Academics MINERVA® ​ CS50 Formal Analyses SCHOOLS AT KGI Fallacies Applications Document 2: Solutions Flora, T. (M22), Koloskov, N. (M23), Terrana, A. Last Modified: July 2020 Introduction 1 Ex 1. Euthanasia and assisted death 1 Ex 2. Recreational cannabis legalization 5 Ex 3. Food aid to developing countries 8 Ex 4. Dress codes, uniforms, and protests 10 Introduction The examples and solutions below exemplify rigorous and thorough applications of #fallacies. These should assist you in structuring and deepening your applications. When reading them, however, keep in mind that some arguments can be interpreted differently and that not all fallacies in the excerpt were fully analyzed and corrected within this document. Only the underlined fallacies are focussed on here. Compare these solutions to your own, spot ​ differences and similarities between them, and remember that, especially when it comes to correcting a fallacy, there are multiple ways to go about it. Ex 1. Euthanasia and assisted death "The case for assisted suicide seems to depend on human sympathy — on the impulse toward mercy, the desire to ease what seems like pointless pain and suffering. Why shouldn’t the terminally ill meet death on their own terms, rather than at the end of prolonged agonies? Why shouldn’t the dying depart this earth with dignity, instead of enduring the inexorable stripping away of their physical and mental faculties? Such are the sentiments that made Jack Kevorkian, who died last week of natural causes, a hero to many millions of Americans. Though he was tried repeatedly and finally convicted of second-degree murder, the former pathologist’s career as “Dr. Death” (he said he assisted at 1 more than 130 suicides) was widely regarded as a form of humanitarianism rather than a criminal enterprise. (...) [Kevorkian] didn’t just provide death to the dying; he helped anyone whose suffering seemed sufficient to warrant his deadly assistance. When The Detroit Free Press investigated his “practice” in 1997, it found that 60 percent of those he assisted weren’t actually terminally ill. In several cases, autopsies revealed 'no anatomical evidence of disease.' This record was ignored or glossed over by his admirers. (So were the roots of his interest in euthanasia: Kevorkian was obsessed with human experimentation, and pined for a day when both assisted suicides and executions could be accompanied by vivisection.) After his release from prison in 2007, he was treated like a civil rights revolutionary rather than a killer — with fawning interviews on “60 Minutes,” $50,000 speaking engagements, and a hagiographic HBO biopic starring Al Pacino. Fortunately, the revolution Kevorkian envisioned hasn’t yet succeeded. (...) There is no American equivalent of the kind of suicide clinics that have sprung up in Switzerland, providing painless poisons to a steady flow of people from around the globe. (...) Were [Swiss suicide clinicists] operating in the United States, [they] might well have as many apologists and admirers as the late Dr. Death. But it should make us proud of our country that [they] would likely find [themselves] in prison, where murderers belong.” Source: Douthat, R. (2011). Dr. Kevorkian’s victims. The New York Times. Retrieved from ​ ​ https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/opinion/06douthat.html?_r=2&hp Ex 1. Solution Fallacies: red herring, straw man, ad hominem ​ ​ One possible interpretation of the argument the author is trying to make is: 1. Proponents for assisted suicide claim dying patients should have the freedom to end their lives on their own terms through the practice. 2. Many of those who seek assisted suicide are physically healthy. 3. A prominent assisted suicide administrator was a controversial figure, obsessed with human experimentation, and earned a lot of money from speaking engagements after he left prison. 4. (Implied) Therefore, dying patients should not have assisted suicide as an option. In this case, we can see that the conclusion is not reached through the premises. In the third paragraph, the author invokes many facts about Dr. Kevorkian that are not related to assisted dying or euthanasia. They apply a red herring fallacy by distracting the reader from the issue at ​ ​ hand, using controversial aspects of a doctor who assisted in voluntary deaths to attack the practice itself. This is characterized as an informal fallacy and a non-sequitur of relevance since 2 the information about Dr. Kevorkian does not allow us to conclude anything about the morality of assisted dying. The argument is missing a premise that connects Dr. Kevorkian's practice of assisted dying to the moral validity of assisted dying. Because the conclusion cannot be derived with certainty from the premises, the argument is unsound. We are thus interpreting the argument as a strictly ​ ​ deductive one (do you think this is fair?). The conclusion seems rather extreme for the premises established. There