Shooting Fish In a Barrel

I recently posted my first entry on this blog, briefly explaining the spirit of the endeavor. Now I'll introduce a series that I hope will appear not infrequently. I'll call it "Shooting Fish In a Barrel." Tyler Cowen, at the amazing blog Marginal Revolution, has series such as "Markets in Everything," "The Culture that is X," (be it Japan, Russia, or wherever), Brad DeLong has a "Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?" series, and so on.

These series enable bloggers to highlight interesting things that fall under the title. The series I'm introducing here allows me to point out my reactions to "duh" moments, moments that reasonable people would agree deserve disapprobation of some sort. I get to express my reaction to something without implying that I'm going out on a limb. You ever been in a class, or seminar, where you knew the answer to a question posed by the professor, but didn't want to answer, because the answer was too easy? In cases like these, the hesitation to answer comes from not wanting to appear as if the issue strikes you as anything other than obvious. Such are the cases of "Shooting Fish In a Barrel." In this series, I'll highlight obvious cases of something gone awry, whether my method of diagnosing what's gone awry is typical or not. To get started, take a look at this clip I came across while browsing the link section at Bloggingheads:



I imagine most of us cringe at the analogy drawn by Rick Santorum between African-Americans on the one hand, and, say, an embryo or fetus on the other. So, many people would express this feeling, and walk away. But I don't want to leave it at that. And although I'll have to discuss it somewhat, I ultimately want to bracket off the whole racial issue, and its attending controversy.

What Santorum has done is to act as if Barack Obama has a "remarkable" view of the relative moral status of African-Americans and the unborn, but that's not the case. Most of us (and not only because of the constitution's silence on the matter) are less than certain about what kind of attitude we should take toward the moral status of an embryo or fetus. On the other hand, we find it to be obvious that a person standing before us is a full moral person regardless of race. When it comes to human beings after they've been born, after they've been named, are physically not attached to their mother, etc, we feel much more confident about what kind of attitude we should take. If Rick Santorum wants to bemoan the state of affairs that has come to pass where we're confident of what to think in the case of African-Americans, but less confident of what to think in the case of an unborn being, he may. But what he shouldn't do is act as if this general state of affairs is a quirk of Barack Obama's in particular.

We do this kind of thing in argument from time to time (Rick Santorum isn't alone here). We place pressure on our opponents because we find one of their premises prima facie absurd. In such cases, we may be right, but it's not enough simply to note our displeasure if in fact our opponent holds a common view. Common views have been wrong (and absurd) before, and it may turn out that the Roman Catholic view of the status of the unborn is more to our liking than the secular-liberal view many now hold. But until that happens, it can't be that Barack Obama has a "remarkable" view. If I'm right about that, then Barack Obama is under no obligation to answer, Rick Santorum is. Santorum is the one implying that Obama's view is remarkable, and in order for him to do that he must assume that the general zeitgeist is against Obama on the matter. When we imply such things about our opponent's arguments, we place a special rhetorical pressure on them, but this pressure is unearned when the implication is not true.