Bad Arguments

I have encountered a number of arguments that are flawed not in their content but in their logic. I thought it would be worth offering an account of them to help readers avoid making them and recognize them when other people do.

1.The Straw Man Argument:

In Man, Economy and State Murray Rothbard, criticizing the conventional account of the inefficiency of monopoly pricing, writes:

But, it may be asked, is it not true that the consumers would prefer a lower price and that therefore achievement of a “monopoly price” constitutes a “frustration of consumers’ sovereignty”? The answer is: Of course, consumers would prefer lower prices; they always would. In fact, the lower the price, the more they would like it. Does this mean that the ideal price is zero, or close to zero, for all goods, because this would represent the greatest degree of producers’ sacrifice to consumers’ wishes?

At no point in his discussion does he mention the argument to be found in any standard textbook, which is not that any price above zero frustrates the consumer’s desire but that any price above marginal cost reduces the consumer’s benefit from the transaction by more than it increases the producer’s benefit, hence reduces the total benefit. He is attacking an argument, that price should maximize consumer benefit, which no economist makes, instead of responding to the actual argument that the ideal price is that which maximize the combined benefit to the parties to the transaction.

2. The straw alternative:

A speaker arguing for libertarian child-rearing responded to questions about whether one should impose any restrictions on what your children ate or how they behaved by contrasting the result of not restricting them at all with the result of restricting them a lot, which she viewed, perhaps correctly, as the normal form of child rearing. She ignored the alternative of only restricting them a little, which is what she was being asked.

3. Confusing “us” with “me:”

“It is in my interest that society be comprised of people of type X => If I am not of type X while in society, I am acting against my own interest => I therefore should be of type X while I am in society.” (A commenter on a previous post, arguing that it is in the individual’s interest to respect rights)

As in the previous case, the argument depends on considering the wrong alternatives, this time nobody respecting rights vs everyone doing so. I only control me, so the relevant question for my self-interest is whether, given whatever everyone else is doing, I will be better off if I always respect rights than if I sometimes violate them.

4. Wishful thinking as argument:

“If your "prudent predator" could exist, that would directly negate the premise that "it is in my interest that society be comprised of people who respect rights". Instead, the premise would be, "It is in my interest that I may ignore rights when I want while everyone else respects rights". The problem with that is that, if PP can conclude this, *so also can everyone else*.” (Commenter on a previous post)

That is a reason to wish my argument to be false; we would be better off if it was in each individual’s interest to respect everyone else’s rights. The fact that we would be better off if an argument were wrong is not evidence that it is wrong; we would also be better off if humans did not get cancer. It is unfortunate that libertarian ethics cannot be deduced from rational self-interest but that does not make it false.

5. The Last Alternative:

There is a problem to which there appear to be only two possible solutions. Someone demonstrates that one of them does not work and concludes that the other must be the answer.

Reality contains no guarantee that all problems are soluble.

Many years ago I taught an undergraduate course at the University of Chicago based on this point, titled “Solution Unsatisfactory” after a story by Robert Heinlein. Each week we discussed a serious problem which appeared to have only two possible solutions — each of which I was willing to argue, at least for a week, did not work.

6. Outgroup Homogeneity

“You say X. But your fellow Republican/libertarian/Socialist says Y, which is inconsistent with X. Why can’t you people be consistent?”

There is no reason why all members of a group have to agree with each other about everything. Usually they don’t. As I put it in my first book:

There may be two libertarians somewhere who agree with each other on everything, but I am not one of them.

A similar approach is to attribute to the person you are arguing with the most extreme, and weakest, position on his side of the argument. Trump demonstrated it in his debate with Biden when he attributed to supporters of legal abortion support for infanticide. His basis seems to have been an early version of a bill by a Democratic state representative with ambiguous language, one possible interpretation of which could be infanticide. The language was changed after the ambiguity was pointed out. A more common example is to attribute to anyone skeptical, as I am, of parts of the current climate orthodoxy the belief that climate change isn’t happening.

7. Theory trumps evidence.

A recent commenter argued against educational vouchers on the grounds that they let government bureaucrats control private schools. It is a legitimate worry, so I asked him if he knew of any examples, cases where a private school complained that it was being forced to do something it didn’t want to do in order to receive voucher money. He could not find any examples, any news stories of such conflicts, but instead of looking harder or considering the possibility that perhaps it wasn’t happening he offered explanations for why he could find no evidence of what he knew was.

8. Give a dog a bad name and hang him.

You accuse a person or organization of doing something bad. You don’t have any evidence for it or any reason they would have done it but you do have evidence of something else bad they did, so that suffices. My recent example was an argument offered by JD Vance.