Category: Bad Moves

I used to be a bad boy, but since I got the number I’ve calmed down and
become more focused on my religion. I believe it is a sign from God, and that
the number was made for me. It has brought me so much luck it is unbelievable.
Sulayman Ahmed, Manchester Metro, 13 September 2002

Unbelievable indeed. What is this amazing power that has turned Mr Ahmed’s
life around? The answer is a lucky telephone number. Ahmed paid £5,000
(about $7,500) for a telephone number which contained a lucky sequence of figures
based around 786, which in Arabic numerology apparently represents the holy
prayer Bismallah al-Rahman al Rahim.

Since owning the number, friends and family have been "amazed at the transformation"
in Ahmed, according to the Manchester Metro. What exactly is the nature
of this transformation? Details are sketchy. The only specific change of luck
mentioned in the report is that "he has been relentlessly pursued by women
desperate to go on dates with him." None of these women were available
for comment.

It seems, however, that the luckiest thing about the number is that Ahmed is
going to be able to sell it on for even more and "start buying property".
Talk about selling the goose that lays the golden eggs!

Let us suppose that, in fact, Ahmed has been on a lucky streak since buying
the number. Does that prove it possesses magical properties? No it does not.
The reason is simple enough, and those who think otherwise are committing a
common error known as the post hoc fallacy.

Here’s how it works. Think of a conditional statement of the form "If
X, then Y", such as "If this is a lucky number, then owning it will
bring me luck". This is clearly the kind of reasoning which Ahmed engaged
in before buying the number. What happens if Ahmed actually enjoys good luck
after buying the number is that he thinks this shows the truth of what is in
the "if" clause: "This is a lucky number". But it doesn’t
because it is not true that he would have enjoyed the good luck only if the
number were lucky. There could be other explanations. Luck is distributed randomly,
most of us think, and at any given time there is always a chance that you will
enter into a lucky streak. So the subsequent run of good luck can never prove
that what came before it was the cause of the good luck.

The mistake is even easier to see in other examples. Imagine we are watching
a football match and I say, "If I scratch my leg there will be a goal in
the next hour". You would not think if there was in fact a goal and I had
scratched my leg that the scratching was the cause of the goal. You’d rightly
see that the fact that the "then" that followed my "if"
actually happened does not show that my scratching my leg caused the goal.

It is remarkable, however, the extent to which people fall for the fallacy.
No matter how little evidence there is of actual causal power, people are remarkably
quick to attribute causal powers to things that occurred before something else.
Many superstitions start this way. Someone wears a hat for the first time and
that day their football team wins. From that day on the hat is their lucky hat.
"I wore that hat and then my team won, so if I wear this hat my team will
win." It’s very poor reasoning which is strangely compelling.

What is also amazing is the extent to which people are blind to other much
more obvious explanations. In the case of Ahmed, for example, he could hardly
have been indifferent to his religion when he bought the number, since he parted
with £5,000 for the number on the basis of its religious significance.
So saying that having the number is the cause of his renewed interest in religion
seems to confuse cause and effect. And being convinced of its luck would certainly
have given him a certain confidence that could translate into more success,
with women and in other areas of life.

It’s a simple explanation but for some reason many prefer to think the alleged
but unsubstantiated "transformation" in Ahmed’s fortunes is down to
a number. People are indeed strange.

"If we want to stop the defence industry operating in this country,
we can do so. The result incidentally would be that someone else supplies
the arms that we supply."
Tony Blair, 25 July 2002 (Source: The Mirror)

How many times have we heard people justifying ethically dubious actions using
this kind of argumentative move? The logic is clear enough. My action has consequence
X, which you find objectionable. But if I don’t undertake that action, someone
else will, and so consequence X will still come about. So there’s no point in
criticising me for undertaking this action, because that won’t prevent the consequence
you object to from coming to pass.

There is a respectable form of moral theory which does say that consequences
are what determine the rightness and wrongness of actions. But even these theories
cannot justify this form of argument. Consequentialist theories say that an
action is wrong if it has bad consequences and right if it has good ones. But
that means if a person does something with a bad consequence then that action
is wrong, period. It is not made okay because if they don’t do it someone else
will.

If this mistake is clear enough, why then does the argument have a curious
kind of appeal? One reason is plain wishful thinking combined with self-interest.
We most often use or hear this kind of argument when someone has something to
lose by not doing the dubious action, or something to gain by doing it. Therefore
pure self-interest can make us cling to any justification that seems to make
our action justifiable. We have a strong desire for our action to be morally
sound and this makes us accept justifications which, if we were thinking about
them clearly, wouldn’t pass muster.

