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the United Kingdom’s GDP by £3 billion per year, as the treasury’s recent report claims. But sixty million
participate in the UK economy, so each benefits by only £50 per year, or £1 per week.[11.6]
Everyone enjoys being shocked by amazing statistics. But you have to be able to believe them; the fun is
wrecked by discovering the statistics are bogus. The brief moment of elation I experienced upon hearing
about the promiscuity of English women in Spain was spoiled by discovering the shoddy sample selection
that lay behind it. If I hadn’t noticed the sample bias, I could have enjoyed the alleged fact for longer.
Ignorance is bliss, as they say. But I console myself with the fact that I did not waste the price of an
airfare to Spain. Ignorance can also be expensive.
That is the real value of learning to see through bogus statistical claims. You don’t make the mistake of
acting upon them, by flying to Spain for unlikely sex or pointlessly lowering your prices or supporting silly
policies.
12 – Morality Fever
p. 147As a boy, I occasionally told my parents how awful I found some classmate or neighbor. I would
list his most appalling characteristics and wait for the parental groans of agreement. But they were never
forthcoming. Instead, they always offered some hypothesis as to why the little creep had turned out so
(not me, the other kid). His parents had divorced and he felt insecure, his father beat him mercilessly, or
something of the sort.
“Maybe,” I would protest, “but explaining why he is awful doesn’t show that he isn’t awful. On the
contrary, it assumes he is. So why do you make these remarks as if they count against my point—which
was only that he is, in point of fact, awful?” Or words to that effect.
It is bizarre to think that you have refuted a claim by explaining why it is true. How could anyone get so
confused as to think this?
p. 148Morality fever did it. My parents assumed that I was morally condemning the boy in question. “It
isn’t his fault” is what they were saying. But I wasn’t morally condemning him any more than I would be
morally condemning a desert by saying that I find it objectionably dry. The desert can’t help it. It is dry
nevertheless, and I don’t care for it.
Had I told my parents that there is a mountain range in Switzerland, they would not have corrected me
by explaining how that mountain range came to be formed. Only in a haze of moral anxiety are people
capable of mistaking an explanation for a refutation.
My parents were not alone in suffering from morality fever. It is a widespread malady of the mind, and I
suspect it is spreading. An increasing number of opinions and topics seem to raise the moral temperature
to a point where the brain overheats.
This chapter is devoted to three more mental malfunctions that commonly occur when morality fever sets
in. Being alert to them is important because, where the issues are morally weighty, proper reasoning is
required more than ever. Or so I shall argue in the last subsection. Just as all self-help books should begin
with a confession, so they should end with preaching.
What’s Wicked Is False
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During New Zealand’s 1985 public debate on legalizing homosexuality, one of the more peculiar but
nonetheless popular arguments was that homosexuality should be illegal because it is unnatural. The
argument is peculiar because, whatever is meantp. 149by “unnatural,” it is silly to think that what is
unnatural should be illegal. Miniature golf is an unnatural activity, yet it would be outrageous to criminalize
it on that account alone. The same goes for little boys kissing their octogenarian grandmothers, wearing
socks with sandals, and open-heart surgery.
Yet, few on the pro-legalization side of the debate pointed this out. Instead they replied that, in fact,
homosexuality is natural. This struck me as tactically disastrous, since it tacitly accepted the idea that
what is unnatural should be illegal. It is an example of something I have since noted often, namely, a
strong bias in favor of arguing about the facts rather than about what follows from them. It is a foolish
bias, because it gives the irrational a strong advantage in debates. They need only invalidly draw their
favored conclusion from a true premise and an opponent with this bias will be in a hopeless position.
Nevertheless, this is what happened. Most on the pro-legalization side claimed that homosexuality is
natural because it has a genetic basis. In 1985, this was a controversial claim and certainly the science
involved was beyond the understanding of most in the debate. So it was fortunate perhaps that some had
a much simpler approach to establishing that homosexuality is natural. It must be, they argued, since those
who wish to keep homosexuality illegal claim it isn’t, and keeping homosexuality illegal is obviously
wrong.
These thinkers accepted the structure of the anti-legalization argument, but reversed its direction. They
agreed that if homosexuality is unnatural it should be illegal. But homosexuality should not be illegal. So
homosexuality must be natural.
p. 150This approach allows those with moral certainty to discover all sorts of interesting facts about the
world without going through the normal rigors of scientific research. By accepting some alleged link
between facts about how the world is (e.g., that homosexuality is natural) and facts about how it ought to
be (e.g., that homosexuality ought to be legal), those with certainty about the latter are blessed with
instant knowledge of the former. Those poor fools struggling in the laboratory to discover a genetic basis
for homosexuality; if only they had clear moral vision they could rest easy.
Despite its absurdity, this “moral method” is common where touchy subjects are concerned. The debate
about systematic differences in the IQs of different races is the most obvious example. Scientists have
published results showing that Asians’ average IQ is higher than whites’ and whites’ higher than blacks’.
[12.1]Most critics of the view reject the finding without any discussion of the research methods or data
used to arrive at it. The fact that the finding is agreeable to racists is taken to be a sufficient ground for its
rejection.
This reasoning is obviously flawed. How can the fact that racists enjoy hearing something show that it is
false? Much of the literature on this topic is at pains to point out that the claim is racist or that those who
make it are motivated by racism. But, again, how could this on its own show that whites’ average IQ is
not really lower than Asians’?
p. 151Besides being logically flawed, the reasoning is also ill-motivated. The opinion in question may
indeed be false, but why should an opponent of racism be especially concerned by it? He must accept
the racists’ reasoning, that such differences would warrant all manner of depredations upon members of
races with lower average IQs. That is a dangerous thing to accept, since these differences might turn out
to be real.
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