Read Critical thinking for Students Online
Authors: Roy van den Brink-Budgen
There is another type of argument whose weakness is due to inadequate evidence. It’s illustrated in the following example:
In August 2008, the sociologist Dr Jessica Ringrose wrote an article in which she argued that teenage girls should be taught more about positive female role models such as Emmeline Pankhurst (and the admirable Lisa Simpson). This argument enraged one contributor to the
Daily Mail
.
Students need to be educated properly, not taught political nonsense! I guess (people like this) want girls taught anti-male propaganda, and will push for lessons on how to kill their future husbands, should they so choose!
At the very least we would say that the response seems very much over the top. Dr Ringrose had argued that the purpose of teaching girls about positive role models was to stop the trend of girls describing themselves as ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ – abusive terms normally used by males. For our contributor from Bolton (in the UK), this is seen as ‘anti-male propaganda’. But this isn’t the real problem (weird though it is). It’s what comes next that’s really troubling for a Critical Thinker. Why does teaching girls about positive role models lead to ‘lessons on how to kill their future husbands’?
Though the man from Bolton hasn’t produced an argument as such, what he has done is to give us an example of another form of weakness in which the evidence is inadequate. This is called a
slippery slope
argument. It should be pretty clear why. Our man from Bolton sees that going down the line of teaching girls about positive role models so that they don’t refer to each other as ‘slut’ or ‘whore’ takes us down a slippery slope to lessons on murdering husbands. It’s a slippery slope because it takes us from
x
to a very distant
y
with no obvious connecting points in the argument. It’s as if, as he presents it, once you accept
x
, then you’re committed to
y
. And this is a familiar usage of the slippery slope argument. Someone is pointing out (very often wrongly) that, if you accept or argue for something, then all sorts of ghastly consequences will follow (without explaining why). You can also see why slippery slope is sometimes described as the ‘thin end of the wedge’.
The reason that a slippery slope argument is an example of inadequate evidence is that, as with the other types, the initial starting point for the argument isn’t enough to justify where it ends up. This is a very important point. If it could be shown that the starting point
was
enough to justify the conclusion, then we don’t have a slippery slope: we have instead an acceptable argument showing why if A, then B; if B, then C; if C, then D… if P, then Q; therefore, if A, then Q. In this sort of argument, each move needs to work, needs to follow. If it does, then we can travel a long way from the starting to the end point of the argument.
Our wish for convenience and safety ends up killing Arctic animals such as polar bears and sea lions. So, for the sake of Arctic animals, we should live with less convenience and safety.
This argument looks odd. The connections between convenience, safety, and the death of polar bears and sea lions are not made. It has the look of a weird slippery slope. So what’s going on?
There are many chemicals that are widely used to make things more convenient and safe for us. For example, we insist on having non-stick saucepans. But, to get those, we need to use the chemical called PFOS. In addition, to make our clothing and furniture safer, we use flame-retardant chemicals called PBDEs. Poor regulation of these chemicals means that they end up in the water supply and thus, by sea and ocean currents, reach the Arctic. They also drift there in air currents. The fish in the Arctic Ocean become contaminated by PFOS and PBDEs. Polar bears and sea lions (and seals) eat the fish, thus becoming contaminated themselves. Such animals also take in the pollution by breathing in the contaminated Arctic air. In this way, our wish for convenience and safety ends up killing polar bears, sea lions, seals, and other animals such as whales, walruses, and reindeer. So, for the sake of Arctic animals, we should live with less convenience and safety.
You can see that, in this developed form, the move from saucepans and sofas to the death of polar bears is well-developed in a very relevant explanatory way. Though the move is a big one, it is not a slippery slope. All the connections are added, and the connections seem to be acceptable.
The very term slippery slope always suggests something negative (as does thin end of the wedge). But sometimes we can reverse this. Sometimes the move from A to Q takes us somewhere good. It’s what I call a controlled climb.
If supermarkets can have lots of GM food (like tomatoes) on their shelves, then we’ll end up saving thousands of endangered creatures, like orang-utans. So we should encourage supermarkets to stock lots of them.
