Crimes Against Logic

by Jamie Whyte

  Then it emerged that when the government said “poverty” they meant something quite particular. When you hear of poverty, you may have images of families struggling to feed themp. 101selves, wearing worn-out old clothes, and living in ramshackle and dangerous buildings, unable to send their children to school or have their medical problems treated by a doctor. But this is a rather old-fashioned view and not at all the way a modern political movement like New Labour would approach the issue. No, when New Labour says that someone is a pauper, they mean that his household income is less than 60 percent of the national median household income. Thirty-five percent of children live in poverty because they live in households whose income is less than 60 percent of the national median.

  The Labour government does not define “poverty” the way the rest of us do. If that is not already clear, consider the fact that a policy that reduced your income could lift you from poverty, provided it reduced the median income more. Equally, no increase in the incomes of the poor could lift them from poverty unless accompanied by a lesser percentage increase in the median income. Since 1979, the real incomes of all income deciles in Britain, poorest 10 percent to richest 10 percent, have increased. But the proportion living in poverty (Labour style) has increased, because the difference between low and middle incomes has increased.

  Labour has introduced a new classification into policy discussion, namely, “household income less than 60 percent of the national median.” This classification may be useful for understanding certain social phenomena; perhaps this group suffers peculiarly high rates of criminality or of domestic violence, regardless of absolute income levels. But it is simply misleading to use the term “poverty” for this classification. “Poverty” already has a perfectly well-understood and quite different meaning.

  p. 102 The advantage to Labour in using the term is that poverty, as commonly understood, has powerful evaluative associations that lead us all to the conclusion that “something must be done!” Tell me plainly that 35 percent of British children live in households with incomes less than 60 percent of the national median and I am not at all sure that something must be done, especially if the absolute wealth of these families delivers adequate welfare and opportunity. To get from this statistical observation to the conclusion that policy must be changed requires considerable argument. But argument is irksome and made unnecessary by simply labeling our statistical classification “poverty.”[8.2]

  Exploitation, Mexploitation

  New Labour has rejected Old Labour’s Marxist ambitions. Private ownership of the means of production is now fine by the Labour party. Indeed, many of its members openly practice private ownership. But those earnest undergraduate days, those hours reading The Communist Manifesto and getting halfway down page one of Capital, must have left their mark. For New Labour’s trick with “poverty” displays a certain Marxist tendency.

  Marx’s work in economic and political theory broke new ground—a grand theory of human history as the consequence of economic and technological forces. Groundbreaking theories usually introduce new concepts. Genes, schizophrenia, and price equilibria, though now familiar, were once the novel concepts of p. 103 biological, psychiatric, and economic theories. So it was with Marx, who posited unfamiliar economic forces and social phenomena for which he needed new terms.

  In physics it is common to introduce wholly new words for new theoretical entities—positrons, quarks, and so on. But in the social sciences this is not at all the norm. Usually, familiar words are combined in a new way to label the new concept: marginal utility, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and so forth. This is what Marx did. Except, instead of employing the normally tedious language of the social sciences, he went for a little excitement. His theoretical concepts get names like “exploitation” and “alienation.” For example, in a capitalist system, business owners typically pay their workers less than they receive from selling what the workers produce, since otherwise they won’t make a profit. Marx calls this phenomenon the “exploitation” of the workers.

  Words like exploitation and alienation, in ordinary use, have strong negative connotations, but please, set all that aside. These words are used in Marx’s theory purely as technical terms to describe certain economic or social phenomena. This is science.

  Alas, new stipulative definitions of familiar old words are hard to bear in mind. We can’t help but slip back to their ordinary meanings. Though generally unfortunate, this slippage does have one desirable consequence—for Marxists, at least. It delivers, as if by magic, the sought after condemnation of capitalism. For behold, Marx has shown that capitalism inherently involves exploitation and alienation. Who could be in favor of such a dreadful system? Hey Presto!

  Marx has, of course, shown nothing of the sort, at least if “exploitation” and “alienation” have their ordinary meanings. p. 104 At best, he has shown that capitalism inherently involves Mexploitation and Malienation (I place an “M” at the front of “exploitation” and “alienation” to distinguish Marx’s technical terms from their ordinary homonyms). And that, on its own, provides no ground for condemning capitalism. I, for one, am entirely in favor of economic systems where business owners can make a profit. I agree that this involves Mexploitation—how could I not, given the definition of Mexploitation? But I deny it is exploitation.

  Verbal Solutions

  The equivocator tries to replace hard intellectual graft with semantic sleight of hand. Capitalism may indeed exploit the workers, but you can’t show this simply by spelling profit “exploitation.” Redefinition, or slipping between different meanings of the same word, cannot deliver an intellectual free lunch where you arrive at informative conclusions without paying a price in evidence and argument. And, if it won’t solve your intellectual problems, it certainly won’t solve any practical problems. But playing with words is much easier than tackling reality, and often overwhelmingly seductive for tired policy makers.

