on the Republican all-tax-cut plans on the Hill, I thought it was pretty obvious what constitutes the GOP "agenda" when it comes to economic stimulus. And yet, John Cole flags this interesting complaint from Real Clear Politics' Jay Cost.

Who's arguing that "tax cuts alone" will solve this problem? Even if some are, is this the median position on the Republican side? Is this the position of the more moderate members of the GOP Senate caucus like Lugar, Voinovich, and Murkowski? How about moderate House Republicans like Kirk, LoBiondo, and Castle? We might count it as bipartisanship if Obama had picked up a few of them, but he didn't.

Cost was referring to a comment President Obama made during his press conference the other night, when he said, "[T]ax cuts alone can't solve all of our economic problems." To Cost, this was a straw-man argument, since it doesn't reflect "the median position on the Republican side."

I guess it depends on the meaning of "median."

In the House, 95% of the Republican caucus — 168 out of 178 — supported an all-tax-cut alternative to a stimulus plan that included spending and tax cuts. In the Senate, 90% of the Republican caucus — 36 out of 40 (with one abstention) — did the exact same thing. We can quibble about where the "median" is, exactly, but with these ratios, there are only so many ways to stretch the definition of the word.

Indeed, Cost's post identified six GOP lawmakers who, he thought, would be likely to reject such an all-tax-cut proposal. Of the six "more moderate members," half voted with their party in support of a plan that wouldn't spend a dime, and would rely exclusively on tax cuts.

What I find especially interesting, though, is that Cost not only wasn't aware of this, but he assumed that even if some Republicans supported this approach, it must be unfair to suggest that such an idea was part of the Republican Party mainstream.

In other words, Republican lawmakers have gone so far around the bend, they're surprising their own supporters.

This raises an interesting question about how one can honestly and fairly represent one's "opponent."  One annoying thing about some op-ed writers and many bloggers is a tendency to use a very general term to refer to their opponent.  "Conservatives," they'll say, "believe x, y, and z."  X, y and z will often turn out to be silly, but perhaps true, of someone who fits in that group.  I find such employment of general terms (they're not generalizations–those involve inferences from the particular to the general) very often inaccurate and for that reason dishonest.  This is especially true of blogging, when one can provide all sorts of evidence about the beliefs of one's opponents.  I think it is also especially true of op-eds, where the bar should be set much higher in that newspapers have editors.  For this reason, I bristle when I read this kind of thing (from none other than George Will):

Certitude of one flavor or another is never entirely out of fashion in Washington. Thirty years ago, some conservatives were certain that their tax cuts would be so stimulative that they would be completely self-financing. Today, some liberals are certain that the spending they favor — on green jobs, infrastructure and everything else — will completely pay for itself. For liberals, "stimulus spending" is a classification that no longer classifies: All spending is, they are certain, necessarily stimulative. 

And some paragraphs later:

Today, again, we are told that "politics" has no place in the debate about the tripartite stimulus legislation, which is partly a stimulus, partly liberalism's agenda of social engineering and partly the beginning of "remaking" the economy. 

Surely a man with an Ivy League education can find it in him to name one representative person who asserts this.

It turns out that such characterizations are straw men–or rather, to be precise, hollow men.  They are hollow because they are so very general.  In the second of the passages above, some liberals might be guilty of wanting to engage in social engineering, but so does everyone, including the author of Statecraft as Soulcraft. 

There has to be a name for this kind of move.  Its generality suggests straw man, so does it's role in criticism, but I think it might deserve its own special name.  Any suggestion?

Begging the Question, George Will

Inalienable

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Whatever one's view of gay marriage, one has to admit that many arguments in favor of it rest on some notion of basic rights.  Whether that claim is true is not my concern now.  However, in the interest of full disclosure, I think that it is.  Whatever one's conception of basic rights, in a constitutional democracy such as our own, such rights are guaranteed by the constitution's bill of rights at the federal level, and by state's constitutions at the state level.  The structure our constitutions guarantees that constitutional rights do not depend in the first instance on the whim of the people.  We cannot vote that some minority group be stripped of its constitutional rights.  Constitutional rights are guarantees, aren't they?  

