The Skeptic’s Repertoire
The skeptic’s repertoire – the false equivalence fallacy

The skeptic’s repertoire – the false equivalence fallacy

Summary:

  • There are numerous speech stratagems which can be used to win an argument or influence the audience.
  • Moral equivalence (or false equivalence) is a fallacy which consists in drawing false equivalence between two things based on shared characteristics.
  • Moral equivalence arguments also take the form of whataboutism or whataboutery.
  • The goal of using the false equivalence fallacy is to confuse the opponent or the audience and draw their attention to another topic.

The false equivalence fallacy

The false equivalence fallacy is a stratagem wherein the speaker finds similarities between two things and tries to build equivalence, moral or other, between them. To say that dogs and cats both have tails, and therefore dogs are equivalent to cats would be a simplistic example of this failed line of reasoning. It might be tempting to dismiss such an argument immediately due to the false analogy. However, dismissing an argument outright without explaining its nuances might have an adverse effect on the audience.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, triggered a propaganda war [1]. The abundance of contradicting information makes it useful to be able to detect logical and moral fallacies. A good example of the moral equivalence fallacy has been provided by Dmitry Suslov from Russia’s Higher School of Economics in his interview with journalist Matt Frei on February 28, 2022. Mr. Suslov repeatedly mentioned the US invasion of Iraq and other countries as a point of equivalence [2]. Such an approach is not unpopular; even a person with lesser ties to Kremlin’s politics could wonder how the attack on Ukraine is different from, say, the invasion of Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein. The point deserves an analysis.

While Saddam Hussein’s regime was characterized by numerous crimes, e.g. “Saddam’s 1987-1988 campaign against the Kurds killed at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds”, Ukraine enjoyed a democratically elected government and had no official record of genocide. “The Iraqi regime used chemical agents to include mustard gas and nerve agents in attacks against at least 40 Kurdish villages between 1987-1988” [3] and committed numerous other crimes recorded by Human Rights Watch [4]. In Ukraine, human rights violations were indeed reported by Amnesty International in 2020, though they supposedly happened primarily in the eastern provinces – those within the Russian sphere of influence [5]. In other words, “(…) the Saddam regime could not have gone on forever as an outlaw system within international law, and therefore that (…) the whole society deserved a breathing space (…)” [6]. On the other hand, Ukraine could continue its democratic existence within international law without its regime’s political opponents getting  poisoned [7], jailed [8], or killed [9], as happened in both Russia and Iraq. The equivalence is thus stretched rather thinly and proves to be an attempt to justify actions motivated differently.

The skeptic’s repertoire – the false equivalence fallacy

Whataboutism

The moral equivalence fallacy is also known as whataboutism [10] or whataboutery [11]. Such a trick is employed by a debater to accuse their opponents of hypocrisy – “you accuse us of a bad deed, but what about your bad deeds?” This stratagem is similar to the false equivalence fallacy, but it adds an accusation of inconsistency against the opponent. Through this means, the balance of the debate is supposed to be shifted and the original argument seemingly doesn’t have to be disproved. In a way, it is a stratagem similar to the ad hominem fallacy, which was discussed in this article.

Whataboutism is primarily used in a political context but it also appears in other types of dispute. For example, it is typically employed by theologians in debates against Darwinians when they want to discredit secular approaches to morality. Confronted with the notion that morality is a human concern and is not determined by supernatural sources, religious apologists “fight back with examples of atheist tyrants (Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot)” [12], insinuating that being a despot stems from godless beliefs. While it is true that many totalitarian regimes were strictly opposed to religion, this stratagem usually fails because dictators and tyrants do not adhere to the notions of human secularism but rather to their personal profit and irrational perception of life. Moreover, many of them believe themselves to be “saviors” [13], divine agents [14], or show other indications of having a strong devotion to superstition or religion [15]. Still, a careless audience may fall victim to such a kind of trickery, especially because the historical characters mentioned can evoke powerful negative emotions.

Conclusion

A skeptic should always be aware of various stratagems in order to be able to properly filter the abundance of information, especially in the time of war, which translates into intensified propaganda and opinion-making ruses. One of the main goals of debaters using the false equivalence fallacy is to divert public attention away from inconvenient facts, such as crimes. It is therefore one of the preferred tools of propagandists and wrongdoers in their effort to justify their disputable actions. Fortunately, the failed logic of some of the arguments can be dispelled through skepticism.

References:

  1. https://spectatorworld.com/topic/ukraine-invasion-first-social-media-war-volodymyr-zelensky/
  2. https://www.channel4.com/news/russian-actions-in-ukraine-are-no-worse-than-america-in-iraq-moscow-academic-says
  3. https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/nea/rls/19675.htm
  4. https://www.hrw.org/reports/1992/Iraq926.htm
  5. https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/europe-and-central-asia/ukraine/report-ukraine/
  6. Hitchens, Christopher (2007). “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”. New York, NY: Twelve Books. p. 150. ISBN 978-1843545743.
  7. https://english.pravda.ru/news/hotspots/144872-navalny_poisoned/
  8. https://english.pravda.ru/news/russia/145545-navalny_arrested/
  9. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saddam-Hussein
  10. https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/whataboutism-origin-meaning
  11. https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/american/whataboutery
  12. https://www.lumenchristi.org/news/2015/05/debunking-arguments-of-new-atheists
  13. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/hitler-created-fictional-persona-to-recast-himself-as-germanys-savior-180967790/
  14. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11388628
  15. https://richarddawkins.net/2014/10/the-atheist-atrocities-fallacy-hitler-stalin-pol-pot/