Category Archives: Other problems

Problems other than specific logical fallacies–poor explanations, things that are false, and so forth.

Argument Analysis, Equivocation, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments, Straw Man

Offending comparisons

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One place in life where a lot of good could be done through a clearer understanding of logic arises in cases of offense. We sometimes seem to believe that to be the cause of someone taking offense is by itself a wrong. But this ignores the fact that people can be mistaken in their offense: Someone might not intend the offense that another feels. In some cases, the offended may simply misunderstand what is being said. The feeling of offense, however, is as bewitching of our rational faculty as is most outrage and indignation. (A classic on the philosophical dificulties here is Joel Feinberg’s
Offense to Others).

Tim Wise in a recent article, “Animal Whites” in the leftist journal “Counterpunch” uses a battery of arguments to show that certain members of the animal right’s community, especially PETA and its founder Ingrid Newkirk have a race problem. Much of the article is flippant and progresses by a series of truly awful arguments, but along the way a couple of interesting issues are raised concerning the use of comparisons in arguments and the nature of offense.

Wise accuses animal rights proponents of “misanthropy” for the comparison between the suffering of animals and humans. The idea seems to be that if you care about animal suffering you therefore do not care about human suffering (or you hate humans). Perhaps this is true in some cases, but it certainly does not follow from the fact that someone devotes their efforts to ending animals suffering that they therefore don’t care about all of the millions of human beings who are suffering.

But this fallacious argument leads us to what matters most to Wise–the comparison of human suffering and animal suffering, or more specifically his offense at the PETA photo-display “Are Animals the New Slaves?”

>That PETA can’t understand what it means for a black person to be compared to an animal, given a history of having been thought of in exactly those terms, isn’t the least bit shocking.

Wise seems to think that if you compare two things in regard to one similar attribute (My car is the same color as my shirt), you imply that they are similar in all attributes (My car is my shirt), or in other attributes (My car would be comfortable wrapped around my body). Thus, if PETA shows that the treatment of African-American slaves in the past and the treatment of animals in the present are similar in some regards (use similar technologies, for example), then PETA is saying that African-Americans are animals, or are similar to animals in ways that would legitimate offense (e.g., the outrageous and shameful history of racist attempts to demean African-Americans (and other people) through comparisons with animals). But this, of course, does not follow from the original comparison.

>The “New Slaves” exhibition, currently making its way around 42 cities over a 10-week period has drawn outrage, understandably, from African Americans. And, typically, representatives of the blindingly white, middle class and affluent animal rights establishment, show no signs of understanding whence the anger emanates.

>To wit, Dawn Carr, PETA’s Director of Special Projects, who has admitted that lots of folks are upset about her group “comparing black people to animals,” but who, in PETA’s defense, doesn’t deny that that is what PETA is doing, but rather insists it’s OK, because the exhibit also compares factory farming to other injustices, “like denying women the vote or using child labor.” In other words, don’t worry black people: you’re not the only ones we’re comparing to animals!

Here we see that Wise is clearly committing the logical mistake in the last clause. The point might be made more clearly by saying that PETA is not comparing people to animals so much as comparing treatments. To say that someone was “hunted like an animal” is not to say that the hunting was right, that they are an animal.

But Wise imagines the animal rights proponent defending this comparison on the following grounds:

>Now I’m sure there will be some animal liberationists who read this and who think that since animals are sentient beings too, and since they have the right not to be exploited for human benefit (positions with which I don’t disagree), that comparisons with the Holocaust, or lynching are perfectly fair. To think otherwise, they might argue, is to engage in an anthropocentric favoring of Homo sapiens over other species.

Wise acknowledges that because animals and humans are similarly sentient, comparing their suffering seems reasonable. But he rejects this argument:

>But of course, whether they admit it or not, most all believers in animal rights do recognize a moral and practical difference between people and animals: after all, virtually none would suggest that if you run over a squirrel when driving drunk, that you should be prosecuted for vehicular homicide, the way you would be if you ran over a small child. The only basis for a distinction in these cases is, at root, recognition of a fundamental difference between a child and a squirrel.

>Oh, and not to put too fine a point on it, but if the folks at PETA really think that factory farming and eating the products of factory farming are literally the equivalent to human genocide, then, to be consistent, they would have to argue for the criminal prosecution of all meat-eaters, and War Crimes Tribunals for anyone even remotely connected to the process. After all, if you consume a factory-farmed chicken, you are, by this logic, implicated in mass murder, the same way many whites were in the lynching of blacks, by purchasing the amputated body parts of the latest victims of white rage.

>To draw any distinction at all–and to not support criminal incarceration of meat-eaters the way one would for a cannibal the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, indeed, draws that distinction–is to admit, whether openly or not, that there is a difference between a cow and a person. That difference may be quite a bit smaller than we realize, and that difference certainly doesn’t justify cruelty to the cow–and it may indeed be so small that we really should opt for vegetarianism–but it is a difference nonetheless.

But in his attempted refutation, Wise has shifted the “refutandum” from the plausible claim that there is a moral similarity between harming animals and humans because of an objective similarity in their character as sentient beings. Now he is arguing against the implausible claim that there is no moral or practical difference between animals and humans. This is a straw man.

These arguments have been addressed in the voluminous literature on animals and ethics. The essential point, I think, rests on Peter Singer’s distinction between “equal consideration” and “equal treatment.” To argue that animals and human beings deserve equal moral consideration does not imply that they deserve the same or “equal” treatment.

As an aside, I would point out that in the first case the essential difference is that we have good reason to believe that the cause of killing the squirrel was not negligence on the part of the driver but far more likely “negligence” on the part of the squirrel (If I leap in front of a car, the driver is presumably not prosecuted for killing me). The other two are more complicated, though again the fact that there are some moral and practical differences between animals and humans does not imply that the comparison between animal suffering and human suffering is illegitimate, which was the claim that Wise should be addressing.

