Check out the report on the new conservative women’s movement, or conservative feminism at AmSpec. The best part was that they thought the best way to reply to the Republican war on women meme was to analogize the Obama Presidency to a bad date or an unreliable boyfriend. That’s, by the way, not a way to relate to women in a way that will undo the thought that the Republican Party doesn’t take them seriously. See the video:
Category Archives: Fallacies and Other Problems
This category covers all broken arguments. Some are straightforwardly fallacious, others suffer from a lack of evidence or some other unidentifiable problem.
Support abortions, but don’t have them? You must be a hypocrite
Rick Perry tried the old tu quoque with the Texas state Senator and abortion rights defender Wendy Davis the other day. (Reported here at SALON.) Davis, as it turns out, hasn’t had an abortion. Even when she, like, could have.
… she was a teenage mother herself. She managed to eventually graduate from Harvard Law School and serve in the Texas senate. It is just unfortunate that she hasn’t learned from her own example ….
First, one can support abortion rights and still not have one. Second, if Perry is trying to make the point that having children isn’t all that disruptive of a life by pointing to one woman who made it through law school with a child… The answer is that at least she chose that option. That makes a big difference.
Slippery slopes… to rationality!
It’s slippery slope week at the NS. Here’s a humorous slope argument at The Onion.
Condemning the decision as “dangerously reasonable†and “beyond level-headed,†vocal opponents of same-sex marriage strongly cautioned that this morning’s Supreme Court rulings supporting gay rights could put the United States on a one-way, slippery slope to rationality.
Ha! Well, you know, the acceptability of a slippery slope argument depends on how likely the consequent is made by the antecedent. Not seeing that, really. There are lots of bumps on that staircase. Mostly comprised by the voting decisions of the denizens of Texas, Utah, Alabama, and so on.
Slip’n’slide, with beastiality at the bottom
Huffpo’s got a nice review of how “the haters” are “freaking out” about DOMA being struck down by the Supreme Court. Got a nice shot of a tweet from Bryan Fisher, from the American Family Association, with the classic slippery slope on homosexuality.
The DOMA ruling has now made the normalization of polygamy, pedophilia, incest and bestiality inevitable. Matter of time.
Do you like slippery on your slope? Inevitable. Of course, the fact that two of these four involve entities that can’t give consent doesn’t prevent Fisher from lumping them all together.
You’re gonna be a hypocrite
The tu quoque argument is the argument from hypocrisy or inconsistency: S says that p, or that we should do a, but then turns around and says not-p or fails to do a. It’s usually not clear what the consequences of the tu quoque are – either evidence of insincerity, evidence that the proposal is too difficult to follow, or that the person can’t keep his story straight. We’ve at the NS had a variety of discussions about tu quoque, ranging from conditions for its acceptability to the breadth of its form. Our best discussion was started by Colin with his observation that sometimes, tu quque arguments needn’t be in the form of actual hypocrisy, but rather hypothetical hypocrisy. Hence, subjunctive tu quoque. (See Colin’s post HERE) I’ve found a close cousin to the not-actual-but-hypothetically-relevant form for tu quoque. It’s the predictive tu quoque.
Witness Jonah Goldberg’s recent posting at NRO. He says: young voters have supported Obama and his policies overwhelmingly. But now that the Affordable Care Act is starting to be implemented, they will be required to buy health insurance — at rates greater than they would have to on other systems. That’s because they are keeping the larger system afloat, as they are supporting the old, sick, and dying. He predicts that they will then bolt on the issue. First, he presents the dilemma.
You’d insist that millennials are not only informed, but eager to make sacrifices for the greater good. Well, here’s your chance to prove it: Fork over whatever it costs to buy the best health insurance you can under Obamacare.
Then he sarcastically presents the decision:
[S]ince the fine for not signing up is so much lower than premiums, lots of people will just wait until they’re sick before buying insurance.
Now, that might be the smart play — for cynics.
But you’re not cynical. You didn’t vote for Obama and cheer the passage of Obamacare because it was the cool thing to do. You did your homework. You want to share the sacrifice. You want to secure the president’s legacy.
And now’s your chance to prove it.
I think it would be best for these lines to be read out loud. When he says “But you’re not cynical,” it has to be delivered with that special tone of voice one has when one’s caught another in a reductio. He’s not being hortatory – as though he’s saying: I predict that you will not be cynics. No, he’s saying: I expect you to be cynics, as you’ve been cynics all along… because your votes were bought by Obama’s policies regarding student loans and extended coverage under parental health care. Now that you have to bear the burden, you’ll resent it.
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Ignoring the trollz
John Oliver’s doing a bang-up job on the Daily Show, and he’s implemented the don’t feed the trolls policy with Sarah Palin. Salon’s got a brief discussion HERE.
One question about iron-manning is whether even addressing the argument given is appropriate. That is, how John and I have been working with the Iron Man has been to take the fallacy as interpreting the opponent’s argument in the best possible light and addressing that version. But sometimes, we can iron man when we just spend any time at all on an argument. That is, if Iron Man is fallacious because of (a) the waste of time and energy on an opponent’s argument, and (b) thereby giving them more intellectual credit than they deserve, then the improvement of the argument isn’t the core of the fallacy. Rather, it’s in the misuse of dialectical resources on a dumb argument.
