by Antony Flew
7.10 The Fallacy of Many Questions is, as was noted earlier (see paragraphs 7.2–7.3), not strictly a fallacy, although the importance for thinking of noticing what if anything is tacitly presupposed not only by questions but also by statements cannot be overemphasized. The Genetic Fallacy really is a fallacy and consists in arguing that the antecedents of something must be the same as their fulfillment. It would be committed by anyone who argued, presumably in the context of an abortion debate, that a fetus, even from the moment of conception, must really be a person because it is going to become one. But the fallacy is more usually exemplified in supposedly debunking equations moving in the opposite direction, from the developed whatever it may be to the actual or supposed antecedent.
7.11 Consider a pair of books that were in their brief day both bestsellers. Both were written by Desmond Morris, a professional zoologist wishing to popularize his subject. My copy of The Naked Ape reveals that one reviewer described it as “brilliantly effective, cogently argued, very readable.” Another agreed: “As with the title, the entire book is full of fresh perception.” The delighted publishers hailed it as “wildly successful.” To explain the title the author wrote: “There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is the naked ape, self-named homo sapiens” (Morris 1968, p. 9).
7.12 Since several reviewers went out of their way to praise that title, it is just worth pointing out that the opposites of “naked” and “covered with hair” are, respectively, “clothed” and “hairless.” So any “fresh perception” here has resulted in a misdescription. It is, however, a misdescription that suits the author’s purpose. This is metaphorically to strip man and, as he was to express it in a sequel, The Human Zoo, to reveal “a human animal, a primitive tribal hunter, masquerading as a civilized, supertribal citizen” (Morris 1970, p. 248). Certainly it can be salutary to be reminded that, whatever else we are or may become, we remain animals: “Even a space ape must urinate” (Morris 1968, p. 21). And certainly it is useful to insist that as animals we have inescapable problems generated by our fertility. But simply to identify us with our nearest ancestors on the evolutionary family tree is an altogether different thing. It is this which, again and again, Morris does: “Behind the facade of modern city life there is the same old naked ape. Only the names have been changed: for ‘hunting’ read ‘working,’ for ‘home base’ read ‘house,’ for ‘pair bond’ read ‘marriage,’ for ‘mate’ read ‘wife,’ and so on” (ibid., p. 74). Once more: “When you put your name on the door, or hang a painting on a wall, you are, in dog or wolf terms, for example, simply cocking your leg on them and leaving your personal mark there” (ibid., p. 161).
7.13 The nerve of the argument, and it is an argument that comes up all the time and all over the place, is that if this evolved from that, then this must always be that or at least it must always be really or essentially that. Yet a moment’s thought shows that this argument is absurd. For to say that this evolved from that implies that this is different from that, and not the same. It is therefore peculiarly preposterous to offer as the fruit of evolutionary insight a systematic development of the thesis that we are what our ancestors were. Oaks are not, though they grow from, acorns; and—for better or for worse—civilized people are not, though they evolved from, apes.
7.14 Furthermore, it is also egregiously preposterous to present as biological understanding a wholesale depreciation of environment as opposed to heredity, of what is learned as opposed to what is instinctual. Certainly the distances between man and the brutes and between city folk and primitive people are in this perverse perspective narrowed. But it conceals what is a most distinctive and powerful peculiarity of our species, as compared with all others. This concealment is a very queer thing to parade as a zoologist’s revelation.
7.15 The peculiarity is our comparatively enormous capacity for learning and the length of the period of the upbringing of children. This learning capacity, and its main trophy and instrument, language, provides our most favored species with an excellent substitute for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. I am especially happy to acknowledge that this is a point I myself first took from reading the essay on “Biology and Sociology” in Julian Huxley’s Essays of a Biologist (1923). For this was a fine work of popularization, which demonstrated that to achieve popularity it is not necessary to sensationalize your subject by standing it on its head.
7.16 Before leaving the subject of the Genetic Fallacy a word needs to be said about The Selfish Gene (1976) by Richard Dawkins. This was his first book. It was written before The Blind Watchmaker (1986), his incomparably illuminating account of the process of biological evolution. The trouble with The Selfish Gene precisely is its title. For genes are not human beings, members of a kind of creatures that can and therefore cannot but make choices (Flew 1995, passim). To describe genes as selfish, therefore, is to commit a kind of Genetic Fallacy, the kind that proceeds from the more developed whatever it may be to the actual or supposed antecedent of that more developed whatever it may be. Even to describe genes as self-interested, which is the opposite of disinterested, is at least awkward and misleading. For that contrast, like the contrasts between being selfish, being unselfish, and not being remarkably either, is one we can apply comfortably, if at all, only to ourselves and our fellow human beings, creatures of a kind that can, and therefore cannot but, make choices (see paragraphs 3.13–3.14).