Having failed to make the argument that there is good reason to be offended by this comparison, Wise turns to an extended ad hominem tirade against the “whiteness” of PETA. Being unable to offer an adequate argument he tries to implicate the position in racist motivations or blindness and thus to dismiss the substantive claims that PETA is making (The following paragraphs are unedited and are the actual conclusion of the article).

>That PETA can’t understand what it means for a black person to be compared to an animal, given a history of having been thought of in exactly those terms, isn’t the least bit shocking. After all, the movement is perhaps the whitest of all progressive or radical movements on the planet, for reasons owing to the privilege one must possess in order to focus on animal rights as opposed to, say, surviving oneself from institutional oppression.

>Perhaps if animal liberationists weren’t so thoroughly white and middle-class, and so removed from the harsh realities of both the class system and white supremacy, they would be able to find more sympathy from the folks of color who rightly castigate them for their most recent outrage.

>Perhaps if PETA activists had ever demonstrated a commitment to fighting racism and the ongoing cruelty that humans face every day, they would find more sympathy from those who, for reasons that are understandable given their own lives, view animal rights activism as the equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns, rather than as a struggle for greater compassion for all.

>But then again, if the animal rights movement wasn’t so white and so rich, it would never have thought to make such specious and obviously offensive analogies in the first place.

If my analysis of the logic of the comparison is correct, then we can understand why this comparison can seem offensive to some without that offense being legitimate since it rests, like Wise’s article in general, on a logical mistake.

But there is I think another ground for affront that seems to be lurking unclearly in the back of Wise’s mind and might be more reasonable–the suggestion that the suffering endured through the shameful institution of slavery, or the genocidal policies of Germany, is being trivialized through this comparison.

>The very legitimate goal of stopping the immense horror of factory farming–which horror should be able to stand on its own as an unacceptable cruelty, in need of immediate action–gets conflated with the extermination of millions of people in two separate Holocausts (that of the Middle Passage and that in Europe), thereby ensuring that damn near everyone who hears the analogy will conclude that PETA is either completely insensitive, at best, or bull-goose-loony, at worst: no offense meant to geese, by the way.

Wise confuses comparison and conflation here, but I take the mention of insensitivity to be a suggestion, however inchoate, that the comparison is taken to dishonor the suffering in the two holocausts, by not recognizing the distinctive character of these “two separate Holocausts.”

Whether this is reasonable will depend upon whether one takes the similarity between animal and human suffering to be valid. If one believes that the suffering of animals is less significant than the suffering of human beings then one will find this comparison perhaps offensive. Whether one is right–and in what precise sense it is true, if it is true–to think that animal suffering is less signficant than human suffering is a question that must be answered by careful ethical reflection.

But, we might at least make appeal to intention here. If it is the case that someone intends to trivialize the human suffering, offense would be legitimate. But if we have no reason to think that this is the point of their comparision, then it does not seem reasonable to find this offensive. I don’t think that this settles the question, but it does, at lesat, allow us to differentiate a substantive disagreement from the confusions that arise from the feeling of outrage and that plague Wise’s article.

There is, perhaps, also a third possible reason for taking offense at the exhibit, and althogh Wise doesn’t address this, it seems plausible to me that it is the ultimate motivation for many who are offended. For some, the use of images of racial violence appears as an appropriation of this suffering for political ends not shared by those who feel racial solidarity with the victims of that violence. There is a feeling of ownership of the suffering, and therefore a feeling that the use of this suffering for what appears to be an extrinsic political goal is illegitimate. To be honest I don’t know what I think about this objection, but it is an entirely different objection that anything Wise has raised in his article, and would need separate and careful consideration

There are ultimately difficult and troubling issues here that confront the animal rights movement when it attempts provocatively to cause awareness of the magnitude of animal suffering. There are, however, two important questions: First, whether the offense that some people feel is justified; Second, whether the offense that some people feel is too high a strategic cost for the activists.

One could not, however, do better than to read the very thoughtful foreword to Marjorie Spiegel’s The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery by Alice Walker before taking offense.

George Will, John Tierney, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments

Abortion writers

Despite their opposing positions on abortion, John Tierney and George Will each subscribe to some version of the never more popular view that abortion is not or should not be a question of constitutional rights. What better way to circumvent those pesky constitutional questions–questions about which, suprisingly, people seriously disagree–than to deny the relevance of the question to constitutional law. At least, so Tierney argues:

The abortion debate, unlike the civil rights debate, can’t be resolved by appealing to any widely held moral or legal principles. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court discovered a right in the Constitution for pregnant women to be left alone by the government. But that just ducked the question – what about the fetus’s right to be left alone? – and angered huge numbers of Americans.

For starters, *Roe v. Wade* doesn’t duck the question at all; it (rightly or wrongly) clearly maintains that the fetus has no legal rights (at least in the first two trimesters). Second, evidence of a conflict of rights (mother-fetus) or sincere disagreement of a vocal number of Americans does not mean that it (1) is not, or should not be, a civil rights issue, or (2) that the justices were wrong. Finally, a conflict of views about the status of the fetus does not demonstrate that the issue “cannot be resolved by appealing to any widely held moral or legal principles” unless by “resolved” Tierney means “subject to wide consensus” in which case he would be saying the abortion issue cannot be resolved (subject to wide consensus) until it’s resolved (subject to wide consensus). But that’s nonsense. Supreme Court cases, whatever their outcome, resolve (answer for some span of time) legal questions concerning constitutional rights; they do not, so it seems, end moral debate about the same questions.

The idea that abortion might constitute a right entailed by the Constitution appears so ridiculous to George Will, that he can muster only a barely intelligible drunken parody of the “Ride of Paul Revere.”

