I don’t think it’s a case of the WAITW as Singer lays it out, though it’s easy to see how the argument would go if it were. All the work of Singer’s argument is to adress and argue against the idea that there are important differences between those two cases. The WAITW characteristically tries to skip that work.
That’s a great answer, but did Singer eliminate all the potentially important differences? Carl Shulman has a nice post pointing out one such difference, and there may be others. It looks like detecting instances of WAITW can be difficult and controversial.
Well, I think the fact that Singer explicitly tries to tackle the problem of ‘important differences’ takes him out of range of the WAITW. At that point, if he fails, then his argument doesn’t work. But he’s not therefore doing something like ‘abortion is murder’.
Edit: I just read Shulman’s argument, and I think it’s invalid. The fact that the drowning child and distant starving child cases differ in those respects relevant to various ‘selfish’ ends isn’t strictly relevant to the question of their moral relationship.
Don’t wanna. According to the post, you’re supposed to detect instances of WAITW based on their pattern, not their conclusions. Same as all other fallacies.
The “pattern” isn’t just the inclusion of the word “is” in the sentence. It’s the pointing towards a more general category, already generally judged, which distracts from the more specific instance and more specific judgment that can be made.
The example you gave fails in all particulars, as it offers a different specific example, rather than a more general category.
It’s a WAitW if it’s misleading. The post describes a (pattern-matching) heuristic for when to unpack/taboo categories used in an argument, specifically those categories that contain the idea under discussion as a non-typical instance. Before you unpack a category, the heuristic only indicates what to unpack. After you unpack, you’ll be able to judge whether the argument stands or essentially relied on the category not getting unpacked, in which case it’s an instance of WAitW.
As Konkvistador notes, people may misuse this argument by crying “WAitW!” without doing the unpacking. But this is a standard problem with many ideas about ways in which people err, giving clever arguers new ammunition, and perhaps this bears repeating more frequently. It is not a problem specific to the post, it doesn’t detract from the idea itself, correctly understood.
Is the argument “refusing to donate to Africa is like refusing to rescue a drowning kid” an instance of the WAITW?
I don’t think it’s a case of the WAITW as Singer lays it out, though it’s easy to see how the argument would go if it were. All the work of Singer’s argument is to adress and argue against the idea that there are important differences between those two cases. The WAITW characteristically tries to skip that work.
That’s a great answer, but did Singer eliminate all the potentially important differences? Carl Shulman has a nice post pointing out one such difference, and there may be others. It looks like detecting instances of WAITW can be difficult and controversial.
Well, I think the fact that Singer explicitly tries to tackle the problem of ‘important differences’ takes him out of range of the WAITW. At that point, if he fails, then his argument doesn’t work. But he’s not therefore doing something like ‘abortion is murder’.
Edit: I just read Shulman’s argument, and I think it’s invalid. The fact that the drowning child and distant starving child cases differ in those respects relevant to various ‘selfish’ ends isn’t strictly relevant to the question of their moral relationship.
Can you identify a misleading incorrect inference suggested by the analogy?
Don’t wanna. According to the post, you’re supposed to detect instances of WAITW based on their pattern, not their conclusions. Same as all other fallacies.
The “pattern” isn’t just the inclusion of the word “is” in the sentence. It’s the pointing towards a more general category, already generally judged, which distracts from the more specific instance and more specific judgment that can be made.
The example you gave fails in all particulars, as it offers a different specific example, rather than a more general category.
It’s a WAitW if it’s misleading. The post describes a (pattern-matching) heuristic for when to unpack/taboo categories used in an argument, specifically those categories that contain the idea under discussion as a non-typical instance. Before you unpack a category, the heuristic only indicates what to unpack. After you unpack, you’ll be able to judge whether the argument stands or essentially relied on the category not getting unpacked, in which case it’s an instance of WAitW.
As Konkvistador notes, people may misuse this argument by crying “WAitW!” without doing the unpacking. But this is a standard problem with many ideas about ways in which people err, giving clever arguers new ammunition, and perhaps this bears repeating more frequently. It is not a problem specific to the post, it doesn’t detract from the idea itself, correctly understood.
What? It’s a WAitW if it’s wrong, but it isn’t if it’s right? That won’t do at all.
Cutting people up with knives is a crime. Surgeons cut people up with knives. Hence surgeons are criminals.
(More briefly, “Surgeons are slashers!”)