Evaluating the Meta-Slope: Is there a Slippery Slope Argument against Slippery Slope Arguments?

Slippery slope arguments (SSAs) have often been viewed as inherently weak arguments, to be classified together with traditional fallacies of reasoning and argumentation such as circular arguments and arguments from ignorance. Over the last two decades several philosophers have taken a kinder view, often providing historical examples of the kind of gradual change on which slippery slope arguments rely. Against this background, Enoch (2001, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 21(4), 629–647) presented a novel argument against SSA use that itself invokes a slippery slope. Specifically, he argued that the very reasons that can make SSAs strong arguments mean that we should be poor at abiding by the distinction between good and bad SSAs, making SSAs inherently undesirable. We argue that Enoch’s meta-level SSA fails on both conceptual and empirical grounds.     

Can ‘Big’ Questions be Begged?

Traditionally, logicians construed fallacies as mistakes in inference, as things that looked like good (i.e., deductively valid) arguments but were not. Two fallacies stood out like a sore thumb on this view of fallacies: the fallacy of many questions (because it does not even look like a good argument, or any kind of argument) and the fallacy of petitio principii (because it looks like and is a good argument). The latter is the concern of this paper. One possible response is to say that the tradition is right about the concept of fallacy but wrong about its extension: petitio principii is not a fallacy. If the only proper ways to criticize an argument are to say that it is invalid or that it is unsound, and petitio principii is not criticisable on either of these counts, then calling it a fallacy is tantamount to saying we should prefer invalid or unsound arguments Robinson (Analysis, 31(4): 114 ,1971). I will present a third way to logically criticize arguments and show that fallacious instances of petitio principii are so criticisable while other instances of petitio principii are non-fallacious; hence, this fallacy is not a reductio of the Standard Treatment. It is not my intention in this paper to come out on the side of any of the competing theories—the Standard Treatment, the dialectical theories, and the epistemic theories—as general theories of fallacy. I show only that petitio principii can be handled by something closely resembling the Standard Treatment in so far as that, on entirely logistical principles, there can be made a distinction such that circular arguments form at best a degenerate kind of argument. Circular arguments look like good arguments but are not, not because they are deductively invalid (which they are not) but because they do not deserve to be called arguments at all.     

A PUZZLE ABOUT NATURALISM

Abstract: This article presents and solves a puzzle about methodological naturalism. Trumping naturalism is the thesis that we must accept p if science sanctions p, and biconditional naturalism the apparently stronger thesis that we must accept p if and only if science sanctions p. The puzzle is generated by an apparently cogent argument to the effect that trumping naturalism is equivalent to biconditional naturalism. It turns out that the argument for this equivalence is subtly question‐begging. The article explains this and shows more generally that there are no scientific arguments for biconditional naturalism.     

Argument Structure and Disciplinary Perspective

Many in the informal logic tradition distinguish convergent from linked argument structure. The pragma-dialectical tradition distinguishes multiple from co-ordinatively compound argumentation. Although these two distinctions may appear to coincide, constituting only a terminological difference, we argue that they are distinct, indeed expressing different disciplinary perspectives on argumentation. From a logical point of view, where the primary evaluative issue concerns sufficient strength of support, the unit of analysis is the individual argument, the particular premises put forward to support a given conclusion. Structure is internal to this unit. From a dialectical point of view, where the focus concerns how well a critical discussion comes to a reasoned conclusion of some disputed question, the argumentation need not constitute a single unit of argument. The unit of dialectical analysis will be the entire argumentation made up of these several arguments. The multiple/co-ordinatively compound distinction is dialectical, while the linked/convergent distinction is logical. Keeping these two pairs of distinctions separate allows us to see certain attempts to characterize convergent versus linked arguments as rather characterizing multiple versus co-ordinatively compound arguments, in particular attempts of Thomas, Nolt, and Yanal, and to resolve straightforwardly conflicts, tensions, or anomalies in their accounts. Walton's preferred Suspension/Insufficient Proof test to identify linked argument structure correctly identifies co-ordinatively compound structure. His objection to using the concept of relevance to explicate the distinction between linked and convergent structure within co-ordinatively compound argumentation can be met through explicating relevance in terms of inference licenses. His counterexample to the Suspension/No Support test for identifying linked structure which this approach supports can itself be straightforwardly dealt with when the test is explicated through inference licenses.     