Judging by the river of rhetoric that has flowed in response to the court vacancy, contemporary liberalism’s narrative of American constitutional history goes something like this:

“On the night of April 18, 1775, Paul Revere galloped through the Massachusetts countryside, and to every Middlesex village and farm went his famous cry of alarm, ‘The British are coming! The British are coming to menace the ancient British right to abortion!’ The next morning, by the rude bridge that arched the flood, their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world in defense of the right to abortion. The Articles of Confederation, ratified near the end of the Revolutionary War to Defend Abortion Rights, proved unsatisfactory, so in the summer of 1787, 55 framers gathered here to draft a Constitution. Even though this city was sweltering, the framers kept the windows of Independence Hall closed. Some say that was to keep out the horseflies. Actually, it was to preserve secrecy conducive to calm deliberations about how to craft a more perfect abortion right. The Constitution was ratified after the state conventions vigorously debated the right to abortion. But 74 years later, a great Civil War had to be fought to defend the Constitution against states that would secede from the Union rather than acknowledge that a privacy right to abortion is an emanation loitering in the penumbra of other rights. And so on.”

It’s hard to know what to make of this. On the one hand, it seems like a version of the obtuse constitutional originalism that claims there are no other rights in Constitution than those explicitly mentioned by the framers or somehow consequent upon the attitudes of the founders.
On the other hand, it suggests that opponents to the Roberts nomination can think of only one thing. That’s true of some opponents–but geez Louise–that’s true of some of his supporters. But in any case it doesn’t absolve Will of the need for an *argument*. If Will wants to use the pages of the *Washington Post* to lampoon *some* liberal groups, rather than argue against them, then we suggest his purpose would be better served on the Rush Limbaugh show, where no one will fault him for not having any good reasons for his conclusions. Granted a slight difference in vocabulary, the level of discourse is about the same.

The exhibits at the National Constitution Center can correct the monomania of some liberals by reminding them that the Constitution expresses the philosophy of natural rights: People have various rights, including and especially the right to property and self-government. These rights are not created by government, which exists to balance and protect the rights in their variety.

But such bland truisms about the constitution don’t resolve anything. Whatever the source of rights–nature, God, or social contract–there always remains the question as to what is entailed by them. Determining their source doesn’t resolve this question; it only pushes it back one step further.

David Brooks, Equivocation, Ignoratio Elenchi, Plain Bad Arguments

Confusing Criminals

It isn’t always clear, and often is, perhaps, not the case, that pundits are trying to deceive by their fallacious arguments. Sometimes the flaws in the argument suggest more basic incoherences and confusions in their thought. This seems to be the case with David Brooks’ “Two Steps Towards a Sensible Immigration Policy” (NYT 8/4/5), in which he employs a literary device that ultimately undermines the argument that he is trying to make about immigration reform.

Imagining a “working class guy from the south side of San Antonio” as his interlocutor, he sketches the problem of immigration:

>He’s no racist. Many of his favorite neighbors are kind, neat and hard-working Latinos. But his neighborhood now has homes with five cars rotting in the front yard and 12 single men living in one house. Now there are loud parties until 2 a.m. and gang graffiti on the walls. He read in the local paper last week that Anglos are now a minority in Texas and wonders if anybody is in charge of this social experiment.

The problem with immigration for this guy seems to be that some immigrants are “bad” and the minority status of Anglos. The latter is a population problem, i.e., the sheer number of immigrants entering Texas (and suggests a more “racial” concern that Brooks admits), the former a crime problem, i.e., the failure of our immigration policy to prevent “bad” immigrants (gang members or other unruly people) from entering the country. But, it is also significantly more than that, since none of the behaviors that trouble this guy are particularly serious crimes, but are closer to “socially disruptive behavior” (I mean something like behavior that does not conform to certain prevalent social expectations, e.g., size of households, disposal of non-functional cars, appropriate party times and forms). There is thus a sort of conflation of crime and “anti-social” behavior. This latter defined relative to norms that are supposedly prevalent among Anglos.

Unfortunately getting “tough” on immigration doesn’t seem to solve the population problem as Brooks notes:

>But we can’t just act like lunkheads and think we can solve this problem with brute force. Tough enforcement laws make us feel good but they don’t do the job. Since 1986, we’ve tripled the number of Border Patrol agents and increased the enforcement budget 10 times over, but we haven’t made a dent in the number of illegals who make it here.

Presumably if we can’t regulate the flow of immigrants we can’t regulate the flow of “bad” immigrants either.

Instead, by controlling economically necessary immigration we will be able to lessen the number of illegal immigrants.

>The only way to re-establish order is to open up legal, controllable channels through which labor can flow in an aboveground, orderly way. We can’t build a wall to stop this flood; we need sluice gates to regulate the flow.

This is the real point of his column: to argue for two bills before the senate, one allowing for a temporary worker program and the other for tougher boarder controls.

But he has just finished telling the guy from San Antonio that the latter aren’t effective in addressing his concerns. There is only one way that we can make Brooks’ argument coherent. We must supply something like one of the two following concealed premises:

A) Illegal immigrants are likely to commit other crimes.

B) It is harder to prevent crimes committed by illegal immigrants than legal immigrants.

It is tautological that illegal immigrants are “criminals” by breaking immigration laws. But Brooks and the guy from San Antonio seem to be more concerned with the “subculture of criminality across America” supposedly caused by illegal immigration. But unless A or B are true, there is no reason to think that the bills before the Senate will effectively address this problem, or for that matter that illegal immigration is the cause of increased criminality (beyond the tautological sense).

I don’t know which of the two premises Brooks or the guy from San Antonio would prefer to accept, and I don’t know whether there is any reason to think that either of these is true. I suspect that the real problem here is that the policies for which Brooks is arguing will not address the concerns of the guy from San Antonio, who seems to confuse criminal behavior with disruptive behavior. Add to that a confusion between the criminality of illegal immigration and other forms of criminal behavior and we see how Brooks can suggest that these policies will address the guy from San Antonio’s concerns.