  The last Conservative government of Britain believed the country would benefit from having a better-educated population. In particular, they wanted more university-educated citizens. Never mind why they wanted this; let us simply accept it as their goal. The problem lay in achieving it. Significantly increasing the number of university graduates would require a great increase in the capacity of Britain’s university system—more universities or p. 105 at least more places at existing universities. This must have been a daunting prospect, both expensive and slow, since it takes many years to train new university lecturers.

  Then the Eureka! moment. I don’t know if some erstwhile Marxist had somehow slipped into John Major’s administration or whether it was just blind brilliance, but someone hit upon the idea: let’s call technical colleges “universities.” Amazing! Dozens of new universities at a stroke and hardly a penny spent. And so it was that during the 1990s the number of universities in Britain almost doubled.

  The problem with this policy is that it has no effect whatsoever on the amount or quality of education going on in the country. So it cannot deliver what was wanted, namely, a better educated population. It delivers only more people with the badge of a university education. It is the same mistake as thinking you can make everyone rich by devaluing your currency. Look how many millionaires there are in Turkey.

  You can’t change the world just by describing it differently, or replacing nasty old words with nice new ones. If your shithouse stinks, you won’t make it smell any better by calling it a public convenience. You need to clean it. And a cripple won’t stand and walk because you call him alternatively-abled.

  Of course, words can acquire unpleasant connotations over time and only those who wish to endorse those connotations will continue to use the word. “Nigger” is a perfect example. But a prohibition on calling anyone a nigger, or even mentioning the “N” word, will not in itself eliminate racism or improve the lot of African Americans. On the contrary, if racism persists, other names for blacks will pick up the unwanted connotations.

  p.
106 Euphemisms tend to undermine themselves. The fact that you feel in need of a euphemism shows that you have a dim view of what it refers to. And soon enough, if your distaste is shared by others, the euphemism will have lost its power and all the old associations will have reattached themselves. In a country as blighted by racism as America there is always the need for yet another name for blacks. And when it comes to the place we do our number twos, everybody is always looking for the next nice way of referring to it. Many Londoners have recently adopted the American expression “bathroom,” the old French euphemisms “toilet” and “lavatory” having lost their cleansing magic.

  Euphemisms usually create no serious problems. They display a certain squeamishness but we still know what is meant. Equivocation, however, as illustrated in the “Christian” and other examples, is a serious intellectual aberration. Whether committed knowingly or by accident, it is a kind of cheat. Beware of it when a line of argument seems too good to be true—when, from the mere definitions of words, informative conclusions about reality are drawn or when value-laden conclusions are derived from purely factual premises. For neither kind of argument can possibly be valid. Any appearance of success is sure to be explained by the presence, somewhere in the argument, of an equivocation.

  9 – Begging the Question

  p. 107 In the 1980s, the Auckland University student newspaper ran a weekly column by the university chaplain. “The Chaplain’s Chat” was its comforting title, with content to match. In 1984, a new column appeared alongside “The Chaplain’s Chat”—“The Egyptian Chaplain’s Chat”—in which the author would give a brief account of the characteristics of one of the ancient Egyptian deities, the sun god Amon Ra and his colleagues.

  This new column was not well-received by the campus Evangelical Union, a society for the most enthusiastic of Christian students. They wrote a letter to the newspaper demanding the withdrawal of what they considered to be a weekly dose of blasphemy.

  The editor did not oblige them. Instead, he wrote an editorial lamenting the Evangelical Union’s lack of tolerance. It ended with the slogan: “Believe what you will but tolerate the beliefs of others.”

  p. 108 He must have been pleased with this bon mot: tolerant, yes, but firm in the face of dangerous fanaticism. Unfortunately, it is impossible to obey this edict when you believe that someone else’s beliefs are intolerable. Which is precisely what the outraged evangelical Christians believed.

  The editor thought he could settle the dispute between the Christians and his newspaper without engaging in theological debate. A general appeal to tolerance would do the trick. But he did not really avoid taking a theological position. You would tolerate “The Egyptian Chaplain’s Chat” only if you disagreed with the evangelical Christians about this kind of Egyptian chatting leading to the everlasting flames of hell. Far from answering the evangelical Christians’ objection, the editor simply assumed they were wrong about this; his plea for tolerance begged the question.

  The fallacy of begging the question consists in taking for granted precisely what is in dispute, in passing off as an argument what is really no more than an assertion of your position.

  Another explanatory example will be useful, since this fallacy is not as immediately obvious as those discussed in earlier chapters.

  Suppose Jack is a Libertarian of the variety who thinks that government policy must respect the absolute property rights of individuals over their income and other possessions, no matter what the consequences for aggregate welfare in society. He thinks there should be no tax or redistribution of wealth and that minimal state functions—justice and defense—should be funded by a state lottery, fines on criminals, and booty from military adventures.