Beliefs do not come in degrees

Philosophers commonly say that beliefs come in degrees (or that beliefs are graded or that there are partial beliefs). Drawing from the literature, I make precise three arguments for this claim: an argument from degrees of confidence, an argument from degrees of firmness, and an argument from natural language. I show that they all fail. I also advance three arguments that beliefs do not come in degrees: an argument from natural language, an argument from intuition, and an argument from the metaphysics of degrees. On the basis of these arguments, I conclude that beliefs do not come in degrees.     

Poisoning the Well

In this paper it is shown is that although poisoning the well has generally been treated as a species of ad hominem fallacy, when you try to analyze the fallacy using ad hominem schemes, even by supplementing with related schemes like argument from position to know, the analysis ultimately fails. The main argument of the paper is taken up with proving this negative claim by applying these schemes to examples of arguments associated with the fallacy of poisoning the well. Although there is a positive finding in this quest, in that poisoning the well is shown to be based on and associated with these forms of argument in interesting ways, the paper in the end is led to the conclusion that the fallacy is irreducibly dialectical. Poisoning the well is thus analyzed as a tactic to silence an opponent violating her right to put forward arguments on an issue both parties have agreed to discuss at the confrontation stage of a critical discussion. It is concluded that it is a special form of strategic attack used by one party in the argumentation stage of a critical discussion to improperly shut down the capability of the other party for putting forward arguments of the kind needed to properly move the discussion forward.     

Discussions Quinton’s Neglected Argument for Scientific Realism

Summary  This paper discusses an argument for scientific realism put forward by Anthony Quinton in The Nature of Things. The argument – here called the controlled continuity argument – seems to have received no attention in the literature, apparently because it may easily be mistaken for a better-known argument, Grover Maxwell’s “argument from the continuum”. It is argued here that, in point of fact, the two are quite distinct and that Quinton’s argument has several advantages over Maxwell’s. The controlled continuity argument is also compared to Ian Hacking’s “argument from coincidence”. It is pointed out that both arguments are to a large extent independent from considerations about high-level scientific theories, and that both are abductive arguments at the core. But these similarities do not dilute an important difference related to the fact that Quinton’s argument cleverly seeks to anchor belief in unobservable entities in realism about ordinary objects, which is a position shared by most contemporary scientific anti-realists.     

Relying on Intuitions: Where Cappelen and Deutsch Go Wrong

Abstract

In Philosophy without Intuitions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), Herman Cappelen challenges the ‘almost universally accepted’ thesis of ‘Centrality’: ‘philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence (or as a source of evidence) for philosophical theories’. Cappelen takes there to be two arguments for Centrality and rejects both. According to the first, Centrality is supported by the way philosophers characterize key premises in their arguments as ‘intuitive’. Central to Cappelen’s rejection of this is his lengthy argument that philosophers’ ‘intuition’-talk is very hard to interpret, indeed often ‘meaningless’. I argue, in contrast, that this talk is easy to interpret. The great mass of philosophers who would endorse Centrality mean by ‘intuition’ just what it ordinarily means: ‘immediate judgment, without reasoning or inference’. Cappelen claims further that philosophers’ ‘intuition’-talk, however it is interpreted, does not support Centrality. I argue that this talk, interpreted in the ordinary way, does indeed support Centrality. According to the second argument, Centrality is supported by the very practice of philosophy. Cappelen rejects this with a thorough examination of several philosophical arguments. Deutsch has attacked Centrality similarly, in effect, with a thorough examination of one famous argument from Kripke. How are we to tell whether philosophical practice relies on intuitions? Cappelen, and Deutsch to some extent, answer by looking to the opinions of intuition-theorists about the nature of intuitions. This approach is quite mistaken. Rather, we should look to our ordinary ability to recognize intuitions. Adopting this approach, and discussing Deutsch’s Kripke example in most detail, I argue that Centrality gets support from all of these examples of philosophical practice.     

Evaluating Arguments for the Sex/Gender Distinction

Many philosophers believe that our ordinary English words man and woman are “gender terms,” and gender is distinct from biological sex. That is, they believe womanhood and manhood are not defined even partly by biological sex. This sex/gender distinction is one of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century on the broader culture, both popular and academic. Less well known are the reasons to think it’s true. My interest in this paper is to show that, upon investigation, the arguments for the sex/gender distinction have feet of clay. In fact, they all fail. We will survey the literature and tour arguments in favor of the sex/gender distinction, and then we’ll critically evaluate those arguments. We’ll consider the argument from resisting biological determinism, the argument from biologically intersex people and vagueness, the argument from the normativity of gender, and some arguments from thought experiments. We’ll see that these arguments are not up to the task of supporting the sex/gender distinction; they simply don’t work. So, philosophers should either develop stronger arguments for the sex/gender distinction, or cultivate a variety of feminism that’s consistent with the traditional, biologically-based definitions of woman and man.

