One of the arguments I find the most irritatingly obtuse litters public comment - letters to editors, public posts, comment streams. The general form is "Why is [person, group or government body] wasting money on [some reported effort or plan] when [something else needs attention/hasn’t been done/is their real task/etc.]?"
You know - “Why are police arresting jaywalkers or hookers instead of concentrating on real crime?” “Why is the town replacing sewer lines when schools need textbooks?” “Why is the city building a new convention center when so many people are homeless?” - on and on, implying that absolutely nothing is worth spending time or money on until that one problem is addressed. (It’s usually coupled to people who think only the problem immediately affecting them is worth attention, but general do-gooders, anti-taxers and gummint-haters get their say as well.)
Is there an established term for this class of argument?
That may be closest in formal terms. What I was thinking of seems to be a narrow subset of it, though. Not “we can do schools or roads” but “until they fix my street, the town shouldn’t spend money on anything else.” More of a… unotomy?
In Ohio, a large operation was conducted a couple of years ago by law enforcement to stamp out the vice of…get this…cock fighting! I was completely outraged at this enormous waste of taxpayer money. They’re chickens! We eat them, millions of them, every day! How utterly stupid and pointless! And yes, it does divert manpower and money that could be put to far better use.
Someone decides whether to pursue such ‘criminals’. It costs money and takes manpower from other far more important matters. I am strongly in support of *not *enforcing such ridiculous laws, though I have no interest in cock-fighting and would never go to see one. I have written letters to the editor about this and they have been published. It is among the most absurd ideas I have ever heard. Anything and everything is more important than fighting the ‘menace’ of cock-fighting. What an enormously stupid waste of taxpayer money. Shall we arrest Colonel Sanders?
All of your examples are pretty weak. Government budgets, police working hours, etc. are in fact limited in the real world - every decision to direct such resources in one place is a decision not to use them on something else. Maybe a better example is “how can you waste time complaining about a movie you didn’t like when there are people dying from the effects of climate change” where the two things have nothing to do with each other and one can in fact worry about both with no drag on the ability to influence either.
A more insidious form of “only one thing matters” came to mind for me.
It’s not exactly the same thing, but in the years since this thread was created, I’ve seen a lot of arguments along the lines of “I don’t care if the president craps on the rights of minorities and uses the constitution as toilet paper, as long as the stock market is doing well.”
6 years old, but the guy who thinks it’s absurd to ban cock fighting because we eat chicken? To the point where he has written letters to newspapers about how we should not outlaw it, because it’s a waste of resources to ban it? I find it mindboggling that someone could be so ignorant and thoughtless that they don’t consider that quality of life matters for animals, that animals feel pain.
If he did, that’s exactly the problem laid out in the OP. Torturing chickens is a bad thing that we should devote a certain amount of resources to stop. Not 30% of the police budget, but something. We are not forced to choose between allowing people to torture chickens or torture humans.
Well, I would see it differently. As long as one child goes hungry, we should not be spending money on stopping chicken fighting.
Sure, you can take money from the “making sure children have enough to eat” budget and use it for the “stopping chicken fighting” budget, but I would rather you didn’t.
Okay, so “one child going hungry” is the thing you choose as the apex of your priority list, that’s fine. But then why are we spending money on anything else? Surely everything else is at least somewhat less important. So by your reasoning, we should not be building roads, we should not be spending money on the military. Why pick on a cock fighting ban specifically as the one thing that we shouldn’t do at all because it’s less important than the absolute highest priority item?
You are a perfect example of the false dichotomy fallacy laid out in the O.P. Take any issue that you oppose or don’t give a shit about, and you can argue that we should not do it because it means we feed one less starving child.
Why are you posting on the internet when you could be out raising money for starving children? What have you spent money on in the last week? Was every single thing more important than buying food for starving children?
Building roads and providing a military helps humanity. I’m not sure when the last chicken was looking for a non-crumbling road to cross.
Why are you posting on the internet when you could be out raising money for starving children? What have you spent money on in the last week? Was it all more important than buying food for starving children?
No it wasn’t. That’s a moral failing I live with every day.
But it’s not feeding starving children, is it? So clearly the false dichotomy you presented comparing [resource expenditure for things you don’t give a shit about] to [feeding starving children] as though it’s an either/or proposition was precisely the type of bogus argument that the OP was all about.