1. These policies will address criminality (of illegal immigration).
2. Addressing criminality (of illegal immigration) will address criminal behavior. (By A or B perhaps)
3. Addressing criminal behavior will address disruptive behavior. (The guy from San Antonio might assume).

Therefore, these policies will address the concerns of the guy from San Antonio.

Nonetheless Brooks would seem to admit that these bills will not solve all the problems.

>So here’s the bottom line for the guy in San Antonio: Everybody’s expecting a big blowup on this issue, but we’ve got a great chance of enacting serious immigration reform. It won’t solve all problems. There will still be wage pressures and late-night parties.

But it seems that he should add one more: criminals. Having confused the criminality of illegal immigration with other forms of criminality he cannot do this.

> But right now immigration chaos is spreading a subculture of criminality across America. What we can do is re-establish law and order, so immigrants can bring their energy to this country without destroying the social fabric while they’re here.

As usual we are not evaluating the truth of Brooks’ conclusion. It may be the case that these two bills are good and beneficial. But it is important to note that Brooks’ has not given us or his friend in San Antonio reason to believe this.
And along the way he seems to have missed the point of his own argument.

Ignoratio Elenchi, John Tierney, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments

Polar Bears for Global Warming

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Most op-ed writers seem to have a fingerprint argument or rhetorical device. Whether it is David Brook’s penchant for dichotomous sociological classifications or George Will’s beloved Bartlett’s Quotations after a while the style gives away the author. A couple of weeks ago I analyzed one of John Tierney’s columns (Source) and uncovered his fingerprint argument. We can see precisely the same argument form in his most recent column, “The Good News Bears” (Source: NYT 8/6/5).

The characteristic pattern of Tierney’s opinion pieces is anecdotal evidence for substantive conclusions. In this column he suggests that global warming–if it is occurring–may in fact be a good thing:

>But I can see why Mr. Kalluk doesn’t mind the idea of a little climate change. “The ice is always going to freeze in the winter,” he said, “but it would be better for us if we had a longer summer. We’d have more time to use our boats. There would be more jobs and a longer tourist season.” The bears would be still around, and their charisma would be making more money for the locals, not just for the WWF fund-raisers down south.

Mr. Kalluk, an inuit who lives in Resolute Bay Nunavut, has visions of eco-tourism dollars in his eyes and so seems content with the prospect of climate change. More importantly, for Tierney’s argument, the climate change *may* not have any harmful effects for polar bears. Commenting on the 20% increase in polar bear populations, Tierney says.

> The chief reason for the rise is probably restrictions on hunting (for which conservationists deserve credit). In this village of fewer than 200 residents, Mr. Kalluk and the other hunters are limited each year to three dozen bears, which they allocate by drawing names out of a hat.

>But the increase might also be related to the recent warming, which could be helping bears in some places.

No evidence is offered for this last hypothesis other than that polar bears have survived in warmer climates before.

But even if we were inclined to accept this speculation from a non-expert, Tierney’s argument misses the point entirely. Even if environmental groups use “charismatic mega-fauna” like the polar bear to drum up support to fight global warming, this does not mean that that is the only or even the primary reason for trying to avoid climate change in the arctic. So even if it is true that the polar bears benefit from warmer climate, this would not suggest that warmer climate in the arctic is a good thing. Tierney has entirely missed the point.

Of course, that brings us back to his underlying argument–some guy in the arctic could make money from climate change, so maybe its not such a bad thing afterall.

John Tierney, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments

Well, Hell. Dell LeFevre thinks this is wrong, so it’s wrong.

William Safire’s resignation from the opinion pages of the NYT in February was a great blow to our enterprise here. While being regular fans of Safire’s language column in the Sunday Times’ Magazine, we were confident that his opinion pieces would almost always provide fertile material for logical analysis. His replacment, John Tierney, has baffled us ever since.

Tierney’s columns seem to share a singular argumentative structure. Often, rather than offering an elaborate argument for a particular position, Tierney reports on a particular person anecdotally as holding that position with the suggestion that this individual possesses a certain epistemic privilege over the reader, and thus the reader should adopt the relevant position. This “argument” is then bolstered by a very terse ideological argument for the relevant position. The anecdotal argument seems to work by a peculiar form of an appeal to authority–and not necessarily a fallacious one. But even though it seems to avoid fallacy, the argument is so weak that it is hard to see how it provides anything more than this anecdote as support for its conclusion. This often leaves Tierney’s ideological argument as the only support for his claim.

His column today “Sagebrush Solution” (Source: NYT 7/26/05) seems to conform to this structure. Here we are introduced to Dell LeFevre who dislikes hikers, the Bureau of Land Management, and some environmentalists.

>Mr. LeFevre, who is 65, has no affection for the hikers who want his cows out of the red-rock canyons and mesas in southern Utah, where his family has been ranching for five generations. He has considered environmentalism a dangerous religion since the day in 1991 when he and his father-in-law found two dozen cows shot to death, perhaps by someone determined to reclaim a scenic stretch of the Escalante River canyon.

Yet, despite his suspicion that environmentalists randomly shoot his cows, Mr LeFevre likes environmentalists when they give him money.

>But he is not bitter when he talks about the deal he made with an environmentalist named Bill Hedden, the executive director of the Grand Canyon Trust. Mr. Hedden’s group doesn’t use lobbyists or lawsuits (or guns) to drive out ranchers. These environmentalists get land the old-fashioned way. They buy it. To reclaim the Escalante River canyon, Mr. Hedden bought the permits that entitle Mr. LeFevre’s cows to graze on the federal land near the river. He figures it was a good deal for the environment because native shrubs and grasses are reappearing, now that cows aren’t eating and trampling the vegetation.

But, the Bush administration is not standing for this capitalist free-market system:

>The Interior Department has decided that environmentalists can no longer simply buy grazing permits and retire them. Under its reading of the law – not wholly shared by predecessors in the Clinton administration – land currently being used by ranchers has already been determined to be “chiefly valuable for grazing” and can be opened to herds at any time if the B.L.M.’s “land use planning process” deems it necessary.

