So I was having a discussion where I said that what somebody else was arguing was just a variety of special pleading. I think I was right, but maybe everyone doesn’t agree… And then I thought of asking all the smart people on this board!
When everyone else engages in a certain behavior, it’s wrong; but when Person XYZ does it, then it’s not wrong, or an exception should be made for them just because they ARE Person XYZ.
What I argued was basically that XYZ was being blamed for behaving a certain way when everyone else in the same situation is doing exactly the same thing, and their behavior was okay. But somehow different standards “should” be applied to XYZ, so XYZ is considered wrong for doing the same thing.
I can lay out the exact discussion if anyone wants… but in essence, is this another type of special pleading? Or is it something else?
Back in 1979, after the Iranian revolutionaries seized the U.S. Embassy, an Iranian person was arrested and charged with shoplifting, for having snapped off three grapes from the produce bin in a supermarket.
The judge noted that lots of other people do this and aren’t charged with shoplifting, but only this one Iranian person was. The judge dismissed the charge.
The store management, the police, and the prosecutor were engaged in “special pleading” – i.e., treating the Iranian differently than they would treat others. A law that others regularly break with impunity was suddenly being enforced strictly against someone for what very much appeared to be nationalistic purposes. The judge was right in exposing this as hypocritical.
What you describe sounds like special pleading, but since you already think it’s special pleading, you’re probably going to generalize it that way. I would suggest giving us the full story with names changed. If you know why others don’t think it was special pleading, that would be valuable, too.
Things that seem like special pleading can in fact not be. For example, there are some posters that are judged more harshly by the mods on this board than others. Multiple posters can do the exact same actions, but only one gets a Warning. But it then turns out the reason is because that poster has a history of such actions.
My point is, are you sure it’s because it’s person XYZ, and not because Person XYZ has a history of bad actions? Or because XYZ is in higher position of authority or has been there longer? It’s only special pleading if there’s no actual reason to have different standards.
Okay, it’s a long story, but here’s basically what happened… there’s an investor board for a company; we’ll call it Extremely Interesting Enterprises (stock symbol EIEE.) Some investors are getting very impatient because they’ve been waiting so long for the company to accomplish their goals. A vote is coming up where stockholders are going to vote for or against a few things, including issuing more shares. Some are arguing that more dilution has to happen if we’re going to get anywhere and that we’re very close to our goal; some are just getting really impatient and not being too rational, IMHO.
So the impatient ones are basically saying that EIEE deserves criticism because of certain actions they’ve taken-- announcing the benefits packages for corporate officers, for example. I think that some people have expected too much, such as thinking that when EIEE clearly said they were making “forward-looking statements”, those should have been taken as promises. Some others think that the article about the key study should have already been out in the NEJM because the chief science officer said it was coming “soon.”
So… my argument was that all corporations do the same thing. And if it’s wrong for one to announce how much money everyone is making and how many stock options they have, or to not treat forward looking statements like legal promises, then all companies should be judged the same way. I think I would say that some are doing this because they had unrealistic expectations to begin with about how fast the company’s work would happen. So that’s it!
That starts to sound like tu quoqueto me. In other words, your interlocutor is saying that EIEE’s actions are detrimental. You say that everyone does the same thing. That does not really address the issue of whether or not the actions are detrimental.
I don’t know, but that’s an interesting question; let’s go through it… The fact that EIEE announced the stock packages of their corporate officials doesn’t have any actual effect on anything. They’re the same as what you’d expect from any company. People are irritated about the fact that these were announced before any announcement related to what* they *wanted to hear (the journal article being out, etc.) So I don’t think it could be said that the stock announcement part was detrimental… except that it didn’t make some investors feel very good. It just wasn’t what they wanted to hear.
Now, the thing with the forward-looking statements issue is that, IMHO, some people wanted those to be the same thing as legally binding statements about what was going to happen and when. But they’re not, which is why all companies have a disclaimer (Here’s an example from a totally different company. So I think that might be more a matter of… “that’s what the law is, but you were expecting something that is not required by law.”
I guess you could make an argument that EIEE might have been better off NOT making some of those forward looking statements in the past, but I don’t think I would apply that to the “journal article is coming out soon” statement that the CSO made. “Soon” isn’t a precise term, and it isn’t expected to be when it’s used in other contexts, but because some investors wanted it to mean “tomorrow” and it didn’t, they’re not happy with what “soon” actually means.
So… what I said on that board is that the real problem is… people aren’t hearing what they want to hear right now, and that’s why all of these other things are being dragged up. That’s what I’d argue, anyway.
Never mind. We all found out today that the article is about to be published in the Lancet, and all of the complaining mysteriously stopped. That HAS to be a very special logical fallacy of its own!
And then I thought of asking all the smart people on this board!
That HAS to be a very special logical fallacy of its own!