is also some evidence in the passage that goes unused in the argument as we interpreted it. One way to “correct” the argument, then, is to make use of this evidence in an inductive argument that has a ​ ​ more reasonable and likely conclusion.To make the argument reliable, we want to establish a stronger connection between Dr. Death's story and the wider point against assisted dying. This is done in the proposed “correction” below by: ● Removing the red herring (distracting) content of the article, along with premises specifically about Dr. Kevorkian’s controversial behavior. ● Incorporating more appropriate and relevant evidence by adding a premise (about Switzerland) and making the analogy with murder more explicit. ● Narrowing the conclusion to be less extreme (only illegal about “healthy” patients), meaning that it follows more directly from the premises, thus producing a stronger argument. 1. Dr. Kevorkian's case shows that most “patients” who opt for assisted death will have been preventable deaths. 2. Switzerland takes in many patients seeking euthanasia administrations from all around the world, many of whom are not ill. 3. Assisting preventable deaths is equivalent to murder, which is illegal. 4. Therefore, assisted death should be strictly illegal for healthy patients. This argument could further be strengthened with more lines of quality evidence (premises) to add support to the extent of the issue, in addition to the anecdotes presented here about Dr. Kevorkian and Switzerland. Additional considerations At the very beginning of the excerpt, the author frames the argument for assisted dying using a straw man fallacy, narrowing it to an argument for respect for those suffering from disease and ​ pain. This fallacy matters as it misguides readers inexperienced with this debate but it is not the main argument of the passage. It is also arguable that there is an ad hominem fallacy (personal ​ ​ attack), as the controversial facts about Dr. Kevorkian are being used to argue against his practice. 3 Ex 2. Recreational cannabis legalization “A study conducted by a team of drug experts in the UK found that marijuana has lesser side effects than many other popular drugs. Researchers found that the combined health risks posed by marijuana are much lower than that (sic) associated with alcohol and tobacco consumption. While alcohol is the direct or indirect cause of thousands of deaths around the country every year, there are no recorded cases of death from marijuana. Proponents of marijuana believe that legalizing other, more harmful, drugs but keeping marijuana criminalized destroys the credibility of valid warnings regarding the risks of substance abuse.” Source: Why marijuana should be legal everywhere. (n.d.). Mercy Wellness of Cotati. Retrieved from https://mercywellness.com/why-marijuana-should-be-legal-everywhere/ ​ Ex 2. Solution Fallacy: tu quoque/two wrongs make a right (implied) ​ ​ The excerpt contains an argument of the form: 1. Cannabis poses health risks, but other drugs that pose more serious health risks are legalized. 2. Therefore, cannabis should be legalized. The argument does not strengthen the claim that legalizing cannabis would generate more benefit than harm, instead appealing to the status of other harmful drugs. While the reasons for a drug to be legalized or not could be used in a strong argument for legalization, they are not present anywhere in the excerpt. Appealing to other drugs, then, can be interpreted as a tu ​ quoque fallacy, in which the speaker shows an error or the hypocrisy of an entity (e.g. a drug ​ enforcement regulator) and uses it as justification for something their premises don't justify. The tu quoque fallacy is an informal fallacy and is a specific kind of two wrongs make a right. In ​ ​ this case, it could be interpreted that the health risks associated with cannabis are permissible in light of the health risks legal drugs pose, which is not grounds for legalization. The argument is invalid, as the conclusion is not related to the premises. To make the argument valid, we could add more explicit premises related to the reasons drugs should be legalized or not, and use valid rules of deduction to reach the conclusion. In this case, we use modus tollens (denying the consequent to conclude the opposite of the antecedent): 1. A→B: If a drug is illegal, it must be more harmful than legal drugs. 2. ￢B: Marijuana is not more harmful than legal drugs (such as alcohol). 4 3. Therefore, ￢A: Therefore, marijuana should be legal. With this revision, we have made the argument valid. Success!...? Not really. The soundness of the argument can be put into question: the first premise is dubious. To make this argument sound, we need more robust criteria for determining what drugs should be legal or not. To address this, we could establish an additional premise that drugs can be ranked by harm, and that the legality of drugs should primarily be based on this ranking.