>But why should a federal bureaucrat decide what’s “chiefly valuable” about a piece of land? Mr. Hedden and Mr. LeFevre have discovered a “land use planning process” of their own: see who will pay the most for it. If an environmentalist offers enough to induce a rancher to sell, that’s the best indication the land is more valuable for hiking than for grazing.

>The new policy may make short-term political sense for the Bush administration by pleasing its Republican allies in Utah and lobbyists for the ranching industry. But it’s not good for individual ranchers, and it ensures more bitter range wars in the future. If environmentalists can’t spend their money on land, they’ll just spend it on lawyers.

Thus, when you strip away the anecdote, you have an argument for the claim that environmentalists should be able to retire grazing permits. The reasons that Tierney thinks this is true seems to be something like

a) Retiring grazing permits is done through the free market.
b) The government should not interfere with the free market.

The anecdote provides evidence, it seems, that the motivation for allowing environmentalists to retire grazing permits is not environmental but rather because it benefits a rancher. But this is just a smoke screen for the ideological argument presented above–at least, it is such a weak argument (Are all ranchers benefitted by this? Will they continue to be benefitted if more grazing land is retired?) that it cannot lend much support to the conclusion: It’s as though the argument that Tierney offers us is “Well, Hell. Dell LeFevre thinks this is wrong, so it’s wrong.”

Now perhaps I am being uncharitable here. Tierney might reply that Dell LeFevre isn’t really part of his argument. It is a little bit of color meant to interest the reader, as presumably every Journalism 101 class suggests students begin their articles with a “hook.” That aside, the anecdote is logically related to Tierney’s claim and provides some rhetorical support for that claim. The vaporous nature of that support is all that I wish to reveal here.

Appeal to Ignorance, Begging the Question, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments

Once more into the argument’s breach

Over the past several weeks, the Weekly Standard has been running a series of articles on the evidence for the administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were in some significant way working together to achieve their ends. The series seemed to be kicked off by Hugh Hewitt’s subtlely titled “Breeding Stupidity” (Source: WeekStand 7/14/05). Hewitt is attempting to refute two positions on the left:

>The first is that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were not connected.

>[The second] Iraq is a breeding ground for terrorists.

The first is rejected on the basis of evidence and argument that I hope to return to in the future.

The bulk of breeding stupidity involves the second claim, which we have examined in several forms over the past couple of weeks. It involves the question of the causes of terrorism. Here Hewett argues that the “left” does not have adequate evidence for the claim that Iraq is breeding terrorists. Invoking an interesting distinction, he argues:

>The fact that foreign fighters are streaming across Syria into Iraq in the hopes of killing America is not evidence supporting the “breeding ground” theory. “Opportunity” to act is not the same thing as “motive” for acting. There is zero evidence for the proposition that Iraq is motive rather than opportunity, but the “motive” theory is nevertheless put forward again and again.

Distinguishing between the “opportunity” to fight the U.S. in Iraq and being motivated to fight the U.S. by the invasion of Iraq is a subtle distinction. Nonetheless, Hewett doesn’t argue his point, he simply asserts the absence of evidence that Iraq is motivating terrorists.

>As recently as Wednesday the Washington Post account of the aftermath of the London bombings included the incredible–and unsubstantiated in the article–claim that the “the profile of the suspects suggested by investigators fit long-standing warnings by security experts that the greatest potential threat to Britain could come from second-generation Muslims, born here but alienated from British society and perhaps from their own families, and inflamed by Britain’s participation in the Iraq war.”

But, the WaPo cannot be right because Tony Blair rejects this view:

>Blair disputed the idea “that the London terrorist attacks were a direct result of British involvement in the Iraq war. He said Russia had suffered terrorism with the Beslan school massacre, despite its opposition to the war, and that terrorists were planning further attacks on Spain even after the pro-war government was voted out. “September 11 happened before Iraq, before Afghanistan, before any of these issues and that was the worst terrorist atrocity of all,” he said.

Even putting the argument in the mouth of Tony Blair does not make the argument any stronger. As I have had occasion to show several times recently the equivocation between the specific act and the general phenomena makes this argument fallacious as can be easily seen in this quotation.

But, Hewitt offers three further reasons:

>While it is theoretically possible that some jihadists were forged as a result of the invasion of Iraq, no specific instance of such a terrorist has yet been produced.

>Reports in the aftermath of the London bombings indicated that the British intelligence service estimates more than 3,000 residents of Great Britain had trained in the Afghanistan terrorist camps prior to the invasion of Afghanistan–which suggests that the probability is very high that most of the jihadists in England date their hatred of the West to some point prior to the invasion of Iraq.

>And though two of the London bombers appear to have traveled to Pakistan for religious instruction post-March 2003, there is not the slightest bit of evidence that it was Iraq which “turned” the cricket-loving young men into killers. In fact, it is transparently absurd for anyone to claim such a thing.

The first argument is an argument from an absence of evidence. If this is being used to defend the claim that “Iraq is not a breeding ground of terrorism” then it is fallacious–an instance of a fallacy of ignorance. But, charitably and despite the recalcitrance of his rhetoric to logical control, we can take this as a restatement of the claim that the belief is being held without adequate evidence.

The second argument is interesting. Once again, the argument works by showing that there was some involvement with radical and militant islamists prior to the invasion of Iraq, which would imply that that invasion could not have caused the prior involvement. What the argument seems to ignore is that thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of people may have “trained in these camps.” Yet, presumably the vast majority do not commit terrorist acts for one reason or another. So the important causal question, is what prompts particular trained militants ultimately to act? And then, is the Iraq war giving these militants more motivation to act?

The final argument is a textbook example of “begging the question”: The kind of example that we explain to students they will almost never encounter so unsubtely deployed.

