Fallacies about rules
Here are some fallacies concerning rules, principles or criteria.
Special pleading
In special pleading someone claims that they (or someone they are defending) should not have to follow the rules, without providing sufficient evidence to support such an exception (Damer p 145). The pleading can come in several forms, including:
Appeal to sympathy. Life is hard, and I shouldn't have to follow the rules. (This is one type of appeal to emotion) Examples:
I'm an orphan, how can you throw me in jail for killing my parents?
I work hard all day. You can't expect me to help with the housework too. (This would be special pleading if the speaker's spouse also worked hard all day.)
Above the law. Some people who make or enforce the laws, or who are wealthy, powerful or famous apparently believe that they don't have to follow the rules. Thus we have Whitehouse scandals, rouge cops and corrupt businessmen.
The outsider. The outsider claims that they don't have to follow the same rules as the regular members of a group, but should still get the same respect. For example, many promoters of unorthodox scientific ideas claim that they don't need to get advanced degrees or have their work published in peer-reviewed journals, but still expect their work to be taken seriously.
The double standard
Special pleading is one type of double standard, but there are others. One is to impose stricter criteria on another person or group. A frequent example in debates on scientific topics is to demand that the "other side" use only peer-reviewed papers as references while allowing themselves to use any references they want. Another type is to use different words to describe our actions: Our allies are freedom fighters, while our opponents are rebels or even terrorists; I am a skeptic, you are a cynic. A third type of double standard is to play favorites. A parent, for example, may require one child to keep their room spotless, while allowing another child to keep an untidy room.
Moving the goalposts
Moving the goalposts means changing the rules after the game has started. This may mean making the criteria harder to meet (moving the goalposts back) but probably more common is the demand that the criteria be made less strict (moving the goalposts forward). For example, one of my instructors in college told the class that he was taking large doses of vitamin C, and that would keep him from getting any colds. The next week he came to class with a bad cold. Rather than admitting defeat he told the class that his cold would have been worse if he had not been taking vitamin C. The instructor had changed the rules, now having a less sever cold was a success. (Of course the instructor had no way of knowing how bad his cold would be if he was not taking vitamin C, it probably would not make any difference.)
The moving target
Moving the target means to keep changing the rules so the "other side" is always wrong, or so that "our side" is always right, or some combination of the two. For example, in a number of sections of The Skeptical Environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg takes environmentalists to task for using local rather than global statistics (page 7): "The point here is that global figures summarize all the good stories as well as all the ugly ones." This is not a very good criteria, sometimes global figures hide local events, such as what has happened in the former Soviet Union, and indeed Lomborg himself breaks the criteria numerous times (a double standard). But then on page 94 the Worldwatch Institute and others are taken to task for showing the global trend for grain production per carita, while Lomborg insists that the trend for the developing world should also be shown. Lomborg describes the Worldwatch Institute's actions in prejudicial language such as "selective figure", "faulty logic" and "statistical finesse." But Lomborg is wrong, with today's trade grain is a world-wide market, and changing the criteria to make sure that the "other side" is wrong is faulty logic.
Reference
Damer, T. E., Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments, Fourth Edition, Wadsworth, 2001.
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Written by Jim Norton
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