So how have we gone from GM foods on supermarket shelves to orang-utans?
(sequence 1) GM foods → fewer pesticides → more insects surviving → more animals feeding on insects survive
+ (sequence 2) GM foods → bigger crops → less land needed for cultivation → less cutting down of forests and other destruction of animal habitats
(sequence 1) + (sequence 2) → thousands of endangered species survive
Though there might be disagreement with the content of the argument, the
end-product
of the sequence is something straightforwardly good.
You might have seen that when someone is accused of leading us down a slippery slope, there’s something about consistency going on. What’s being said is that, if you believe/argue for/accept/want
x
, then, to be consistent, you must accept what comes with/follows
x
. In that the slippery slope isn’t normally spelled out, this consistency is often left vague. For example, the attack on Dr Ringrose that educating girls about positive female role models leads to females murdering their husbands isn’t obviously a consistency issue. To see how it might be, perhaps we should seek to get into the head of the man from Bolton. Here we go:
If you think girls should be taught positive female role models, then you must think that they should be taught to see men in a negative light, so you must think that girls should be given the skills to deal with the negative aspects of males, so you must think that they shouldn’t have to put up with the negative features of males, so you must think that they can kill men.
That was a very slippery slope. Let’s get out of here.
We’ll meet the issue of consistency again later in this chapter.
We’ve so far looked at types of argument in which weakness comes from the use of inadequate evidence. There is another category of weak arguments. These are those which have irrelevant evidence. Though irrelevant evidence is in an important way inadequate, there is some value in making the distinction.
Whereas inadequate evidence could possibly by supplemented or developed by adding in some extra evidence of the same type, irrelevant evidence just stops us in our tracks. Even if we added some more of the same type, it’s just more irrelevance. The first example of this category of weak arguments takes us to meet a weak and vulnerable man.
In Chapter 5 we looked at how counter-arguments are sometimes included by an author in order to knock them down. This is fine although, of course, the author might not knock it down effectively. But there is another point that needs considering. We have to take it that the counter-argument is being presented accurately (or perhaps, more to the point, fairly).
We’ll look at this by using an example from
The Times
. After concerns about possibly over-aggressive policing in dealing with demonstrations in summer 2009 in the UK, there was some correspondence in this newspaper about what the police should be allowed to do. Here’s someone’s contribution from 8 August:
Here’s an idea: let’s take away the officers’ extending batons, shields, stab vests, helmets, CS spray and handcuffs and just have them all politely inform wrongdoers and criminals to be nice. Because that would work wouldn’t it?
The force of this position (it’s not technically an argument, as you can see) is that the criticism of the police methods is unjustified. And it’s not justified, our
Times
reader thinks, because the alternative is ridiculous.
Hopefully, you’ll be able to see at least one problem with what’s going on here. The problem that perhaps hits us first is that the counter-position seems ludicrous. Nobody, presumably, would say that the police should ‘politely inform wrongdoers and criminals to be nice’. And this problem is a serious one. If someone distorts the counter-position, then any argument against it is pretty meaningless. This is because it’s then a pointless argument.
This distortion of the counter-position has a name. It takes its name from what’s going on here. Why would someone distort a counter-position? Presumably because the distortion makes it easier to attack it. If the counter-position is presented in a deliberately weak version, then it should be easier to show how weak it is, to knock it down. So the name of this type of arguing is
straw man
. A straw man isn’t a real man; a straw man is a weak version of man; a straw man can be easily knocked down, can be blown away.
The straw man argument can be seen in terms of irrelevant evidence because what the author presents as the claim made by the other side is irrelevant. They’re saying something that isn’t the case.
Here’s another straw man argument. Interestingly, it’s also on the topic of law and order. Indeed, this is often where you’ll find them. People can easily find chaos lurking around every corner. The next person (
The Times
letters page, September 2009) worries that not locking up criminals for life is a problem. Their letter followed the suggestion that Scouts and Guides are no longer to be allowed to carry their traditional sheath knives.