7.17 The temptation to commit the Genetic Fallacy is greater when the evolution is thought to have been smoothly continuous. For it is then reinforced by the different temptations of the Logically-black-is-white Slide. This unsound form of argument is extremely popular, although it is rarely made fully explicit. It runs roughly as follows: “The difference we are dealing with is a difference of degree. Since with such a difference there can be no natural break at which a sharp line of division is, as it were, already drawn, there can be no logical stopping place on any journey from one extreme to the other. The difference cannot, therefore, be one of either kind or principle. So it must really be either nonexistent or, at best, unimportant.”
7.18 The first thing is to get a little clearer about differences of degree. Let us say that a difference of degree between two extremes is one such that there is or could be a series of actual cases, or theoretically possible cases, stretching between one of these extremes and the other, and with the amount of difference between each member of the series and the next vanishingly small. It becomes obvious that in any such series “there can be no natural break at which a sharp line of division is, as it were, already drawn.”
7.19 But it should also be obvious that differences that are both large and in this sense differences of degree can be of the last importance. For the differences between age and youth, between riches and poverty, between sanity and insanity, between a free society and one in which everything not forbidden is compulsory, are all paradigm cases of large differences that are differences of degree in the sense just now explicated. It must therefore be as wrong as it surely is common to move as if no move had been made and, hence, without any particular justification, from saying that this is a difference of degree to saying that this is a mere difference of degree.
7.20 What starts people down the disastrous Logically-black-is-white Slide is the observation that some difference is a difference of degree, and that “there can be no natural break at which a sharp line of division is, as it were, already drawn.” This is, as we have just seen (see paragraph 7.18), a defining characteristic of differences of degree. What is wrong is to assume that it warrants the conclusion that even the largest of such differences “must really be either nonexistent or, at best, unimportant.” It is possible to disentangle, a little artificially, three separate strands in this error.
7.21 First is the notion that, if a distance is one which is or could be traveled in a series of very short steps, then it cannot even in sum amount to much: a m
uckle cannot be made of no matter how many mickles. This wretched misconception has a classical label. It is called either The Sorites (Greek, pronounced So-wry-tees) or The Heaper: “Since a single grain of sand does not make a heap, and since adding one more is at no stage enough to convert what we have into a heap, there cannot really be heaps.”
7.22 Second is the idea that we cannot properly distinguish between this and that, much less insist that the difference is desperately important, unless we are able to draw a sharp line between one and the other. Of course the lack of such a line may sometimes be very inconvenient. Still it does not even begin to show that when the items distinguished are well clear of the undemarcated no man’s land, we cannot or should not make such distinctions. As Edmund Burke, with his usual good sense, once said: “[T]hough no man can draw a stroke between the confines of night and day, still light and darkness are on the whole tolerably distinguishable.”
7.23 Third is the assumption that where there is no obvious natural break, and hence where any line drawn must be artificially drawn, there both our drawing of any line and our decision to draw that line at one particular point rather than another must be illogical. These are the most important misconceptions. They nevertheless are misconceptions.
7.24 Here we should recall what was said earlier (see paragraphs 1.31–1.37) about the reasons why logic sometimes gets a bad press. The second of these was “that it is confused with various things that have nothing to do with it” (see paragraph 1.35). There certainly is nothing logical, in our primary sense, about impractical practices or unworkable institutions. One source of trouble is that the logical may be contrasted either with the illogical or with the neither logical nor illogical. The rational may similarly be contrasted with either the irrational or the neither rational or irrational. The correct interpretation of the words “logical” and “rational” must depend on what is in the context the appropriate contrast. Furthermore, as we have just noticed in discussing The Selfish Gene (see paragraph 7.16), not only are there innumerable sorts of objects of discourse that cannot properly be characterized as either selfish or unselfish, there are also even actions that neither merit praise as unselfish nor deserve blame as selfish (see paragraphs 3.13–3.14). So it is in discussion often both helpful and to the point to press what might be dubbed Is-there-a-third-way Questions. One of these is the question whether one of the pair of contrasting terms in the dispute in question is one of another pair in another relevant contrast. The other is the question whether the two terms in the dispute are not only mutually exclusive but also together exhaustive.
7.25 We noticed the two possible contrasts with the rational when earlier (see paragraphs 4.7–4.8) we disposed of the unsound argument that if there are always physiological causes of my uttering the sounds I utter, then I cannot have and know that I have good reasons for believing the propositions I assert by uttering those words. The unsound argument is that if it is the one, then it must be merely that and not the other also. The point there is that these physiological causes should have been described not as irrational but as nonrational. When Aristotle, centuries before we could be picked out as members of the species homo sapiens, defined man as the rational animal he was not—as Bertrand Russell and others have sometimes mischievously suggested—loftily ignoring the irrationality of all of us some of the time and of some of us a great deal of the time. Instead, what Aristotle was doing was picking out what seemed to him the most important, the most remarkable distinguishing characteristic of our species, namely, that we are all at least potentially rational and hence also potentially irrational.
