by Antony Flew
7.33 Naturally the information given by advertisers will, where there are alternatives, be presented in a way favorable to the interests of the advertisers. For example, consider an advertisement for beer. There is a difference, which is not a difference in the amount or the accuracy of the information given about the beer, between saying that the mug is already half empty and saying that it is still half full. My own two favorite examples of such accentuation of the positive are, perhaps fittingly, both drawn from the United States. In response to distress about the environmental effects of phosphates one wide-awake firm spread the exultant sales message that its domestic detergent was “98.8 percent phosphate free.” The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) also rapidly became most careful to promote what used to be called Hazard Analyses as, more encouragingly, Safety Analyses.
7.34 More serious, and of more obvious concern to us here, are certain other ways of putting a better face on percentages and similar quantitative comparisons. The first and most fundamental question to ask about all percentages is “percentage of what?” As we emphasized in chapter 6, 70 percent of those now in Ruritania’s jails is not at all the same thing as 70 percent of all Ruritania’s first offenders (see paragraphs 6.1–6.3). The news that profits in retailing have increased or are to be by law reduced by 10 percent tells us nothing in particular until we know whether this is a percentage of mark-up over wholesale prices or of gross profits on capital employed. It is the former that directly determines prices in the shops. But that is very different from, and is almost bound to be enormously larger than, the latter, since it is from the former that retailers have to meet all their costs—premises, wages, equipment, and so on.
7.35 Suppose you boast that the New Splodge contains 50 percent more of some supposedly gorgeous ingredient. Then your boast is as near as makes no matter completely empty if no one else knows, and you are not telling, how much there was in it before. Such no doubt true statements can be doubly misleading thanks to certain very simple mathematical properties of percentages. The birth of a woman’s second child constituted a 100 percent increase in her family, whereas if she were to have a fifth child, that one would represent only a 25 percent addition to her previous four. And if a man were to suffer a 50 percent cut in anything, he would then need a 100 percent increase to get back to where he was before the cut.
7.36 Other simple mathematical properties are important in the pictorial representation of data comparisons. The area of any plane figure, if the shape is held constant, increases much faster than any of its dimensions. In the simplest case, that of the square, the doubling of the length of the sides quadruples the area. It will not do, therefore, to represent the gratifying rise in the sales of electric toasters by a series of undistorted pictures of toasters, one for each year, in which the sales figures correlate with the height or the width of the sketches. For the increases in the areas of these sketches must then be far greater than the sales increases they purport to illustrate. There is a similar disparity between the increase in the area of a square and the growth in the volume of the corresponding cube. It may be helpful as a mnemonic to remark that it was part of the genius of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who in 1838 built the first steamship to make transatlantic trips, to see the relevance of this to the problem of building a coal-fired steamship capable of carrying itself, its crew, and a profitable payload across the Atlantic. The relevance is “that whereas the carrying capacity of a hull increases as the cube of its dimensions, its resistance, or in other words the power required to drive it through the water, only increases as the square of those dimensions” (Rolt 1957, p. 249).
7.37 Mistakes and misdemeanors exploiting these and other simple mathematical properties certainly are to be found in commercial advertisements, as well as perhaps even more commonly in other, noncommercial forms of publicity. Then again one might, I suppose, deem as a sort of arguments all the attempts made by salespersons to build up favorable associations for their products. If so, then it is certainly a bad sort of arguments for buying those products. But to talk in this way surely is to stretch the word “argument” a bit too far to be helpful? And anyway, if, as is often the case with the different brands competing in mature markets, there is precious little if any difference in either quality or price between one brand and another, then it is hard to think of any reason for choosing one particular brand other than that you simply find its advertising more appealing than that of the competition.
7.38 I can offer from the earliest pages of my private philosophical scrapbook a prize specimen of one kind of bad reason that can be found not only in commercial advertisements but also in many other contexts. This specimen came from an advertisement for a substance called Silvikrin. The advertisement was published in the long-since-defunct British weekly Picture Post, a journal that had been modeled on the also-long-defunct but since resurrected American weekly Life. Under the heading “Can baldness be postponed?” we read: “Faced with fast-falling hair most people make some attempt to delay the evil day when baldness can no longer be denied. Some try to disguise the fact with long forelocks and other subterfuges. But the wise and knowledgeable face up to the fact that their hair is dying from ‘natural causes’ and that a natural treatment is the only hope of saving the situation” (September 9, 1950, emphasis original).