Let's set the stage.  Here's aspiring legal scholar, George Will:

In November, 13,402,566 California voters expressed themselves for or against Proposition 8, which said that their state's Constitution should be amended to define marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. The voters, confident that they had a right to decide this question by referendum, endorsed Proposition 8 by a margin of 52.3 to 47.7 percent

Well, that's the question isn't it–whether the voters were acting constitutionally (thinking you are, by the way, does not mean you are).  Do the voters get to decide which rights people have according to the constitution by constitutional referendum?  On the one hand, the constitution is malleable by referendum.  And good thing too.  But Will argues that this right has no boundaries.  But this power of referendum certainly cannot be infinite.  I mean, for instance, you can't have explicitly contradictory provisions.  That would mean legal chaos.  You cannot, in other words, answer every constitutional question by referendum.  This way we cannot have an election stripping Mormons of the right to vote, or women of the right to be physicists.  So, in other words, which rights are of this type is the question.  Does civil marriage constitute one such right?  Here's Jerry Brown (in the words of George Will):

Now comes California's attorney general, Jerry Brown — always a fountain of novel arguments — with a 111-page brief asking the state Supreme Court to declare the constitutional amendment unconstitutional. He favors same-sex marriages and says the amendment violates Article 1, Section 1, of California's Constitution, which enumerates "inalienable rights" to, among other things, liberty, happiness and privacy. 

And that's an interesting argument, I think.  If certain rights are inalienable, then it's constitutionally prohibited that they be alienable by referendum, even if that referendum was believed to be constitutional by the voters.  The proper place to answer such questions–that is, about the constitutionality of the questions–is also provided in our constitutions–the courts, whose job it is to interpret the law.  One needs generally to interpret documents whose meaning and provisions are sometimes unclear.  And this seems like an instance of that.  But not to George Will:

Brown's audacious argument is a viscous soup of natural-law and natural-rights philosophizing, utterly untethered from case law. It is designed to effect a constitutional revolution by establishing an unchallengeable judicial hegemony. He argues that:

The not-really-sovereign people cannot use the constitutionally provided amendment process to define the scope of rights enumerated in the Constitution; California's judiciary, although established by the state's Constitution, has the extra-constitutional right to supplement that enumeration by brooding about natural law, natural justice and natural rights, all arising from some authority somewhere outside the Constitution; the judiciary has the unchallengeable right to say what social policies are entailed by or proscribed by the state Constitution's declaration of rights and other rights discovered by judges.

What is natural justice? Learned and honorable people disagree. Which is why such consensus as can be reached is codified in a constitution. But Brown's reasoning would make California's Constitution subordinate to judges' flights of fancy regarding natural justice. Judges could declare unconstitutional any act of Constitution-revising by the people.

That's the constitutional role of the judiciary (as established by case law).  Their having this role does not mean the people of California are not "sovereign."  That misses the point of Brown's objection.  And it misses the point of our constitutional structure.  It's the constitutional job of the judiciary to interpret the law.  How do they do that?  You can't ask the law you're interpreting, because you have to interpret it.  What to do?  Antonin Scalia, for instance, uses a dictionary.  Clarence Thomas, get this, natural law–whatever that is.

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."

General discussion, George Will, Straw Man

The hollow man

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In general, one commits the straw man fallacy in a situation of criticism–when one challenges someone else's argument in anything other than its true and charitable form, one is in danger of committing the straw man fallacy.  Let me give an Al Gore example.

  • Al Gore argues that curbing carbon emissions is critical to reducing the impact of climate change.  He points to numbers and charts and data and stuff like that.  I see what he's saying, he saying we should get rid of all of our cars!  

The claim after "I see what he's saying" obviously bears little resemblance to what Al Gore is saying.  It's funny, in fact, how often that claim–oh, I see what you're saying!–precedes a straw man.  It's like a straw man warning.  