Hewitt finishes his article with some speculation as to the motivations for this belief, having convinced himself that there is no evidence in favor of it.

>Of course it’s a convenient stick with which to beat the Bush administration. But it has a far more powerful lure than that.

>As the bloody toll of the Islamist movement grows and its record of horrors lengthens from Bali to Beslan to Madrid to London, the incredible cost that can only be attributed to the Afghanistan metastasis that went unchecked from the time of bin Laden’s return there in 1996 until the American-led invasion of 2001 becomes ever more clear.

The real motivation according to Hewett is to conceal the causal role that four years of a Democratic administration’s “inaction” on bin Laden played in all of the terrorism that has occurred since or presumably will occur in the future.

>Christopher Hitchens sharply rebuked the “motive” school of terrorist psychologists: “I thought I heard you making just before we came on the air, of attributing rationality or a motive to this, and to say that it’s about anything but itself, you make a great mistake, and you end up where you ended up, saying that the cause of terrorism is fighting against it, the root cause, I mean.” [emphasis added]Hitchens’s point, which must be made again and again, is Blair’s point: The killers are killers because they want to kill, not because the coalition invaded Iraq, or Afghanistan, or because there are bases in Saudi Arabia, or because Israel will not retreat to the 1967 borders.

This argument, even concealed under Hitchen’s rambling blather, is unconvincing, as we have attempted to show over and over again. In order to argue that administration policies are not causing terrorism, Hitchens and others retreat to the position that nothing is motivating terrorism. One could argue quite plausibly that Iraq is not the sole cause of terrorism, but the administration’s shills cannot admit this much as it would suggest that Iraq plays some causal role.

Beneath all of the Hewett’s bluster we find that his argument is ultimately and simply the assertion that there is no evidence that Iraq is breeding terrorists. But the absence of evidence does not show the claim is false. If the alternative claims (1996-2000 Afghanistan is the cause or there is no cause for terrorism) were at all plausible, or had any evidence adduced for them, then it might be unreasonable to continue to hold this claim. But, this is as far as our analysis can take us.

Ad Hominem, Appeal to the People, Charles Krauthammer, Plain Bad Arguments

Give me that old time religion

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Over the year we’ve been in business we’ve seen plenty of ironic fallacies–these are the fallacies people commit by accusing others of committing fallacies. During the election the favorite was the reverse ad hominem–accuse someone else of attacking (thereby ignoring their justified attack and attacking them in turn). Here’s another variation on that theme–the reverse ad populum:

>These things come in waves, of course, but waves need to be resisted, even if the exercise leaves you feeling like King Canute. The new wave is fashionable doubt. Doubt is in. Certainty is out.

So Charles Krauthammer (famous for his use of the reverse ad hominem) would have us believe that since doubt is fashionable, people who believe it must do so simply because others do, not because perhaps they have a reason to doubt. This is a nice way of abdicating your responsibility for an argument against their view. That doesn’t make it right. And worse, I’m not sure if Krauthhammer knows this, but just because your belief is deeply held or profoundly felt doesn’t mean it’s *true.*

Of course, Krauthammer’s jeremiad (he used that word) on belief is really just a set up for his main argument.

>The Op-Ed pages are filled with jeremiads about believers–principally evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics–bent on turning the U.S. into a theocracy. Now I am not much of a believer, but there is something deeply wrong–indeed, deeply un-American–about fearing people simply because they believe. *It seems perfectly O.K. for secularists to impose their secular views on America, such as, say, legalized abortion or gay marriage. But when someone takes the contrary view, all of a sudden he is trying to impose his view on you.* And if that contrary view happens to be rooted in Scripture or some kind of religious belief system, the very public advocacy of that view becomes a violation of the U.S. constitutional order.

Now let’s look at this a little more closely. Embedded in the usual tripe about anti-religious feeling in the liberal media, is a familiar argumentative trope: religious [think Christian Evangelical not Muslim] versus secular. These two things do not rightly belong in the same category (at least in the way Krauthammer arranges them), so any attempt to compare them is bound to mislead. Besides, *legalized* abortion is not imposed on anyone the law recognizes; gay marriage (wherever it is legal) is not imposed on anyone either (barring probably unlikely shotgun weddings). These are activities, not views. Views cannot be imposed on anyone; activities can, but these activities can’t–unless your parents force the gay lifestyle on you; or force you to get an abortion. To avoid gay marriage, don’t go to gay weddings, or don’t be gay; to avoid abortion, give birth to any children you conceive.

Equivocation, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments

Muddling moral claims and causal claims

We have had occasion before to point out a specific confusion of causal claims and moral claims that seems common among conservative commentators. The confusion is at times quite subtle and arises out of deep conceptual connections between some causal claims and moral claims. But there are also many cases of egregious confusions. Cathy Young today provides several in a column comprised of a series of quotations from various sources to show that the liberal “response to terrorism even on the moderate left remains an egregious moral muddle” (Source: BG 7/19/05).

>In a letter to The New York Times published on July 9, one New Yorker proudly described his comments to a Dutch television news crew which interviewed him on the New York subway immediately after the bombings. When asked if he believed New York would be attacked again, he replied in the affirmative. Why? ”Because the US is hated now more than ever. Even some of our allies sort of hate us.” And why is that? ”We invaded Iraq, which has never attacked us or declared war on us.”

>In other words: If we’re attacked again, it will be our fault (just as, presumably, the London bombings are the fault of British Prime Minister Tony Blair for lending his support to the war in Iraq).

The letter writer seems to be quite clearly describing a causal relation, which Young nonetheless interprets as a moral relation. The language of “fault” is probably at fault here, since we can use it to indicate both a causal and a moral relation–nonetheless, it carries in all of its uses a connotation of “wrong” and therefore of justifying the result.

a) It is likely that the U.S. will be attacked because attackers are motivated by hatred and the U.S. is hated more than ever (because of Iraq.

becomes in Young’s translation something close to:

b) It is right that the U.S. will be attacked because attackers are motivated by hatred and the U.S. is hated more than ever.