7.39 Does this argument really have any more force than the contention that he who drives fat oxen must himself be fat? As we shall soon be seeing (see paragraph 7.42), there certainly is something more to the natural than there is to fatness. And many of the people who would at once recognize that the second contention has no force at all would hesitate to dismiss so immediately the argument about natural causes and natural treatments. Certainly we do not have to wait long before we come across someone arguing that because something is natural it must therefore be as it ideally ought to be. Such people could easily be persuaded to agree that “Nature knows best” (Commoner 1972, p. 37). Once the form of such arguments is clearly spelled out, however, it becomes obvious that the arguments are fallacious. For they proceed from what as a pure and simple matter of brute fact is allegedly the case directly to the conclusion that what thus is the case is as things ideally ought to be. This fallacy of moving directly from is to ought has a name: the Naturalistic Fallacy.
7.40 Its nature was classically expounded by David Hume in a very characteristic paragraph of A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). This paragraph is worth quoting in full as a fine example of good eighteenth-century English prose. But readers need to be warned that what Hume claims to have observed in writings about “systems of morality” is not really what the authors actually did write and what he actually did read. Rather, it is what the authors should have written and what they would have written if only they had properly appreciated the structure of their own arguments. For even the best of writers and thinkers may sometimes, without noticing the significance of what they are doing, slide from employing words such as “natural” and “normal” in their is senses into using them in ought senses. For instance, they start by first noticing that some sort of behaviors is normal—meaning that, for better or for worse, most people do usually behave in such a manner. They then proceed without further argument to the conclusion that such behavior is normal—meaning here and now that it consists with appropriate prescribed moral or other norms. Paragraph 7.41 is thus a verbatim quotation of that famous paragraph from the Treatise (III[i]2), preserving all the original spellings and punctuations.
7.41 “I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, and an ought not. This change
is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason” (III[i]2).
7.42 The “something more to the natural than there is to fatness,” that is, the something which leads some people to believe that “Nature knows best,” perhaps is or involves some sort of personification of Nature as a benevolent deity. Given that sort of belief, it becomes not altogether irrational for one to believe, as biologist disaster prophet Barry Commoner seems to have done, that whereas all naturally produced chemical compounds are harmless, all those artificially produced are likely to be in some way dangerous if not positively poisonous. These consequent beliefs are all known to be false. For instance, there are, and have been for millions of years before the origin of our particular species, numerous naturally produced carcinogens—substances capable in sufficient quantities of generating cancers (Efron 1984, pp. 136–37 and passim).
7.43 Anyone who wants to discuss carcinogens or any other kind of poisons sensibly needs to know that every kind of substance both natural and artificial is in some quantity poisonous, and also that particular quantities that are not poisonous to one species may be very poisonous to another. The fundamental principle of toxicology was famously stated by the sixteenth-century German physician known as Paracelsus: “What is it that is not poison? All things are poison and none is without poison. Only the dose determines that a thing is not poison” (quoted in Efron 1984, p. 144). That is why the not-one-molecule policy of zero tolerance for supposed carcinogens—a policy which was at one time very vigorously promoted, especially in the United States—was impractical and absurd.
7.44 Although a policy of zero tolerance for supposed carcinogens makes no sense in a war on cancer, it may be, and in New York it apparently has been, remarkably effective in the war on crime. With regard to the latter kind of war there are always those eager to tell us that we cannot hope for much success until and unless we succeed in removing some or all of the supposed root causes for crime. Chief Justice Earl Warren, for instance, found crime “in our disturbed society” to be due to “root causes” such as “slum life in the ghettos, ignorance, [and] poverty” (Warren 1977, p. 317). Such claims are rarely, if ever, supported by statistics showing correlations between, on the one hand, increases or decreases in the amounts of crime and, on the other hand, increases or decreases in the numbers of people living in slums and in ignorance and poverty. Indeed the people who issue these pronouncements seem to be among those who, as the Nobel laureate George Stigler so characteristically put it, “issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes on no other basis” (quoted in Sowell 1993, p. 72).
7.45 Here we are concerned with the question of what is meant and implied by saying that something is a root cause of crime, rather than with the question of whether any such hypothesis about the root causes of crime is actually true. If anyone does wish to pursue the latter question they would be well advised to consult Dennis 1997. For this work shows very clearly that in the United Kingdom the relation between the crime statistics and the statistics showing the strength of the supposed root causes is more nearly inverse than direct. But to appreciate what is meant and implied by talk about the supposed root causes of crime we need first to make a fundamental distinction between two senses of the word “cause.”