7.26 Aristotle was here making a point that runs parallel with the one that would be made by anyone defining human beings as moral animals, namely, that we are at least potentially moral and hence, and necessarily, potentially immoral. In both cases the possibility of striving to reach the ideal necessarily presupposes and is presupposed by the possibility of defection from it. For both rationality and irrationality, morality and immorality, are possible only for members of a kind of creatures that can and therefore cannot but make choices and that are always or almost always able to do and to think in ways other than those in which they do do and do think (Flew 1995, chapter 6).
7.27 We have been insisting that it is a mistake to take it that what is neither logical nor illogical, neither rational nor irrational—what we have been describing as the nonlogical and the nonrational—has to be by the same token illogical, or irrational. It is also a dangerous mistake. For it encourages all those who value some things which are nonlogical, or nonrational—as, hopefully, we all do—invalidly to infer that these humanly indispensable values militate against, or even preclude, logic and rationality. Certainly there is a place in life for passion, for compassion, and for commitment. For the illogical and the irrational there is, or ought to be, none.
7.28 Descending from the rather abstract and theoretical level of the previous few paragraphs and considering some of the paradigm cases of differences of degree already mentioned, it is easy to see that we often have the most excellent reasons for drawing a line. Suppose we want to mount a round-the-clock operation. Then we shall need to fix some pretty precise point in the diurnal cycle at which the day watch is to take over from the night watch, or the day shift from the night shift. Suppose there is to be a speed limit. Then a line has to be drawn between those speeds that are to be legally permissible and those that are not. If certain legal rights and duties are to be attached to adult status, then it becomes practically essential to determine some moment in people’s lives when they become legally adult. And so on. There is absolutely nothing illogical about being led by such practical considerations to draw sharp lines, lines which necessarily are, in the sense explained (see paragraph 7.18), artificial. And, furthermore, since the choice to do this is reasoned, it is diametrically wrong to berate it as arbitrary.
7.29 There may also be, and again there often are, good reasons why the line to be drawn should be drawn through this particular point rather than that, or at least good reasons why it should be drawn through one of the points of this particular sort rather than through any of the rest. For instance, given that we have some standard units for measuring the difference in question, then everyone will find it easier, more natural as opposed to forced, if any line that is to be socially important—not to say socially divisive—is drawn through some point corresponding to a whole and preferably a round number of these standard units. Even though the choice between 18 or 19 or 10 or 21 as the age of majority may have to be unreasoned and hence arbitrary, the decisions to fix some age of majority, and to fix it so that the line is drawn at a birthday rather than at any other day in the year are by no means unreasoned and, hence, not arbitrary.
7.30 Whatever artificial dividing lines we draw across any differences of degree are bound to generate paradoxes of the little more and how much it is, and of the little less and how little: “If only Jack had been born an hour sooner he would not have been caught by the draft, and if only Jill had breasted the tape a split second sooner she would have established a new world record.” The argument may then be offered that so much ought not to hinge upon these so littles. To this the only but sufficient general reply is to insist that just because so many humanly vital differences are differences of degree and just because for the best of reasons we do have to draw artificial lines of division across these continuous differences, the occurrence of some such paradoxes, with all the consequent heartburn and self-congratulation, is an inescapable part of the human condition.
7.31 What we must on no account do, once such lines have been established, is to pretend that the particular little more or little less is all that is now in jeopardy. For the line laid down was a line of policy, and in that sense of principle. So what is now in question is not only that particular little more or little less, but also, for better or for worse, the general policy or principle that any breach must challenge. For instance, if the frontier line between two states is
drawn across a desert, then an incursion a few miles deep by the forces of one or the other will not—if the possibility of finding oil is precluded—result in either an intrinsically worthwhile gain for the incursor or an intrinsically substantial loss for the victim of the incursion. But, if the victim state were simply to ignore what the other state had done, then by failing to make any response at all it would have both sacrificed the principle of its own territorial integrity and made it more difficult to establish and maintain a fresh and firmer line of resistance if it decided in the future that establishing such a line of resistance was what it wanted to do.
7.32 So far none of our illustrations has been drawn from commercial advertising. In some circles so much is urged or assumed about the alleged evils of this activity that the absence of such illustrations may strike many readers as curious. But it becomes less surprising when we consider how small a proportion of such advertising output is argumentative prose. The case would of course be very different if we were to bring into account the advertising of politicians. Certainly when I checked through the commercial advertisements printed in the journals which come regularly into our house, and paid more attention than usual to those other advertisements that interrupt the television programs I watch, I found that I was able to distinguish two chief kinds of advertising material. One kind attempts to associate the products advertised with people, places, and activities who or which the advertisers believe that their target public will find attractive. Nothing needs to be said about this here. The other kind provides information about the product. Such information is in the First World and with widely advertised products rarely, if ever, straightforwardly false. This is because the provision of indisputably false information about their products is usually both illegal and against the longer-term interests of the advertisers themselves. For they cannot hope to continue to achieve good sales for their products in any market in which it becomes known that they have been dishonestly promoting those products.