The NSA knows about your analogy and slippery slope
In response to challenges to the legality and morality of the NSA’s surveillance program, President Obama said we should have a healthy debate about it (video HERE). This occasions George Neumayr at the American Spectator to make this comparison:
He is open to a “healthy†debate about it. Holder and Obama are like drunk drivers who cause a pile-up and then stroll back innocently to see if they can “help.â€
And when President Obama makes it clear that the content of the calls is not monitored, Neumayr sees a slope looming:
In a few years, the line will move to: yes, we are listening to your calls, but we are not recording them; yes, we are forcing you to pay for abortion but we are not requiring you undergo one.
The trouble is that in both the analogy and in the slippery slope, we have Neumayr assuming that the harm is already in the surveillance as it is. Notice that both of the Obama replies to criticism has been to challenge that thought — the harm of surveillance would be on content.
Be prepared … for that slippery slope
Mark Tooley objects to the Boy Scouts no longer discriminating against gay scouts. He sees it as a trend of the emasculation of male culture, a kind of conformity to the kind of society “determined to echo the preening voice of the sort of nagging school guidance counselor whom every adolescent boy dreads and seeks to avoid”. Yes, Tooley is analogizing contemporary politics to high school boys and their attitudes. The point for the NS readers is that he’s not just got a concern about the reasons, but also a concern about the consequences. He sees larger trouble brewing, and more than just the fact that BSA scoutmasters will likely be gay, too:
[It is not yet clear]what this policy means for transsexuals. Cross-dressing Scouts? Only one of countless issues that inevitably now will arise under the rubric of protected “orientation or preference.†For a more likely scenario, how about teenage Scouts wanting openly to celebrate their pornographic interests?
Yes, so Tooley’s mind has run from the question of whether there should be no prohibition on gay scouts to whether if they let them in, whether they’ll have to let them wear, you know, Priscilla Queen of the Desert wear for the backpacking trip. Or whether their interest in pornography will be allowable and protected.
It’s really two slopes, and separate ones. The ‘transsexuals’ line is an error for the simple reason that if there’s a uniform, there’s a uniform. So the same reason why Johnny can’t wear his All-State football jersey on the backpacking trip is the same reason why Sam can’t wear his sundress. Done.
The pornography issue is, again, simple. Exposing the boys to sexually explicit material, even if they do it themselves, isn’t lawful. What does Tooley think? That once you let the gays in, you might as well fire up the film projector for the stag films? (I suspect that it’s a background equivocation of protecting the boys’ interests — what if they’re interested in porn?, he asks.) He even thinks it’s “more likely”! More likely than what?
OK quoque
Just in: James Inhofe (R- OK) is now plugging for federal disaster aid for the tornado damage in Oklahoma. That’s fine. Ah, but he and his colleague, Tom Coburn (R-OK) were famously against similar aid for the East Coast after Hurricane Sandy. Oh, that’s weird. I wonder what Inhofe has to say about that:
That was totally different. . . . They were getting things, for instance, that was supposed to be in New Jersey. . . . They had things in the Virgin Islands. They were fixing roads there, they were putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C. Everybody was getting in and exploiting the tragedy that took place. That won’t happen in Oklahoma.
First, off, he’s opposed to funding help for those battered by a storm because he’s worried about grift? Sheesh. Second, if it does happen in OK, is he on the hook then? Oh, and Inhofe and Coburn have a long history of opposing funding FEMA (despite the fact that OK has among the most disasters).
Senator Coburn wants the help, too. He proposes to pay for it by cutting other federal programs.
Again, we have a case where we must ask whether we have a case of acceptable tu quoque. We’ve regularly here at the NS argued that cases of tu quoque that show double standards are appropriate and relevant. Similar cases should be judged similarly, and it zip code is not a relevant reason to change one’s view on whether funding is deserved. So reveling in the hypocrisy charge here isn’t for the sake of feeling hate toward someone or to score points on a vice, but to show that someone’s not been an honest arbiter with reasons. That’s what’s happening here. It’s not schadenfreude, it’s not ad hominem abuse. It’s evidence that someone doesn’t proceed fairly. That’s what it shows, and when your constituency is suffering, you understand the role of government support. That’s what the hypocrisy charges amount to.
You would have noticed this hypocrisy… if you weren’t such a hypocrite
Jonah Goldberg at NRO rings up a fantastic subjunctive tu quoque:
Yes, it’s extremely unlikely he ordered the IRS to discriminate against tea-party. . . . And his outrage now — however convenient — is appreciated. But when people he views as his “enemies†complained about a politicized IRS, what did he do? Nothing.
Imagine for a moment if black civil-rights organizations, gay groups, or teachers’ unions loudly complained to members of Congress and the press that the IRS was discriminating against them. How long would it take for the White House to investigate? Answer honestly: Minutes? Hours?
The overall form of subjunctive tu quoque is not that you have actual inconsistent behavior or double standards, but that you would have them. You just know it! Of course, this form of tu quoque requires, for the subjunctive to be accepted, that the audience think the President is a hypocrite and an employer of double standards. So, often, the subjuctive form of the tu quoque isn’t an argument from hypocrisy, but one to it.
**A later addition to the post 5/21/2013**
For other discussions of subjunctive tu quoque, see Colin’s original post HERE, and John’s got a lengthy discussion HERE, and we three co-wrote a paper that appeared in INQUIRY about a year back, which I’ve posted on my Academia.edu page HERE. For cases that tu quoque arguments are regularly relevant, see one of my recent posts on it HERE, and my essay in Informal Logic HERE.