Donald Trump nominated for Nobel Peace Prize.
Some of those who argue that Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize do so on the basis that :
- Obama (and/or other dubious past winners, such as Yasir Arafat) won it,
- Trump is at least as deserving as Obama, therefore
- Trump deserves the award.
This argument makes sense if you believe Obama and/or Arafat were deserving winners. But it does NOT make sense if you believe (as I do, FWIW) that awarding the prize to them was a mistake. And, as far as I can tell, most of the people who use the Obama analogy to justify giving it to Trump do NOT in fact believe Obama was a deserving winner. Indeed, they tend to think he was even less deserving than I believe he was.
A good analogy is the debate over who belongs in the baseball Hall of Fame. Some people argue that Player X should get in because he's at least as good as the worst player currently enshrined in the Hall. Sabermetrics guru Bill James calls this the "if one then" fallacy. As James shows in his classic book on the HOF, there have been some truly awful erroneous selections in the history of that institution. If every player who was as good as the worst current member of the Hall were inducted, HOF standards would be massively lowered, and the Hall would be several times bigger than it is now.
Similarly, if everyone who is a less awful nominee than the worst past winners of the Nobel Peace Prize were given the award, we can all be Nobel laureates! If your goal is to devalue the Nobel Prize, that's fine. But otherwise, you should oppose using past errors as justifications for future ones.