A second explanation is more charitable to those who invoke such arguments.
It is natural and probably right to think that the morality of actions is in
some way tied to how they contribute or do not contribute to making the world
a better place. So in some sense the question, "Will the world be any better
if I do or do not do X?" is a perfectly good one to ask. But in answering
it we need to think not only about the net result of our actions when combined
with those of others but also about our contribution to that result. It may
well be that the world will not be any better if I refrain from doing something
bad. But if it is I who does that bad thing rather than someone else then I
am the one who is responsible for what happens. I am not less responsible because
someone else would have done it. The fact is that I did do it and so must carry
the blame.

And this is in fact how we usually do judge people morally. For instance, a
group of young men comes across a solitary old person and one decides that one
of them should rob him and this young man cannot be dissuaded. Does that then
mean that if one of the other two goes ahead and mugs the old man that he would
be blameless for the crime? The idea is surely absurd.

Similarly, in countless repressive regimes people have been tortured, raped
and even exterminated in death camps. For any given individual involved in those
atrocities, it is almost always the case that if they hadn’t done it someone
else would have. But that does not make their actions permissable. (We may feel
some sympathy for people who were forced to choose between undertaking horrible
acts and being punished or even killed themselves, but these are factors which
mitigate our judgement of the wrongdoing. They do not render the wrongdoing
right.)

So when it comes to arms dealing, the fact that if Britain doesn’t do it other
countries will is not enough to justify it. What we need to know is whether
the arms dealing is morally justifiable in itself. Like magicians’ tricks, the
argument fools us into looking away from where the real sleight of hand is taking
place.

Implanting tracking devices provides a very frightening vision for the future.
… This would be used initially for sex offenders, but we would soon find
that other marginalised groups, such as asylum seekers, would find they were
forced to have implants.
John Wadham, director of Liberty. (Source: Observer, 17/11/02)

The idea of implanting tracking devices under the skins of criminals is, with
good reason, a controversial one. No other punishment in Britain involves altering
a person’s body. Some may even see it as requiring a form of mutilation, in
the strict sense of the word, and that therefore it is an example of the kind
of "cruel and unusual punishment" that infringes upon a person’s basic
human rights. These rights, some argue, are also breached merely by the fact
that an offender with an implant will have his or her movements tracked 24/7.

These arguments may or may not be compelling and they need to be weighed against
the arguments in favour of the implants. One of these is that the implants may
actually give the offender more freedom, since the alternative is to be kept
under lock and key. Perhaps it’s better to be out of prison and under surveillance
than in prison.

There are clearly serious issues and debates surrounding the proposed tagging.
But the concerns raised by the director of the civil liberties campaign group
Liberty do not address them. Instead of tackling the key questions head-on,
he invokes the spectre of a slippery slope: if we allow sex offenders to have
implants, then before we know it, implants will be everywhere.

The problem with slippery slope arguments is that they make the location of
what is contentious unclear. In this case, we need to ask: is it problematic
that sex offenders have these implants or is it only a problem if the use of
implants is extended to other groups in society? If it is problematic for sex
offenders to have the implants then we do not get to the root of the problem
by thinking about what other groups of people might be next in line for them.
If it is wrong, it is wrong regardless of whether the technology is extended
or not.

But instead of focussing on the actual wrongness of the action under debate,
slippery slope arguments shift our focus to its unacceptable extensions. In
the implant case, the goal is to make us oppose implants because we don’t want
to see them in asylum seekers, not to make us realise how terrible it is that
sex offenders have them. So they avert our concentration from what is really
at issue and make us look elsewhere.

A slippery slope argument can carry some weight if there is a high probability
that the unacceptable consequence will in fact happen, and is actually unacceptable.
The problem is that in most slippery slope arguments there is no such demonstration.
Wadham’s claim is simply an assertion. There is no particular reason to suppose
that implants will be extended for use with asylum seekers. (It is interesting
that he talks about "other vulnerable groups", thus classifying sex
offenders as a "vulnerable group". In some senses sex offenders are
vulnerable, but not many people would agree, if it were stated directly rather
than obliquely, that they form a vulnerable group comparable to asylum seekers.)
But unless we are given good reason to suppose implants would be extended to
other groups we would not want them to be extended to, the slippery slope doesn’t
work. It is not enough to say, "If you tolerate this, asylum seekers will
be next." One has to show that asylum seekers will in fact be next, or
at the very least that there is a good chance they will be.

