A Heap Of Sand

Socrates is mortal. All men are mortal. Therefore all men are Socrates. That's a fallacy of composition. Now, I'm not a philosopher, so my knowledge on the theoretical background to the many logical fallacies is sketchy at best, but I do recognize BS on many occasions (not always and not always immediately) when confronted with it. All men are not Socrates; that's BS.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

Also, I'm sure I make the occasional logical fallacy myself, and some of them are nearly unavoidable by mere mortals like myself. Consider, if you will, the friction between "pro choice" and "pro life" advocates in the ongoing abortion debate. Those who are completely against abortion at any stage during pregnancy accuse pro-abortion advocates of supporting murder, hence the label "pro life". Those who are in favor of abortion give priority to a woman's right to choose to terminate her pregnancy, hence the label "pro choice". The pro choice side of this debate is considered to be more prevalent among progressive, and the pro life side is more prevalent among conservatives, especially those who are motivated by religious, Christian values.

As you may have noticed, this is a highly generalizing way of looking at this, which is often necessary to communicate big ideas, idealism or long-term views into the future, or simply to communicate certain political or cultural trends. But there's dangers attached to these generalizations as well. For one, they make us susceptible to the fallacy of composition I mentioned at the start, which is the error of assuming that what is true for a member of a group is true for the group as a whole. Or inferring that something is true for the whole when it is true for part of the whole. "All pro choice advocates are murderers" is just as fallacious as "all pro life advocates are anti-feminists!" Yet this is the type of headline that's becoming more common in the age of click-bait economy (guilty as charged :-)).

The claim that pro life advocates are against women's rights is easily debunked; roughly half of the babies are girls and there's no denying that conservatives who are against abortion are huge hero's for those future women's rights... More seriously though, it's nonsense to believe that someone who wants to protect an unborn human is therefore against women's rights in general, or even a woman's right to decide what to do with her own body. The fault here lies with another fallacy; the continuum fallacy, which is linked to the sorites paradox or the "the paradox of the heap of sand". This is the error of refusing to draw a line anywhere when there's no precise location to draw that line.

It goes something like this: we can all agree that 1,000,000 grains of sand is a heap of sand. Also we'll agree that 1 grain of sand is not a heap of sand. But where do we draw the line? Humans have a strong tendency to categorize and to fit them into patterns; it's what makes the complexity of reality bearable and aids us in our sense of agency, in our ability to have an influence on those patterns, or to at least recognize categories within them to bring order to our world-model. This encourages us to sometimes draw a line, even when a clear location of that line does not exist. We might say: from 3,000,001 grains of sand, and up, constitutes a "heap", and anything less doesn't. The fallacy is to give up on the line entirely, to say that because there's no exact location for the line, the categories delineated by that line don't exist at all.

Analogous to our heap of sand, I think most can agree that right after conception, the clump of cells that will later become a human being, isn't the same, doesn't have the same moral value as that future human being. I also believe most will agree that a week before birth, if the pregnancy is carried out in the normal 9 months, is not a good time for abortion, as we're talking about a full grown human being now. Pro life extremists rightly claim that there's no way for us to determine exactly when the collection of cells becomes a (conscious) human being; the fallacy they make, is to follow that with saying that therefore abortion in any stage of the pregnancy is murder. It's not that simple, not that clear-cut, especially with something as sensitive as human lifes and human rights.

We're still generalizing here, but it's fair to say, I think, that this debate is not just a left-right issue, not just conservatives vs progressives, but also religious vs atheists; generally speaking there are more religious people on the pro life side and more atheists on the pro choice side. Not to make fun of these matters, but I find it slightly amusing to see conservatives, who are traditionally extremely pro individual freedom of choice, trying to impose this type of group morality on women, essentially denying them one of the most impacting choices of their life. It's the observation that I find funny, not the other part, to be clear.

In the same vein, extremely religious people accuse atheists of not valuing human life enough because of their predominantly materialistic world-view. They say that we, atheists or agnostics or secularists or humanists, believe that we are a cosmic accident and that we're only made of matter, and therefore value human life the same as all other life, or all other animals at the least, which are also made of matter only. Many of them believe that fighting for animal's rights somehow diminishes the value of human lifes. This is both discussed fallacies packed in a neat bundle. Another way of illustrating the fallacy of composition is as follows: "this tire is made of rubber, therefore this car is made of rubber." "A single atom is worth nothing, therefore the huge collection of atoms that make up a human being is worth nothing," or something like that. And in this case the religious conservatives accuse progressives of committing a continuum fallacy; now it's the left that neglects to recognize that human lifes have more value, just because there's no precise delineation between human and animal consciousness. This is not true for the vast majority of progressives of course.

What's frustrating, is to see this link between atheism, the rejection of God, and the devaluation of human life, which is based on numerous logical fallacies, being used as yet another way to link fascism to socialism and Marxism; Hitler and Stalin were both fascists (true) because their ideologies reject the Judaeo-Christian God. Something like: killing was easy for them because of their secular ideologies. Also frustrating is how this line of reasoning is used to criticize and hold back certain types of activism, like the fight for a better climate or for animal's rights. This video by the CosmicSkeptic illustrates this beautifully in a critique on one of PragerU's many ideologically motivated video's:

_{Are You Worth More Than a Tree? Dennis Prager Response}

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