7.46 When we are talking about the causes of some purely physical event—an eclipse of the sun, say—then we employ the word “cause” in a sense implying both physical necessity and physical impossibility: What happened was physically necessary and, under the circumstances, anything else was physically impossible. Yet this is precisely not the case with the other sense of “cause,” the sense in which we speak of the causes of human actions. For instance, if I give someone good cause to celebrate, I do not hereby make it inevitable that the person will celebrate. To adapt a famous phrase from the German philosopher mathematician Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), causes of this second, personal sort incline but do not necessitate. So it remains entirely up to the individual whether or not to celebrate.
7.47 Hume appears to have been the first to make this distinction clearly and sharply. In his essay “Of National Characters” he wrote: “By moral causes, I mean all circumstances, which are fitted to work on the mind as motives or reasons. . . . By physical causes I mean those qualities of the air and climate, which are supposed to work insensibly on the temper, by altering the tone and habit of the body . . .” (Hume 1985, p. 198). Because Hume denied the reality of physical necessity, he could not make this distinction quite as we have done. But his choice of labels for the two senses distinguished does indicate a fundamental difference between, on the one hand, the natural sciences and, on the other hand, the social, or as he and his contemporaries would have said, the moral sciences.
7.48 Once we apply this distinction between two senses of “cause” to assertions about supposed root causes of crime, there can be little doubt but that those who so confidently make these assertions would want them to be interpreted as necessitating (physical) rather than as merely motivating (moral) causes. For what otherwise would be the radical and challenging novelty in such assertions? Surely no one would wish to deny that poverty, ignorance, and slum conditions generally can provide very strong temptations to take criminal actions and that those who have been convicted of committing crimes may in consequence sometimes very reasonably appeal to those things as extenuating or even totally excusing circumstances. That none of these temptation-generating conditions constitutes an always necessitating cause of crime can be established by referring to the fact that by no means all those people who are subject to them become criminals. (For further discussion of this distinction between two senses of “cause,” see Flew 1995, pp. 122–47. For a now somewhat dated introduction to the problems of crime in the United States, see Wilson 1975. For what has some claim to constitute the comprehensive and definitive study of crime and human nature, see Wilson and Herrnstein 1985.)
7.49 Somewhat similar to the claim that certain unfortunate conditions are the root causes of crime is the claim that society is to blame. For instance, it has been vehemently said that “Everyone is learning how to cop out of personal responsibility by blaming ‘society.’ From teenagers in high school to hardened felons in prison, they can tell you how the traumas they were put through by ‘society’ caused everything from failing grades to armed robbery. People who would rather mooch than work used to be called bums, but now they are homeless ‘victims’ of ‘society’ ” (Sowell 1987, p. 232).
7.50 If we are reasonably either to accept or to reject such claims, then we need first to persuade those who make them to explain what they mean by them and how and by whom the responsibility for whatever defect is in question was supposedly incurred. It seems likely that we shall have difficulty in securing any satisfactory answer to these questions. While Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of the United Kingdom she once, in an interview with the weekly Woman’s Own of October 31, 1987, confessed: “I don’t believe in Society. There is no such thing, only individual people, and there are families.”
7.51 To my mind this entirely innocuous utterance, usually misreported as being simply “There is no such thing as society,” generated an extraordinarily widespread and sustained uproar. For instance, I myself have met in the columns of quarterly journals published in the United States and Australia years after she was ejected from the prime ministership, angry denunciations of Margare
t Thatcher for not believing in the existence of society. But I have never at any time succeeded in persuading any such denouncers to explain what it was they held to be true and believed that she had denied.
7.52 Certainly it is possible to say sensible things about society, and some of these things are extremely important. For instance, Thomas Hobbes wrote in his De Cive (The Citizen) (1642) that “civil societies are not mere meetings, but bonds, to the making whereof faith and compacts are necessary; the virtue whereof to children and fools, and the profit whereof to those who have not yet tasted the miseries that accompany its defects, is altogether unknown; whence it happens that those, who know not what society is, cannot enter it; those because ignorant of the benefit it brings, care not for it.”
7.53 All this is indeed both true and important. But it still provides us with no reason for believing that a society consists of anything in addition to the individuals and/or the families of which it is composed. And it is only these individuals and/or sometimes the individual members of the government of that society, if it has one, who can properly be held responsible and praised or blamed for what they have done or failed to do. We might most illuminatingly say of a society or nation or nation-state what was once famously said of history: “History does nothing; it ‘does not possess immense riches,’ it ‘does not fight battles.’ It is not ‘history’ which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends” (Marx and Engels 1845, p. 93, emphasis original).