Many years ago, I read a rather weird fiction novel.
Part of it involved a judge sentencing a man to to death for “murder.” The man had verbally harassed and bullied his wife for years, and the wife committed suicide.
The judge’s logic was as follows: “Because you bullied your wife, you caused her death. Because you caused her death, you are therefore guilty of murder. Because you are guilty of murder, the lawful punishment is therefore death. Therefore, I hereby sentence you to death.”
In each individual segment, the logic is 50% accurate - and the end result is that you end up with an end result that is far from the original statement - people might agree with each individual segment, but not when they are all chained together (verbal bullying = death sentence.)
An underlying concept is transitivity (vs intransitivity) in propositional logic.
Transitivity:
if (A implies B) and (B implies C) then (A implies C)
Here of course you’re not talking about strict implication, so it’s not a strict logical relation. They are not really probabilities either, so I don’t know what to call it. Your expression “inflationary logic” seems like a pretty good description for what’s going on. As a biologist, I kind of like calling it “ring species logic”. Each proposition seems compatible with its immediate partner, but as the distance between the first and last propositions increases they eventually become incompatible.
The error of course is conflating “A contributes partly towards B” with “A causes B” with “Your particular instance of A absolutely positively caused that particular instance of B”.
Using this technique with enough skilled rhetorical sleight of hand one can prove that darn near anything causes darn near anything else. This is a favorite tool of propagandists since forever.
The problem in the chain of statements in the OP is that « cause » is being used with different meanings.
In particular, legal causation in the second sentence is generally much narrower than the more general common meaning. « Causation » in the context of homicide normally means an unlawful act that poses a clear risk of physical harm. Bullying may not rise to that level, and the individual’s decision to commit suicide likely cannot be attributed to the husband’s legal responsibility.
Then there’s the assumption that causing death is automatically murder. That’s not correct. A person can cause another person’s death and it may not amount to murder, and may not even trigger criminal liability at all. Motor vehicle collisions where someone is killed may have been caused by the other driver’s carelessness, but that doesn’t automatically mean murder. Even intentional killings may not be murder, such as self-defence.
Of course, this is a fictional example, and maybe in the legal system of the novel « cause » does have this broader meaning and any death caused under this broader meaning is murder, in that fictional legal system.
Reminds me a bit of how wealthy families maintain control of large corporations while still getting most of the funding advantages of publically traded stock.
You sell 49% of the company to the public, keeping 51% for yourself. Then create a holding company to hold that 51%. Then sell 49% of the holding company to the public and keep 51% of the holding company for yourself. Then create another holding company to hold that 51% of 51%. Then sell 49% of that to the pulic.
After 3 iterations you totally control the pyramid despite owning roughly half of half of half = 1 eighth of the whole thing.
The OP’s logic chain is similar, where each stage amplifies reality for the next.
In law, you have to establish proximate cause. Something like bullying would usually be too remote to be considered a proximate cause of one’s death (although I’m remembering that there is a recent case of a girl tried for encouraging a guy to commit suicide),
A person trying to make remote connections is, perhaps, “grasping at straws”.
The judge’s statement can’t be properly parsed if it is taken out of context.
Normally, judges cannot simply offhandedly declare a person guilty of murder. Wouldn’t there have been an arrest, a declaration of charges from the state (the prosecution), and a trial (a bench trial or a jury determining whether the defendant is guilty of the exact charges)?
The passage sounds more like the judge summarizing a procedure that has already been concluded. It’s put dramatically, but if the defendant was found legally guilty of murder and murder carries the death penalty then no chain of logic exists beyond “this is what the law states.”
Of course, as a work of fiction set in who knows what legal jurisdiction, maybe none of things are true. If it’s a description of a legal conviction, though, every statement is 100% true, not 50%.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
Yep. Most of the great family fortunes in Europe are set up exactly like that. With dozens of layers of overlapping holding companies. All to ensure the family keeps control even though they own a tiny fraction of the whole. If you do the various classes of shares correctly you can even funnel dividends preferentially to the originating family. Although that does relatively depress the stock price of the dividend-lite shares.
It’s not quite as common in the USA, but it still gets done some. The arrangement of Google / Meta is one example of multiple share classes to benefit the founders, although not (AFAIK) of layered holding companies.
It’s legal, but you need to find investors that are willing to buy shares in a 49% share of a 49% of a 49% share in a company that does actual business (as opposed to shares directly in the company that does business). At each layer of holding companies, the attractiveness of shares to investors diminishes. AIUI, multi-layered holding structures are often motivated just as much, if not more, by tax considerations (shifting profits to tax-efficient jurisdictions via dividends) rather than considerations to bring in outside capital.
But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn’t this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg - isn’t this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we’re not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!