Ironically, the famous slippery slope argument just alluded to is arguably
not an example of the genre at all. Republican posters in the Spanish Civil
War showed Nationalist bombings and proclaimed, "If you tolerate this your
children will be next". However, the real force of this poster was only
partially due to its depiction of the possibility of what might happen next.
What the poster did above all was to make us realise the unacceptability of
the nationalist bombings themselves, by making us imagine what it would be like
if our children were the victims. So just because an argument has the apparent
form of a slippery slope argument, that doesn’t necessarily mean it exhibits
all its failings.

When confronted with a slippery slope argument, two questions should be asked.
First, is the practice being objected to in itself objectionable? If it is,
then the foreseen extensions are irrelevant. If implants for sex offenders are
wrong they are wrong, and it is an irrelevant distraction to start talking about
implants in other groups of people. If bombing Spanish towns is wrong, it is
irrelevant that it would also be bad to bomb British ones. If the practice is
not objectionable in itself, we then need to ask, if we start down this road,
is it likely that the practice would be extended to situations where it was
objectionable? Only if it is will the slippery slope argument carry any force.
And even then, that may only provide reasons for creating safeguards to prevent
the unwanted extension. It cannot form a direct objection to the practice itself.

The poor sell drugs so they can buy Nikes and the rich sell Nikes so they
can buy drugs.
from £9.99 by Frédéric Beigbeder (Picador, 2002)

It is widely lamented in serious circles that we live in the age of the "soundbite".
Nuanced arguments have been replaced with rapid-fire rhetoric for a generation
with no attention spans. The short, sharp, memorable phrase is king.

"Soundbite" is however a term of abuse rather than a description
of a single phenomenon. If you approve of what is said pithily and memorably,
all of a sudden it is not a soundbite after all, but an aphorism or a "pearl
of wisdom". Quotations lifted from literature, film or theatre are often
dignified in this way. In order to emphasise their shared features with soundbites,
let us call them "wisebites".

What is ironic is that the very people who often scorn the soundbite for its
shallowness often fall for the wisebite which is equally vacuous if not more
so. Take, for instance, the quotation above from Frédéric Beigbeder’s
novel. One reviewer of the book selected it especially as an example of the
writer’s brilliant ability to hit the nail on the head. But the wisebite falls
apart at the slightest examination. It just isn’t true.

Of course some poor people sell drugs in order to afford more consumer goods
and some people working for multinationals are drug takers. But that’s not really
what the wisebite implies. Rather, the wisebite suggests that there is a kind
of vicious circle of consumption: that the rich create a need or desire for
the poor to acquire consumer goods so that they themselves can fund their drug
habits, which are in turn supplied by the poor. Capitalism is thus a kind of
self-perpetuating mechanism for keeping the poor poor and the rich stoned. This
may be true in an extremely crude satire on advanced capitalism written by a
naive member of the Socialist Workers Party youth wing, but does anybody really
believe it accurately describes the true, complex relations between drug users
and suppliers, multinationals and the poor?

Is it even true that the poor generally sell drugs? Drug dealers are often
from poor backgrounds but they themselves are often very wealthy indeed. Many
of their drugs are in fact sold to the poor and it is their addictions which
keep them poor. But then the idea that the ex-poor are exploiting the still-poor
doesn’t appeal to the intellectual classes as much as the idea that the poor
are victims of greedy corporations.

Strip away the nonsense from the wisebite, then, and you are left with the
truism that the poor do aspire to acquire material goods and that this desire
is partly fuelled by the producers of these goods. Furthermore, some rich people
take drugs. That really does not leave much of the original sentiment intact.

Compare this with a bona fide soundbite. British premier Tony Blair is fond
of saying "No rights without responsibilities". Put like that, the
soundbite is too simplistic. Newborn infants, for instance, have rights without
responsibilities. But take away the obvious exceptions and at least there is
a serious point being made by the soundbite. If we are to have rights in a society
then certainly people have responsibilities to uphold them or not to infringe
them. The general existence of rights does entail concomitant responsibilities.

In this battle of the bites, it is thus the derided soundbite which emerges
the stronger and the celebrated wisebite turns out to be hollow. It seems we
are as ready to be beguiled by the false but wise-sounding "aphorisms"
of the writer, poet or intellectual as we are to dismiss the soundbites of the
politician. Their relative merits rarely come into play.