Of course, this letter writer may be wrong about the causal relationship between future terrorism and the Iraq war, but he is presumably not advancing the claim that Young suggests he is.

But Young has other targets in mind:

>Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan and a leading left-of-center commentator on the Middle East, argues on his website and in an article at Salon.com that the London bombings are ”blowback” from the US and its allies’ misguided policies. Cole pooh-poohs the idea that Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is a product of hatred for the West’s democratic values. In his view, it is a response to specific Western policies that are perceived as a war against Muslims, from Israeli oppression of the Palestinians to the military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Once again we have a causal claim about the relationship between certain policies and terrorism. But this time Young chooses to address it as a causal claim:

>Pardon me for pointing out the obvious, but the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, took place before the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Cole tries to make the case, citing the 9/11 Commission report, that Sept. 11 was ”punishment on the United States for supporting Ariel Sharon’s iron fist policies toward the Palestinians.” Yet the report makes it clear that planning for the attacks had been underway for about two years before Sharon became prime minister of Israel in March 2001, though Osama bin Laden evidently wanted to move up the operation in response to Sharon’s actions. And the radical Islamic terror network first struck New York City in 1993.

Presumably Cole would argue that the earlier terrorist acts were themselves the response to earlier *particular* policies such as troops stationed in Saudi Arabia, the continual support of Israel’s occupation, etc. Young, however, wants to argue that terrorists are motivated by the hatred of our way of life, rather than particular policies and perceived injustices. This is a difficult question–it is hard to understand what a sufficient cause of suicide bombing is for the terrorists. In addition, there are deep questions here that could be explored about the nature of historical causality–about the identification of necessary and sufficient conditions for historical events–about the relationship between abstractions and the concrete policies that implement these abstractions and make them an affront. But Young wants to cobble together a diatribe against supposed “moral confusions” on the left and not examine the complexities of causal claims. And whatever Cole’s confusions might turn out to be, they do not seem to be “moral” as Young would like.

>Other myopic responses abound. A few commentators insist on a moral equivalence between the deaths of Iraqi civilians in US military operations with the deaths of civilians in the London bombings. Yet the US military and its allies have made every effort to minimize civilian casualties; the deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians is overwhelmingly the work of so-called insurgents who drive explosive-packed cars into crowds of children while American soldiers hand out candy.

Five-hundred, or so, words into her column and Young has finally found a specifically moral claim to adduce as evidence. One wonders, in passing, how widespread this claim is, given that Young vaguely attributes this to a “few commentators” (and all her other cases are specifically attributed). Nonetheless, there seems to be something of a muddle here for those supposed “few commentators.” It seems reasonable to distinguish between first degree murder and second degree murder, and they are not morally equivalent. One might make a case for the claim that there are “moral similarities” between these sorts of deaths, but I suspect Young would be as unhappy about that. But if this is a moral confusion found only within a supposed “few commentators” it seems difficult to find an “egregious moral muddle” that defines the left on its basis.

So without any evidence advanced for her accusation, Young decides she’s finished her job.

>But acknowledging our mistakes and misdeeds should not undercut moral clarity when it comes to terrorism. The jihadists are driven primarily by hatred of Western civilization and its freedom; their primary targets are innocent civilians; and they cannot be defeated except by force.

Having failed to find an egregious moral muddle endemic within the left, Young chooses a simple assertion of her view to close her muddled accusations of moral muddles. Perhaps she is right about these last claims (there is of course no argument to defend them here). Nonetheless, the connection between these claims and the “moral clarity” which she wishes to claim for herself could do with some significant unmuddling.

Charles Krauthammer, Informal Fallacies, Plain Bad Arguments, Straw Man

Neo-Con Abstractions and Sleight of Hand

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We have heard a fairly consistent chorus, since September 11th, castigating the Islamic world for their supposed failure to denounce Islamic extremists. Unable to blame all muslims directly for terrorism, some find it plausible to blame all muslims for complacency, and an ever-present suggestion of complicity as well, with terrorism. This enables those thinkers who are so disposed to conceive the world in abstractions and to pose its problems in terms of wars among and within “civilizations.”

Krauthammer has a particular love of this neo-con trope. Today he again draws on it to help explain Europe’s problem with terrorism (Source: NYT 7/15/05). For Krauthammer the phenomenon that needs to be explained is that the terrorists in London (and the murderer of van Gogh in Netherlands) are “native-born Muslims.” (Of course, the terrorist acts in Madrid are the unmentioned exception here.)

>The fact that native-born Muslim Europeans are committing terrorist acts in their own countries shows that this Islamist malignancy long predates Iraq, long predates Afghanistan and long predates Sept. 11, 2001. What Europe had incubated is an enemy within, a threat that for decades Europe simply refused to face.

This is an extremely interesting rhetorical move. It rests on a certain ambiguity in the author’s intention. If he aims to show that there was a radical Islamic movement advocating violence prior to the last 5 years, then one wonders who doubts such a thing. That claim seems uncontroversially true and does not need additional evidence. This makes the argument look very strong. But Krauthammer’s intention is more devious. He wants to suggest that these acts would have been committed even without, and perhaps more likely without, America’s war on terrorism. The fact that radical Islamic movements pre-exist the last five years, of course, does nothing to show what Krauthammer wants to suggest. It is only the difference between a proximate cause and a more remote cause. Though there would be good reason to suggest this if we limited ourselves to the Dutch case–though that is not probably a case of terrorism even if it was violence committed by a muslim with fundamentalist beliefs.

This is a complicated fallacious argument. This seems to be something like a ignoratio elenchi (the fallacy of missing the point) with the conclusion unstated but suggested by the context. His choice of the three American events (9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq) suggests that the relationship between these events and the continued terrorism is Krauthammer’s real though not explicitly stated concern.

a) native-born Europeans are committing terrorism
shows b) that Islamist malignancy pre-dated 9/11 etc.
c) (implicitly) therefore the “war on terrorism” is not the cause of these acts.