Are we now going to stop people buying climbing ropes; are we going to take the kukri [a curved knife] away from the Gurkha soldier? What if the Brigade of Guards takes exception to the Secretary of State for Defence during Trooping of the Colour? (Rubber bayonets?) We need to make punishment mean punishment …
You will see that, when a straw man argument is used, the arguer is showing the position they’re attacking as an absurd one. This technique of showing a position as absurd also has a name, a Latin name:
reductio ad absurdum
– reduction to absurdity. This person is saying that the solution to knife crime is not to ban knives but to lock up for life those people who use them criminally. They defend their position by reducing the opposing position to absurdity – if you ban knives, then you have to ban rope (in case someone uses it to strangle you?), and you have to ban the Gurkhas from using their knives, and the Brigade of Guards have to use rubber bayonets. Clearly all of these are absurd, and their absurdity shows the straw man because, as we’ve seen, nobody is saying that
all
knives have to be banned.
We’ll leave straw men blowing in the wind (having seen that, despite what Bob Dylan might say, they’re not the answer). But, having left them behind, let’s have another look at the first straw man argument:
Here’s an idea: let’s take away the officers’ extending batons, shields, stab vests, helmets, CS spray and handcuffs and just have them all politely inform wrongdoers and criminals to be nice. Because that would work wouldn’t it?
There’s something else worth noting about it. There’s another weakness. This is that the issue of policing demonstrations is reduced to two possibilities: to allow the police to carry on as before or to get them to speak politely to criminals. Those are the only possibilities allowed. It could be that there are other possibilities: using different policing methods or allowing demonstrations to take place only within a limited area are two of them.
Here we have yet another weakness of inadequate evidence. The author is claiming that there are two positions to consider. There are others, so their presentation of the evidence is inadequate. This weakness is called (not surprisingly)
restriction
of
options
. It’s also sometimes called
false dilemma
.
It’s important to note that restriction of options is a problem only when there are more options than the ones presented by the author. This means that sometimes there really will be only two options; it also means that sometimes there will be more than three, four, five, and so on.
The Nazi war criminal, Aribert Heim, is either still alive or is now dead. We have no firm evidence that Heim is dead, so we should proceed to look for him on the basis that he is still alive.
In this example, it is true that Heim is either alive or dead. These two options exhaust the range of possibilities. So there is no inappropriate restriction of options here.
The Second World War began with the invasion of Poland by Germany on 1 September 1939. Things might have been very different, however, if Russia hadn’t agreed a prior secret pact with Germany, carving up Poland between them. The invasion might have been postponed or might never have taken place. Stalin’s willingness to do business with Hitler almost certainly contributed to Hitler’s decision to invade Poland at this time.
In this example, two options are given. The invasion of Poland might have been postponed or not have taken place. There is, however, an obvious third possibility that it might have gone ahead anyway (given Hitler’s determination to expand German territory). You might want to consider a fourth possibility that the invasion would have taken place earlier but this doesn’t seem to fit well with the point about the agreement with Russia.
In this last example, then, there is an inappropriate restriction of options. You will recall that the other term that we used was ‘false dilemma’. A dilemma is normally taken to be a situation in which someone is faced with two choices, each of which
creates problems. Let’s have a look at a problem someone’s faced with, having had a good meal served to them by a pleasant and efficient waiter or waitress.
Should I leave a tip? The service was very good, so it would be appropriate to reward the staff. But I’ve got a problem with that. If I (and people like me) leave a tip, that will allow the system to continue by which staff are paid very badly because the management knows that diners leave tips. But, if I (and people like me) don’t, the waiting staff will have to live on low wages even though they’ve done a really good job. So …?
A real problem indeed but is it technically a dilemma? Is there at least one other thing that could be done? Perhaps our diner could start a campaign to increase the low wages of catering staff. They could, but it doesn’t solve the immediate problem. They could leave a very small tip, but that’s contained within the first option. So our diner needs to resolve what amounts to a dilemma one way or another before they leave the restaurant.