  If Jill is like most opponents of this view, she will protest that Jack’s “no tax” policy would lead to mass poverty. By so arguing, p. 109 she assumes precisely what Jack denies, namely, that such consequences warrant the violation of property rights. In other words, Jill’s objection begs the question. She takes for granted what is in dispute. To refute Jack’s “no tax” policy, Jill will have to show that property rights are not really absolute, that certain consequences, such as mass poverty, can warrant overriding them.

  Begging the question occurs when people fail to get to the root of their disagreement. This may explain its popularity. Getting to the root of a disagreement will often force you to scrutinize your fundamental assumptions, because that is often where the disagreement lies. But this can be an unpleasant business. These fundamental assumptions will normally have been acquired without even a moment’s thought and seriously thinking about them might well bring on a nasty fit of the ideological wobbles. Why do you believe that people have absolute property rights? Or that they don’t? Most people would rather have teeth pulled than seriously confront such questions. So they don’t. They simply take their favored answer for granted and talk straight past those who disagree.

  Whatever its cause, the ubiquity of question-begging means that it usually goes unnoticed. But look hard and you will see it going on in almost all debates. The examples to be discussed here are but the tip of a massive iceberg.

  Tolerance

  Begging the question is especially common in disputes about prohibition, on both sides. As in the example of the Egyptian chaplain, those on the liberal side often appeal to some general p. 110 principle of tolerance, despite the position of their prohibitionist adversaries being precisely that the behavior at issue is intolerable. The most egregious example occurs in the abortion debate, where a common riposte to those who would criminalize it runs, “If you believe abortion is wrong, that’s fine, don’t abort your pregnancies. But show tolerance toward others who don’t share your beliefs.” Surely everyone, whatever their personal views, ought to be pro-choice.

  Anyone who has ever actually listened to an anti-abortionist ought to be incapable of this response. Anti-abortionists don’t think abortion is some kind of lifestyle faux pas, like serving white wine with beef or driving a 4x4 despite never having seen the countryside. They think it’s murder. They think killing a fetus is no different morally from killing an adult. If their prohibitionism is wrong, it is not because they are insufficiently tolerant of murder. It is because killing a fetus is not really murder.

  Tolerance is irrelevant in the abortion debate. If abortion isn’t murder, toleration isn’t required; if it is murder, tolerating it would be a vice.

  Everyone favors tolerance—but only, of course, of what should be tolerated. This qualification is the tricky bit; it is where disagreements tend to arise. And when they do, extolling the virtue of tolerance is of no help, because it can’t tell us what should be tolerated and what not. Like most preaching, it’s as empty as it is pompous.

  Intolerance

  It is not only the liberal side that tends to beg the question in prohibition debates. Consider the drugs debate. Why, for example, p. 111 should snorting cocaine be illegal? A common answer is that if it were legal there would be more of it.

  Well, quite! That is precisely why those who would legalize it would legalize it. They think that people who want to snort cocaine ought to jolly well get on and snort cocaine without being stopped by the state. To protest that legalization would lead to more cocaine-snorting assumes what is in dispute: namely, that there is some reason why people who want to snort shouldn’t.

  “There’d be more of it” is a popular prohibitionist argument, no matter what the activity in question. I have heard it employed against almost every victimless crime, from drug-taking to consensual adult incest. But, it is a perverse argument, because it draws attention to what you’d think counted on the liberal side, namely, that people would like to indulge more. It is incumbent on the prohibitionist to show why they shouldn’t. Otherwise the objection simply begs the question.

  The most common argument of prohibitionists, who feel the need to show why people should not indulge, is to claim that the behavior is bad for you; the crime is not really victimless. This
argument is usually question-begging, too, since liberalizers tend to agree with John Stuart Mill that nothing should be prohibited on the ground that it harms the voluntary participant: harming others should always be required for prohibition.[9.1] But, even if we accept the paternalism of our prohibitionists, their argument still ends up begging the crucial question.

  Consider again cocaine. Let us grant all the harm done by snorting cocaine. It can damage the inside of your nose; after a p. 112 hard night on the stuff you are apt to feel somewhat tired and grumpy the next morning; and if you become a heavy, habitual user your productivity at work and intimate relationships may suffer. These are certainly costs of using cocaine, not to mention the $100 per gram. But if you seek to ban something on paternalistic grounds, you must consider not only its costs but also its benefits.

  Eating, for example, involves effort and risk. But no paternalist would consider banning it because its benefits outweigh these costs. Proper paternalistic prohibition requires not merely a list of the costs but a cost-benefit analysis. The costs must be set against and exceed the benefits. The banned activity must be a net cost.

  The main benefit of snorting cocaine, perhaps the only benefit, is the pleasure it gives the snorter. Prohibitionists never consider this benefit. They will acknowledge some benefits of legalization, such as removing the criminal element from drugtrading, but they never consider the increase in pleasure caused by increased cocaine-snorting. Yet that is the whole point of legalizing it. If you don’t count what makes people want to do something, the cons will always outweigh the pros. Consider kissing. If you set aside the fact that people enjoy it, then there isn’t much to be said in its favor—it is just a good way of spreading germs. Ban it!