Granting that (a) provides evidence for (b) (unnecessarily of course), it is hard to see that (a) or (b) provides any reason to hold (c). It might provide reason to believe (d) the “war on terror” is not the *sole* cause of these acts (even if it might be the precipitating cause). But that last claim is also uncontroversial I would think.

But setting aside this deceptive argument, Krauthammer wants to use this to explain Europe being “weak” on terrorism.

>One of the reasons Westerners were so unprepared for this wave of Islamist terrorism, not just militarily but psychologically, is sheer disbelief. It shockingly contradicts Western notions of progress.

>Our first response was, therefore, to simply sweep this contradiction under the rug. Put the first World Trade Center bombers on trial and think it will solve the problem. Even today there are many Americans and even more Europeans who believe that after Sept. 11 the United States should just have done Afghanistan — depose the Taliban and destroy al Qaeda’s sanctuary — and gone no further, thinking that would solve the problem.

Again Krauthammer suggests something that he does not actually assert–that the war in Iraq was and is a necessary part of the response to terrorism–and which his argument does nothing to show. Like above, this is a sort of sleight of hand, whereby an argument that might support a particular conclusion is actually being used to suggest the truth of a much stronger conclusion. This is combined in an interesting way with a version of the straw man argument. Presumably very few thought that we should *only* go after Afghanistan and do absolutely nothing else to combat or prevent terrorism. The question has always been whether our intervention in Iraq is contributing to terrorism.

>But the problem is far deeper. It is essentially a civil war within a rival civilization in which the most primitive elements are seeking to gain the upper hand. Sept. 11 forced us to intervene massively in this civil war, which is why we are in Iraq. There, as in Afghanistan, we have enlisted millions of Muslims on the anti-Islamist side.

>But what about the vast majority of European Muslims, the 99 percent who are peace-loving and not engaged in terror? They must also join the fight. They must actively denounce not just — what is obvious — the terrorist attacks, but their source: Islamist ideology and its practitioners.

And here we get the Neo-Con’s penchant for abstractions revealed. Rather than a historically determined political phenomenon, we are treated to a child’s tale of conflicts within and among civilizations. And one wonders whether, in Kruathammer’s mind, all Christians and Jews must denounce not just Christian and Jewish extremist terrorist acts, but the Christian and Jewish fundamentalist ideologies and their practitioners as well.

David Brooks, Equivocation, False Dichotomy, Informal Fallacies, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments, Straw Man

Smoking or non?

We remarked some time ago that David Brooks of the *New York Times* discovered a new fallacy: the *argumentum pro homine*. It’s a fallacy of relevance akin to the ad hominem argument, though instead of attacking a person, you praise him for traits that have nothing to do with the conclusions you mean to draw about him. One might wonder, however, whether Mr. Brooks employs this sort of praise in a backhanded sort of way. In today’s op-ed, “Mr.Bush, Pick a Genius,” we can’t tell whether Brooks means to malign or praise the poor Michael McConnell, a man who strikes him as a “genius” and a terrific Supreme Court nominee.

>McConnell (whom I have never met) is an honest, judicious scholar. When writing about church and state matters, he begins with the frank admission that religion is a problem in a democracy. Religious people feel a loyalty to God and to the state, and sometimes those loyalties conflict.

To be precise–which is what honest, judicious judicial scholars do–religious people feel a loyalty to what *they* take to be their own religion’s–or better, their own demonination’s–interpretation of Divine requirements. Considering the sheer number and diversity of Christian denominations alone, these loyalties will very likely conflict. The genius, as Brooks describes him, has discovered hot water.

This is all set up for the grand argument.

>So he understands why people from Rousseau and Jefferson on down have believed there should be a wall of separation between church and state.

“Wall of separation” is a suggestive, though wholly and unfortunately imprecise phrase. It’s the kind of phrase that will have the imprecise non-geniuses among us arguing at cross-purposes. In other words, it’s the kind of phrase that cries out for argument, justification, clarification, application, interepretation. But how, one wonders:

>The problem with the Separationist view, he has argued in essays and briefs, is that it’s not *practical.* As government grows and becomes more involved in health, charity, education and culture issues, it begins pushing religion out of those spheres. The Separationist doctrine leads inevitably to discrimination against religion. The state ends up punishing people who are exercising a *constitutional right*. [emphasis added]

It seems like the problem with the separationist view is that it’s *not constitutional*, not that’s it’s not practical. But that’s not the real point. This is:

>McConnell argued that government shouldn’t be *separated* from religion, but, as Madison believed, should be *neutral* about religion. He pointed out that the fire services and the police don’t just protect stores and offices, but churches and synagogues as well. In the same way, he declared in Congressional testimony in 1995, “When speech reflecting a secular viewpoint is permitted, then speech reflecting a religious viewpoint should be permitted on the same basis.” The public square shouldn’t be walled off from religion, but open to a plurality of viewpoints, secular and religious. The state shouldn’t allow school prayer, which privileges religion, but public money should go to religious and secular service agencies alike.

The rest of the article spins out the evidence for this view in the usual fashion–cherry picking cases of misguided or confused local officials discriminating against religious people. We’ve all heard these cases, so we won’t bother going through them in order to point out that much more than these anecdotes would be needed to demonstrate systematic religious discrimination.

But back to the point, notice how “neutral” is an interpretation of “separated.” And notice also how this view is supported by one wickedly specious analogy–the fire department and police have fairly well-defined objectives–property and life. Nonetheless, the problem with McConnell’s view is that he falsely contrasts secular with religious. “Secular” is not religious, or any particular religion; it is not another religion alongside the many religions. Some might even claim that “secular” is a kind of “neutrality” with regard to religion.