Positive Liberty

I’m dismayed that my colleague Sandefur would yet again endorse bringing up al Qaeda as a way of dodging the subject of prisoner mistreatment in American-run facilities. Declaring al Qaeda atrocities to be worse than our own is a classic logical fallacy — the red herring:

A “red herring” argument is one which distracts the audience from the issue in question through the introduction of some irrelevancy. This frequently occurs during debates when there is an at least implicit topic, yet it is easy to lose track of it. By extension, it applies to any argument in which the premises are logically irrelevant to the conclusion.

My thesis is that American treatment of prisoners in recent years has been a serious departure from previous American policy, and that it has very often been cruel, degrading, illegal, and immoral.

Thomas Friedman’s answer to this is simply to say that Osama bin Laden is a very bad person. I am aware of this fact, and I agree with it. Yet it doesn’t at any point come into contact with the thesis at hand.

Note that we could easily apply Friedman’s logic not to exonerate the United States, but to exonerate bin Laden himself. (This should be a clue, by the way, that the logic is faulty.) Here are Friedman’s words, with a few simple substitutions:

Dive into a conversation about America in the Arab world today, or even in Europe and Africa, and it won’t take 30 seconds before the words “September 11” and “July 7” are thrown at you. Yes, both are shameful, but September 11 was a day at the beach compared to what Hitler and his Nazi German supporters did to the Jews…

All true statements. Yet the culpability remains for each of the parties involved. When an argument can make even Osama bin Laden look good, something has gone very wrong. And likewise if it can make Abu Ghraib look good.

Friedman is so taken by his red herring that he even follows it out into some strange parallel universe, one in which Osama bin Laden makes us do bad things, presumably with some sort of mind control ray:

Bin Laden has created a situation in which the U.S. occupation in Iraq is viewed as entirely “illegitimate” and therefore any violence there by Sunni jihadists against Americans or Iraqi civilians is considered entirely legitimate “resistance.”

Who made the U.S. occupation seem illegitimate? Who did this? It wasn’t bin Laden. We did it.

I know, I know, I’ll be accused of moral equivalence. The accusation doesn’t stick: Bin Laden is worse. All I’m saying is that his evil doesn’t give us a license to do lesser evils. And if this is moral equivalence, it’s far better, I think, than the moral relativism which holds that a little evil is just fine, as long as it’s not a bigger evil.

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