Almost 400 comments but not a word of discussion of the parsing Yvain provides for his seven examples! But if Yvain’s parsing is wrong—as I think it is—then his analysis will serve to further bias our understanding of positions we disagree with and to forsake any charity in understanding these positions.
The question that is fairly asked of Yvain is what distinguishes his “worst argument” (“X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features, even though it doesn’t.”) from any form of rule-governed reasoning in ethics (whether deontological or rule-utilitarian). When the examples are expanded and recast in those terms, they do not express Yvain’s “worst argument”; they rather simply express moral premises subject to disagreement.
Taxation is theft. I’m no libertarian, but the argument isn’t that taxation shares features with “archetypal” theft but that any taking of unearned property is wrong for the same basic reasons as “archetypal” theft is wrong, whether natural law or utilitarian calculus.
Abortion is murder. The claim almost always comes from a fundamentalist religious direction. Abortion is said to be murder not because it shares features with prototypical murders but because it is the same in the essential respect that it involves killing an innocent possessed of a soul. It’s stupid enough as it stands; no reason to misrepresent it.
King is a criminal. If the psychologist-of-morality Kohlberg is believed, most adults in the U.S. identify morality with authority. Many believe it is immoral to break a law enacted through democratic procedures. Those who reason this way are indeed philistines, but their problem isn’t with some formal fallacy in reasoning but with their premises.
Evolutionary psychology is sexist People who argue in these terms usually think it is wrong to “reinforce sexual stereotypes” even if they’re true.
And so on. If you were arguing with someone defending their position in the ways Yvain summarizes, would you point out, say, that the archetypical murder is a lot different from abortion; or would you point out that souls don’t really exist (or point to similar defective assumptions)? The first would miss the point. An answer to the antiabortion argument has a similar form to the “worst argument,” but I think the answer is sound: Compelling women to remain pregnant is involuntary servitude. (More popularly, No forced labor.) The question is whether the essential features of abortions, relative to a well-chosen framework, are best captured by analogy to murder or slavery. We always reason by some sort of analogy; the question is whether the given analogy is adequate. Yvain’s proscriptions consistently carried out would toss analogical reasoning in ethics.
Yvain’s proscriptions consistently carried out would toss analogical reasoning in ethics.
It is perfectly reasonable to first identify the category and its archetypal example, no one seems to argue against it. The issue is tossing out the step where the reasons the archetypal example gives the category a negative connotation are checked against the example under consideration. Thus analogical reasoning survives as a first step, but its validity is subsequently questioned, not simply negated.
The issue is tossing out the step where the reasons the archetypal example gives the category a negative connotation are checked against the example under consideration.
And my claim is that, in typical uses of the example arguments, the reasons that make the category negative—for the arguer—are precisely the reasons the arguer intends to advance. So, Yvain hasn’t made a case that submergence in a verbal archetype is an important fallacy. And thinking that it is the key fallacy involved in these arguments promotes superficiality when considering arguments like the exemplars.
Almost 400 comments but not a word of discussion of the parsing Yvain provides for his seven examples! But if Yvain’s parsing is wrong—as I think it is—then his analysis will serve to further bias our understanding of positions we disagree with and to forsake any charity in understanding these positions.
The question that is fairly asked of Yvain is what distinguishes his “worst argument” (“X is in a category whose archetypal member has certain features. Therefore, we should judge X as if it also had those features, even though it doesn’t.”) from any form of rule-governed reasoning in ethics (whether deontological or rule-utilitarian). When the examples are expanded and recast in those terms, they do not express Yvain’s “worst argument”; they rather simply express moral premises subject to disagreement.
Taxation is theft. I’m no libertarian, but the argument isn’t that taxation shares features with “archetypal” theft but that any taking of unearned property is wrong for the same basic reasons as “archetypal” theft is wrong, whether natural law or utilitarian calculus.
Abortion is murder. The claim almost always comes from a fundamentalist religious direction. Abortion is said to be murder not because it shares features with prototypical murders but because it is the same in the essential respect that it involves killing an innocent possessed of a soul. It’s stupid enough as it stands; no reason to misrepresent it.
King is a criminal. If the psychologist-of-morality Kohlberg is believed, most adults in the U.S. identify morality with authority. Many believe it is immoral to break a law enacted through democratic procedures. Those who reason this way are indeed philistines, but their problem isn’t with some formal fallacy in reasoning but with their premises.
Evolutionary psychology is sexist People who argue in these terms usually think it is wrong to “reinforce sexual stereotypes” even if they’re true.
And so on. If you were arguing with someone defending their position in the ways Yvain summarizes, would you point out, say, that the archetypical murder is a lot different from abortion; or would you point out that souls don’t really exist (or point to similar defective assumptions)? The first would miss the point. An answer to the antiabortion argument has a similar form to the “worst argument,” but I think the answer is sound: Compelling women to remain pregnant is involuntary servitude. (More popularly, No forced labor.) The question is whether the essential features of abortions, relative to a well-chosen framework, are best captured by analogy to murder or slavery. We always reason by some sort of analogy; the question is whether the given analogy is adequate. Yvain’s proscriptions consistently carried out would toss analogical reasoning in ethics.
It is perfectly reasonable to first identify the category and its archetypal example, no one seems to argue against it. The issue is tossing out the step where the reasons the archetypal example gives the category a negative connotation are checked against the example under consideration. Thus analogical reasoning survives as a first step, but its validity is subsequently questioned, not simply negated.
And my claim is that, in typical uses of the example arguments, the reasons that make the category negative—for the arguer—are precisely the reasons the arguer intends to advance. So, Yvain hasn’t made a case that submergence in a verbal archetype is an important fallacy. And thinking that it is the key fallacy involved in these arguments promotes superficiality when considering arguments like the exemplars.