Anyway, back to what I was saying.   The straw man fallacy admits of a couple of variations.  You might call the most common variation the "misrepresentation" form.  It consists in the distortion of an opponent's actual position.  Take the above example.  Al Gore argues for more sensible carbon policies, but he does not advocate the rapid elimination of the automobile.  Another form, recently discussed by Bob Talisse and Scott Aikin, involves selecting the worst of an opponent's argument for attack.  This one lacks the outright stupidity or dishonesty of the misrepresentation form, although it involves the false claim that the weak argument is the strongest one.  Talisse and Aikin call this "the weak man" argument. One other common form of the straw man, the one I see today in the work of a dear friend of the NonSequitur dot com, involves completely inventing an opponent and an opponent's argument, and then attacking that and claiming victory.  Call this the hollow man argument.

This is just what George Will does today.  He writes:

Reactionary liberalism, the ideology of many Democrats, holds that inconvenient rights, such as secret ballots in unionization elections, should be repealed; that existing failures, such as GM, should be preserved; and, with special perversity, that repealed mistakes, such as the "fairness doctrine," should be repeated. That Orwellian name was designed to disguise the doctrine's use as the government's instrument for preventing fair competition in the broadcasting of political commentary.

Because liberals have been even less successful in competing with conservatives on talk radio than Detroit has been in competing with its rivals, liberals are seeking intellectual protectionism in the form of regulations that suppress ideological rivals. If liberals advertise their illiberalism by reimposing the fairness doctrine, the Supreme Court might revisit its 1969 ruling that the fairness doctrine is constitutional. The court probably would dismay reactionary liberals by reversing that decision on the ground that the world has changed vastly, pertinently and for the better.

The only problem is that, as has been pointed out all over the place, no one advocates the fairness doctrine.  Will doesn't even name one person who supports the fairness doctrine in his article.  Yet he concludes:

If reactionary liberals, unsatisfied with dominating the mainstream media, academia and Hollywood, were competitive on talk radio, they would be uninterested in reviving the fairness doctrine. Having so sullied liberalism's name that they have taken to calling themselves progressives, liberals are now ruining the reputation of reactionaries, which really is unfair. 

This is really appalling, even for Will.  Normally he can muster at least a straw man.  But I wonder whether his inability to find someone to slime is a step forward or a step backward.  

George Will, Ignoratio Elenchi

Fight for your right to party

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Here's a fun assignment.  Think of all of things you can do with yourself, then ask, do I have a constitutional right to do this? If it's not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution in unambiguous language, like the second amendment's unequivocal guarantee of your individual and unrestricted right to pack heat, then no, you don't have a right to it.  The second part was kind of a joke.  The first part not–you'll find that you have no explicit constitutional right to do most of the things you do.  So the fact that something you do or can do is not explicitly mentioned in the constitution does not ipso facto mean it's not a guaranteed right.  Or so I would think.  Not so much George Will.

In Roe, the court said that the 14th Amendment guarantee of "due process" implies a general right of privacy, within which lurks a hitherto unnoticed abortion right that, although it is "fundamental," the Framers never mentioned. And this right somehow contains the trimester scheme of abortion regulations.

Since 1973 the court has been entangled in the legislative function of adumbrating an abortion code the details of which are, Wilkinson says, "not even remotely suggested by the text or history of the 14th Amendment." Parental consent? Spousal consent? Spousal notification? Parental notification? Waiting periods? Lack of funding for nontherapeutic abortions? Partial-birth abortion procedures? Zoning ordinances that exclude abortion facilities? The court has tried to tickle answers for these and other policy questions from the Constitution.

Last thing first.  According to the Constitution, it's the judiciary's job to interpret the law.  The Supreme Court interprets all laws in virtue of their consistency with the U.S. Constitution.  That's its job.  Second,  did you think of any of the things  you do which aren't explicitly mentioned as rights?  