     

Why Kamm's Principle of Secondary Permissibility Cannot Save the Doctrine of Double Effect

The DDE yields counterintuitive verdicts about certain cases: it may deem it permissible to kill a certain number of people when they are not used as means and their death is not intended, but deny that killing fewer of these people is permissible if that requires intending their death, or using them as means. To accommodate the judgement that we may kill the lesser number in such cases, supporters of the DDE may appeal to Frances Kamm's Principle of Secondary Permissibility (PSP). The principle says, roughly, that if it is permissible to kill n people when not intending their death, or using them as means, then it is permissible to kill n ? m people in a way that does involve intending their deaths, or using them as means, as ‘secondarily permissible’ (where m > 0). In this article I argue that appealing to the PSP to solve the puzzling cases of the DDE is generally misleading and that it fails in particular cases. The crux of my argument is that the PSP allows killings that go against the grain of the DDE.     

The Morality of Daycare

An increasing number of parents are electing to use daycare to assist them with their parenting from infancy onward. Strikingly, there is scant discussion of whether or not such a practice is morally permissible. In this paper, I shall discuss three different arguments that I believe are implicitly thought to support the use of daycare. I shall argue that the current widespread use of daycare, particularly with respect to infant children, often involves arbitrarily subjugating the needs of children in favor of the desires of parents, and thus is often morally wrong. Finally, I consider a possible fourth argument; one that I believe stands a better chance of justifying the use of daycare, though in the final analysis I argue that it also fails to justify the current widespread use of daycare.     

Richard Swinburne, <Emphasis Type="BoldItalic">The Existence of God,</Emphasis> and Principle P

Swinburne relies on principle P in The Existence of God to argue that God is simple and thus likely to exist. In this paper, I argue that Swinburne does not support P. In particular, his arguments from mathematical simplicity and scientists’ preferences both fail. Given the central role P plays in Swinburne’s overall argument in The Existence of God, I conclude that Swinburne should further support P if his argument that God likely exists is to be persuasive.     

The computational value of debate in defeasible reasoning

Defeasible reasoning is concerned with the logics of non-deductive argument. As is described in the literature, the study of this type of reasoning is considerably more involved than the study of deductive argument, even so that, in realistic applications, there is often a lack of resources to perform an exhaustive analysis. It follows that, in a theory of defeasible reasoning, the order and direction in which arguments are developed, i.e. theprocedure, is important. The aim of this article is to show that debate is the most efficient procedure to argue in the presence of limited resources. To do so, there is first some general theory on defeasible argumentation, which is followed by an introduction to the problem of dialectical search. The problem of dialectical search is (or at least, should be) the essential issue in every theory on argumentation, and emerges at every occasion that involves adjudication on competing arguments. Starting with an example, it is explained that dialectical search can be best scheduled according to classical debating techniques, that work along well-tried methods. These methods (which include various forms of curtailment, interruption, and interpretation) have proven their value in keeping debating efforts within reasonable bounds. How they apply in a theory of formal argument, will be shown in this article.This research was made possible by SION, and is financed by NWO under contract number 612-316-019. Part of this research has been conducted at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This article contains fragments of Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 of the author's dissertation. Studies in Defeasible Argumentation (1993).     

Endurantism vs. Perdurantism?: A Debate Reconsidered

One of the central debates in contemporary metaphysics has been the debate between endurantism and perdurantism about persistence. In this paper I argue that much of this debate has been misconstrued: most (if not all) of the arguments in the debate crucially rely on theses which are strictly orthogonal to the endurantism/perdurantism debate. To show this, I note that the arguments in the endurantism/perdurantism debate typically take the following form: one presents a challenge that endurantists (/perdurantists) allegedly have some trouble addressing, and to which perdurantism (/endurantism) apparently has a straightforward response. I argue, however, that in each case, there are versions of endurantism (/perdurantism) that can offer precisely the same (or at least a highly analogous) response to the challenge, and thus the ability to provide this particular solution does not directly tell in favour of one the two views. In §1, I elaborate two views which will be particularly prominent in the discussion: liberal endurantism and restrictive perdurantism. In §2–6 I discuss in turn the central pro‐perdurantism arguments: the argument from anthropocentricism, the argument from vagueness, the argument from recombination, the argument from temporary intrinsics, and the argument from coincidence. In §7–8, I discuss the main pro‐endurantism arguments: the arguments from motion, and the argument from permanent coincidence. Finally, in §9, I discuss what conclusion can be drawn from this discussion.     

