How many times have you heard the phrase, “two wrongs don’t make a right”?
I think almost every parent ever taught this to their kid. It went something like: “Just because Timmy cheated on his math doesn’t mean that it was fine for you to cheat on yours. Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
In Dr. Sadler’s video on fallacies, he brings up the deeper reasons for why the argument of using someone else to justify your actions isn’t a good argument to use. Here’s his video.
Here’s what the argument of “two wrongs do make a right” looks:
Someone else did X. If someone else did X, it’s okay for me to do X. Therefore, it’s okay for me to do X.
While this seems like a pretty easy idea to grasp, I think we’d be surprised at how much it is still used as an argument, even by adults. In relationships it might look something like: “He cheated on me. If he cheated on me it’s okay for me to cheat. Therefore, it’s okay for me to cheat.” Or maybe a work setting: “My co-worker is always late. If my co-worker is always late, it’s okay for me to be late. Therefore, it’s okay for me to be late.”
If something is wrong, it is wrong. This is similar in some ways to the concept of popularity that we talked about yesterday. “Because all of these people do it, I am justified in doing it.” This is never the case. Is it okay to do things others do? Absolutely. But if your sole argument for doing it is because “they do it,” you have encountered a logical fallacy.
The second fallacy he talks about is the “Red Herring” fallacy.
This is used to mislead someone in an argument instead of getting deeper into critical thinking.
The example he gives is if you are running away from sniffer dogs that are chasing you down, in the end, you are going to be caught unless you throw them off the trail. Dogs are drawn to very smelly things, so you could drag the scent of something with a potent smell, a Red Herring for example, across your trail so that when the dogs came to that smell, they follow the fish smell rather than follow your scent.
People often do this in arguments. Take a debate setting. You make a great point and the other person starts their argument. You have a great rebuttal ready, but then they switch their argument just slightly so that it totally throws you off of the trail of the original argument and causes you to chase a much less important point.
People will do this in many ways. One of the ways he mentions in the lecture is called a smoke screen. They will just throw a ton of verbiage at you with the premise that it all “proves their point.” By talking a lot and not letting you get a word in, they cause you to be so distracted by all they’ve said so that by the end you don’t even know which point to respond to, let alone know which points they made are even be relevant.
You may be able to get away with something by using these arguments, but when held up to critical thinking, they do not hold up.