{"id":3963,"date":"2013-01-12T14:51:24","date_gmt":"2013-01-12T19:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=3963"},"modified":"2013-01-12T14:51:24","modified_gmt":"2013-01-12T19:51:24","slug":"reductio-by-analogy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=3963","title":{"rendered":"Reductio by analogy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Johah Goldberg wrote a book<\/a> about public and political discourse.\u00c2\u00a0 That makes him an expert about how people argue about policy.\u00c2\u00a0 His recent criticism<\/a> of Joe Biden’s rhetorical flourish “if it saves one life,” reason to heavily regulate fire arms is an occasion for him to act the logic hound:<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because I wrote a whole book on the way phrases like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153if it saves only one life, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worth it\u00e2\u20ac\u009d distort our politics, but whenever I hear such things the hairs on the back of my neck go up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ok, so what’s Goldberg’s critical point?\u00c2\u00a0 That the ‘saves one life’ line of reasoning doesn’t work for lots of other things we could regulate:<\/p>\n

The federal government could ban cars, fatty foods, ladders, plastic buckets, window blinds, or Lego pieces small enough to choke on and save far more than just one life. Is it imperative that the government do any of that? It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a tragedy when people die in car accidents (roughly 35,000 fatalities per year), or when kids drown in plastic buckets (it happens an estimated 10 to 40 times a year), or when people die falling off ladders (about 300 per year). Would a law that prevents those deaths be worth it, no matter the cost?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Oy.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, for sure, he’s responding to stark version of the ‘saves one life’ principle, but the application of the principle in the gun laws case is about regulating a product that’s designed to kill.\u00c2\u00a0 For sure, if we can prevent the wrong kinds of deaths, that’s the objective.\u00c2\u00a0 So the analogy may be appropriate for a straw liberal, but that’s not Biden’s argument.\u00c2\u00a0 And note, on top of all that, we do use a version of the ‘one life’ principle with all those other products, only that we don’t prohibit their purchase.\u00c2\u00a0 We regulate salt in foods, we institute speed limits and require safety measures in car production, and have pretty clear warnings about buckets and ladders on them (the presumptions being that people don’t purchase them so as to drown toddlers or jump off of).<\/p>\n

The irony of it all is that Goldberg says that phrases like Biden’s cheapens our political discourse.\u00c2\u00a0 Sometimes, it’s not the phrase that cheapens, but the way it’s taken.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Johah Goldberg wrote a book about public and political discourse.\u00c2\u00a0 That makes him an expert about how people argue about policy.\u00c2\u00a0 His recent criticism of Joe Biden’s rhetorical flourish “if it saves one life,” reason to heavily regulate fire arms is an occasion for him to act the logic hound: Maybe it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because I wrote … Continue reading Reductio by analogy<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,12,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-goldberg","category-straw-man","category-weak-analogy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3963"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3965,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3963\/revisions\/3965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}