Genetic modification and genetic determinism

In this article we examine four objections to the genetic modification of human beings: the freedom argument, the giftedness argument, the authenticity argument, and the uniqueness argument. We then demonstrate that each of these arguments against genetic modification assumes a strong version of genetic determinism. Since these strong deterministic assumptions are false, the arguments against genetic modification, which assume and depend upon these assumptions, are therefore unsound. Serious discussion of the morality of genetic modification, and the development of sound science policy, should be driven by arguments that address the actual consequences of genetic modification for individuals and society, not by ones propped up by false or misleading biological assumptions.     

Toleration and Cultural Controversies*

Multicultural societies are far more likely than others to include minorities committed to the pursuit of practices that offend the majority, and treating the cultural commitments of all citizens fairly will require some set of guiding principles to distinguish tolerable ‘cultural controversies’ from intolerable ones. This paper does not directly address the moral question at stake here (i.e. demarcating the limits of toleration) but rather seeks to provide a politically justifiable normative argument to explain when tolerant restraint is necessary, permissible or prohibited. This argument emerges from a concern to treat the cultural commitments of all citizens fairly. In turn, the argument indicates a potential reconciliation of the ‘politics of toleration’ with the ‘politics of respect’. *I would like to thank Stephen De Wijze, Hillel Steiner, Thomas Uebel, Peter Jones and Res Publica’s anonymous referees for their very helpful comments. I would also like to thank the ESRC for providing funding.     

On euthanasia: blindspots in the argument from mercy

In the euthanasia debate, the argument from mercy holds that if someone is in unbearable pain and is hopelessly ill or injured, then mercy dictates that inflicting death may be morally justified. One common way of setting the stage for the argument from mercy is to draw parallels between human and animal suffering, and to suggest that insofar as we are prepared to relieve an animal's suffering by putting it out of its misery we should likewise be prepared to offer the same relief to human beings.
In this paper, I will argue that the use of parallels between human and animal suffering in the argument from mercy relies upon truncated views of how the concept of a human being enters our moral thought and responsiveness. In particular, the focus on the nature and extent of the empirical similarities between human beings and animals obscures the significance for our moral lives of the kind of human fellowship which is not reducible to the shared possession of empirical capacities.
I will suggest that although a critical examination of the blindspots in these arguments does not license the conclusion that euthanasia for mercy's sake is never morally permissible, it does limit the power of arguments such as those provided by Rachels and Singer to justify it. I will further suggest that examination of these blindspots helps to deepen our understanding of what is at stake in the question of euthanasia in ways that tend otherwise to remain obscured.     

Agency and responsibility: The personal and the political

In this paper, I review arguments according to which harsh criminal punishments and poverty are undeserved and therefore unjust. Such arguments come in different forms. First, one may argue that no one deserves to be poor or be punished, because there is no such thing as desert-entailing moral responsibility. Second, one may argue that poor people in particular do not deserve to remain in poverty or to be punished if they commit crimes, because poor people suffer from psychological problems that undermine their agency and moral responsibility. Third, one may argue that poor and otherwise marginalized people frequently face external obstacles that prevent them from taking alternative courses of action. The first kind of argument has its place in the philosophy seminar. Psychological difficulties may be important to attend to both in personal relationships and when holding ourselves responsible. Nevertheless, I argue that neither type of argument belongs in political contexts. Moral responsibility scepticism ultimately rests on contested intuitions. Labelling certain groups of people particularly irrational, weak-willed, or similar is belittling and disrespectful; such claims are also hard to prove, and may have the opposite effect to the intended one on people's attitudes. Arguments from external obstacles have none of these problems. Such arguments may not take us all the way to criminal justice reform, but in this context, we can supplement them with epistemic arguments and crime prevention arguments.     

The Practice of Argumentative Discussion

I propose some changes to the conceptions of argument and of argumentative discussion in Ralph Johnson's Manifest Rationality (2000). An argument is a discourse whose author seeks to persuade an audience to accept a thesis by producing reasons in support of it and discharging his dialectical obligations. An argumentative discussion (what Johnson calls argumentation) is a sociocultural activity of constructing, presenting, interpreting, criticizing, and revising arguments for the purpose of reaching a shared rationally supported position on some issue. Johnson's theory of argumentative discussion, with occasional modifications, is derived from this definition as a sequence of 17 theorems. Argumentative discussion is a valuable cultural practice; it is the most secure route to correct views and wise policies.