12-13-90 . . . I shouldn’t be surprised at this, having taught for more than seven years, but my students are incredibly conservative. I don’t mean “conservative” in the substantive sense, which implies commitment to certain views; I mean it in the formal sense. The students think that because something has been or is the case, it ought to be the case. They speak and act as if there is a presumption in favor of the status quo. Part of the problem is that they’ve never been taught to think critically about anything. Instead, they accept what they hear and see. They absorb their parents’ values as if by osmosis. They wear what their friends wear. They let politicians set their agendas for them. The main symptom of this formal conservatism is a tendency to think in categories. Certain words have positive connotations: “capitalism”, “democracy”, “liberty”, and “law”. Others have negative connotations: “communism”, “socialism”, “drugs”, and “atheist”. Some students think it’s an argument against an idea or practice that it can be described as “socialist”. I call this “argument by labeling”, for it consists of two steps: first, attaching a negative connotation to the label; and second, affixing the label to the idea or practice. There should be a name (that is, label) for this fallacy; it’s quite common. I hereby denominate it “The Labeling Fallacy”.
Here’s an example. Yesterday, in our discussion of Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights [1983], my Contemporary Moral Problems students and I asked whether animals are properly said to be euthanized when they are killed for lack of food and shelter. Some animal shelters kill dogs and cats when they run out of space for them. Regan says we should be honest and not describe these killings as “euthanasia”; to be euthanasia, he says, the killing must be done painlessly and because the alternative (continued life) is not in the person’s or animal’s interests. Regan refuses to accept the prevailing distribution of resources within which shelters operate. If we as a society distributed our resources more justly, he says, these animals would have lives that, on balance, are happy. When I repeated this point in class, it drew a number of critical responses from my students. One of them characterized Regan’s position as “socialistic”. The fact that no further reasons were given told me that the student was committing the labeling fallacy: Regan’s proposal is socialistic; socialism is bad; therefore, Regan’s proposal is bad. This wasn’t an isolated case, either. Several other students chimed in with the same point. I was flabbergasted, although by now I shouldn’t be. All I could do was ask what’s wrong with socialism, which led to yet another fallacy. Someone cited the Soviet Union as an “example” of the “failure” of “socialism”. So now I had a strawperson fallacy to contend with. The student was attacking the Soviet Union, assuming that the Soviet Union exemplifies socialism, and concluding that socialism is undermined. Sigh.
I’ve said enough about the fallacies these students commit. Why do they commit them? What explains their obstinacy and confusion? I think it goes back to their formal conservatism. They live in a simplistic, absolutistic world—a world of good and bad, right and wrong, us and them. In their view, the United States is capitalistic, democratic, and religious; these are good. The Soviet Union is communistic, socialistic, and irreligious; these are bad. Unfortunately, the students have never stopped to consider what “capitalistic” and “socialistic” mean or whether the United States and the Soviet Union are examplars of these economic systems. I tried to explain that the Soviet Union is far from a pure socialistic state, just as the United States is far from a pure capitalistic state. Both have mixed economies. Furthermore, even if it were true that the United States were a capitalistic state and capitalism were good, it wouldn’t follow that the United States is good, right, or just. Compare the following argument: [Joseph] Stalin was a father and fathers are good; therefore, Stalin was good. The United States may be morally defective in spite of being capitalistic. And I haven’t conceded that capitalism is good; in fact, I think it’s consistent with (and causes) great evil. Alas, there wasn’t time to go into any of these things in any detail. The students saw only the tip of the argumentative iceberg.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 