George Will, Stanley Fish, Things that are false

Job Market

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Anyone who has gone through the relentless misery known as the academic job market knows that one's political affiliations are the farthest thing from one's mind (and the least likely subject of conversation at any of one's many interviews).  One worries rather about the really long CV of one's competitors.  Having gone through that myself, I can say that George Will's whining about ideological imbalance in the humanities is uninformed and silly.  Speaking of a recent and most likely annoying book by Stanley Fish, he suggests that one ought to study the causes and consequences of there being so many lefties in academia.  Laying out his case for affirmative action for conservatives, Will writes: 

Fish does not dispute the fact that large majorities of humanities and social science professors are on the left. But about the causes and consequences of this, he airily says: It is all "too complicated" to tell in his book, other than to say that the G.I. Bill began the inclusion of "hitherto underrepresented and therefore politically active" groups.

Then, promiscuously skewering straw men, he says, "these were not planned events" and universities do not "resolve" to hire liberals and there is no "vast left-wing conspiracy" and inquiring into a job applicant's politics is not "allowed" and "the fact of a predominantly liberal faculty says nothing necessarily about what the faculty teaches." Note Fish's obfuscating "necessarily."

The question is not whether the fact "necessarily" says something about teaching but whether the fact really does have pedagogic consequences. About the proliferation of race and gender courses, programs and even departments, Fish says there are two relevant questions: Are there programs "with those names that are more political than academic?" And do such programs "have to be more political than academic?" He says the answer to the first is yes, to the second, no.

The "consequences," however, of this phenomenon have been studied.  Turns out, say some, students are unlikely to be indoctrinated.  I know I say this a lot, but I'm tired of being called an indoctrinator: I can't even indoctrinate my students to underline or italicize the title of that leftist handbook, The Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics.  When they get that, perhaps will move on to my views about race and gender. 

George Will, Lack of Evidence

Ten fifths a person

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George Will has the courage to say what the people who aren't thinking are thinking:

There will be "some impact," Will declared. "And I think this adds to my calculation — this is very hard to measure — but it seems to me if we had the tools to measure we'd find that Barack Obama gets two votes because he's black for every one he loses because he's black because so much of this country is so eager, a, to feel good about itself by doing this, but more than that to put paid to the whole Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson game of political rhetoric."

Perhaps if it's hard to measure, and you're a conservative columnist prone to gullibility, you should back off and wait until there's evidence.

David Brooks, General discussion, George Will

The power of ideas

David Brooks, conservative columnist and former Bush sycophant, yesterday:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

Gee, who would scorn ideas?  Maybe the David Brooks, court flatterer of Bush's Versailles era [October 2, 2004]:

When John Kerry was asked how he would prevent another attack like 9/11, he reeled off a list of nine concrete policy areas, ranging from intelligence reform to training Iraqi troops, but his answer had no thematic summation. If you glance down a transcript of the debate and you see one set of answers that talks about “logistical capacity” or “a plan that I’ve laid out in four points,” or “a long list” of proposals or “a strict series of things” that need to be done, you know that’s Kerry speaking. [emphasis added] 

Ideas are so boring!  Concrete policy!  Snore.  Contrast this with Bush [following directly from the same October 2, 2004 op-ed]:

If, on the other hand, you see an answer that says, “When we give our word, we will keep our word,” you know that is Bush. When you see someone talking about crying with a war widow, you know that’s Bush.

Bush had no ideas then either, and it seems Brooks knew it.  But then it was a virtue.  Now it obviously isn't.  My only question is why it took Brooks so long to learn this. 

In a related matter, I'm happy to be wrong about the right wing pundit army marching lockstep with their guy, however bad his arguments.  This was true with Bush until just recently.  The only disagreements (uttered sotto voce) were that he was not conservative enough.  Now to the growing chorus of right wing pundits who reject McCain for reasons other than sufficient rightwardness, a group which includes George Will, Kathleen Parker, and to some extent Charles Krauthammer, one can perhaps now definitively add David Brooks.