We’ve all heard of stories where someone says something to the effect of "Well, if _________ hadn’t happened, then I never would have _________. The first blank is filled in with a bad thing and the second with a good thing. The implication is that the first thing seemed bad at the time but everything turned out all right so the first thing wasn’t bad after all. Is this a logical fallacy?
The first thing that popped into my mind was the creation of Israel. I can’t imagine too many people who would consider the holocaust a good thing.
Wow, Godwinized by reply #1!
Its more of an ‘Ends Justify the Means’ mentallity - IMHO
I would say no because its subjective, “worth the trouble” is subject to way too many variables whereas a logical fallacy always has a problem.
It’s not a fallacy, it’s a value judgment, and hence subjective.
"If I hadn’t been fired from my last job, I never would have moved to this state and I never would have won $10 million in the local lottery.
That’s a perfectly valid and logical argument based upon a value judgement. The stress of losing my job was more than balanced by the benefits of winning $10 million. Everything worked out for the best. My life is better because I was fired.
Now what if all I achieved by moving was winning $50, 000 in a local lottery? What about $5, 000? $500? Is it still for the best? Maybe. It’s entirely a value judgement. It isn’t logically invalid to make such an argument, it’s just very subjective.
What I get from the OP is the question of if the bad really was what caused the good to happen, a question of causality, which in some cases are valid, but that is a different type of error and it is a error in itself to equate bad bringing about good as equivalent to causality.
Mary Higgins Clark’s mystery “Where Are The Children?” At the end, the psychiatrist thinks
[spoiler]If I had gone to Nancy after her mother’s death, I would have realized something was wrong with her fiance and gotton her away from him. But then she wouldn’t be sitting here with her husband and children.
The thought that Nancy’s first husband was a pedophile who kept her drugged, raped their four year old daughter, killed their two children and framed Nancy for it, so she had to go to prison and face a humiliating public trial, faked his own suicide, followed her cross country, kidnapped, rad and killed some more children, and later kidnapped the children of her second marriage, intending to rape her three year old daughter and kill both of the children apparently never enters the shrink’s mind[/spoiler]
Baring the causality error possibility, in other words Bad X actually produced Good Y, you can bundle both together (X+Y) = Z as X and Y have to occur together, and make a value judgement on the outcome Z.
Example:
X=bad = Person intentionally cut another person open with a blade, slicing tendons muscles and nerves.
Y = good = Because of the above the ability to walk was restored
X+Y = Z = good = The operation was a success and the patient can walk today.
I suppose I thought it might be a fallacy because people couch their sayings in terms of how great life is now after something bad happened even though they have no idea how their life would be if the bad thing had never happened.
We could call it Kruk’s Law. When John Kruk was hit in the groin by a pickoff throw and was rolling around on the ground I’m sure he didn’t think what a lucky event it was, but the medical treatment after the injury is what led to an early diagnoses of his testicular cancer and may have saved his life.
There’s two fallacies involved. One is the assumption that one cause has one effect. The reality is that an event has multiple effects, good and bad. You can’t isolate one good effect and therefore declare that the event was good. To use the Godwin example, the fact that Raiders of the Lost Ark was a good movie doesn’t mean that the existence of Nazi Germany was a good event; the other effects of Nazism make it a bad event overall.
The second fallacy is that it ignores probabilities. If I shoot a gun randomly up into the air and the bullet happens to come down to earth and kill a terrorist who was on his way to blow up a school building, then my action had a good result. But that doesn’t mean shooting a gun randomly into the air is a good thing to do because it could just as easily have killed an innocent person or had some other bad effect.
There’s possibly also a fallacy of induction or generalisation - bad thing X led to good thing Y therefore (the unspoken assumption that) bad things are just a necessary step towards good ones.
I would call the logical fallacy confirmation bias.
Most people believe in the Biblical idea that “all things work to the good for those who believe” - even people who don’t believe in the Bible generally have some formulation of that idea such as “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
So you take a bad thing with an eventual good thing and use it as confirmation of what you already believed, ignoring all of the examples of good things followed by bad things and ignoring the possibility that the events are totally unrelated.
It’s definitely a fallacy, but I’m not sure what formal name to give it.
A major example, from my own life: If the Soviet Union had not crushed the Hungarians in the 1956 uprising, then my mother would not have met my father (the details are unimportant), and hence I would never have been born. Strictly on a personal basis, I consider having been born to be a good thing, but that doesn’t change my opinion that the Soviet action was a bad thing.
I do not consider this to be an example of a logical fallacy. It is a philosophical evaluation. The philosohy described by “the ends justify the means” is consequentialism, or utilitarianism, in which the end result of an action is the best way to value it.
There is no general answer to this. It depends a great deal on what the specific good and bad things are, how good and bad they are relative to one another (which may depend on subjective value judgments) and on whether (or to what degree) the bad thing was causally necessary in order for the good to happen.
Well, ain’t that a kick in the nuts.
I was going to give the example of what if Adolf Hitler had a child who had invented the cure for cancer, but found the thread had already been Godwinized, and therefore decided not to. Kind of.
The only logical fallacy that I might see is that you haven’t really described a criterion for determining how x or y are good or not. It can easily come to pass that x is good for reason a and bad for reason b. It’s like saying that blue is a color in one sentence and sad in the next.
In fact, there’s a whole system of moral philosophy devoted to “if thing x leads to good thing y, then x was good”, called consequentialism. Here though, you can’t generally say before you know y if x was in fact good or not. For more info, check here: Consequentialism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
Applying this thinking to morality is one of the major fundamental questions of ethics, and is the crux of the argument between consequentialists (ie an action is “good” because of good effects) and deontologists (ie an action is good because it’s the Right Thing to Do).
A similar thing happened to my dad. He had an intussusception, blocking his intestine. It was a terrible thing, he got horribly ill and required abdominal surgery, where they found evidence of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I’m pretty sure, if he didn’t have this emergency surgery, the cancer would have gone on for quite a while before being detected, and he’d likely have died from it.
A fallacy would be to suggest that intussusceptions are good things. They are not, but every event in our lives changes our future, and sometimes bad things set us up for a better future.