No true Scotsman argument
From Hobson's Choice
A variety of tautology in which a particular virtue or vice is claimed to define the thing. It is sometimes described as an ad hoc fallacy, which simply means that the term is defined differently depending on circumstances. The term was coined by Antony Flew:[1]Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Press and Journal and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again." Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing." The next day he sits down to read his Press and Journal again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, "No true Scotsman would do such a thing."This is a fairly common form of argument.
Examples
The term is commonly used in the context of religious apologetics. For example, A argues for some special moral status of Christians. B points out that Christians have been guilty of many horrible crimes down the ages. A points out that those miscreants were not true Christians. While this quite possibly so, the problem arises in A's expectation that any putative Christian will nevertheless receive special moral authority. In other words, political officials will still tend to play up their "Christian" credentials rather than demonstrate their morality in some more reliably predictive way.[2]
The customary way of weaseling out of accusations of this sort is to point out that a real Christian would never do something like this, so none of these horrors were committed by real Christians. Of course, anyone who pulls this sort of argument should be slapped with a fish. It's utterly meaningless. You can easily apply it any situation you want -- a real man would never abandon his family; a real Communist would never suppress dissent; a real American would never start a war without a good reason, that drunkard is no son of mine -- and pretty soon, we've got a world full of horrible things that no one at all is responsible for.White's argument essentially reverses the logic of the "No true Scotsman" argument. While it's invalid to simply absolve a belief system by arbitrarily changing the definition to exclude people who behave badly, it's at least as invalid to promiscuously include every wrongdoer regardless of any standard.[3] Additionally, the problem White wants to solve—no one taking responsibility for wrongdoing—certainly isn't addressed by blaming this or that belief system. Just to demonstrate, White knows perfectly well that his examples of "Christian" massacres are disturbing to Christian readers; that's why he put them up. But why blame a person's belief system for outrages that same person is likely to abhor? If "ideologies have consequences," why is the one he's indicting for (say) the slave trade unlikely to defend the slave trade?
Matthew White, "Which Has Killed More People? Christianity? or Gun Control"
A more reasonable surmise is that people generally prefer to cover their actions in the cloak of virtue. Christianity, somehow, established a favorable moral image for a group of people, some of whom also massacred a lot of other people. What does that tell you about Christianity? Nothing, really. While reliable statistics aren't available, we can estimate that an enormous proportion of human-years for the entire human history were experienced by humans living in self-identified Christian milieux. This share is much less than a quarter, but probably more than any other belief system (or family of kindred belief systems).[4] The fact that Europeans have massacred more humans (European and not) than any other major category of people may reflect on some peculiar European propensity for barbarism, or it may reflect on a combination of historical accidents. In the Levant, indigenous Christianity was not involved in anything particularly scandalous until modern times; the Crusades, of course, were a Western European affair.
Notes
- ↑ Antony Flew, Thinking About Thinking – or do I sincerely want to be right?, Collins Fontana (1975). Via Wikipedia
- ↑ Another problem, of course, is that Christianity does not actually claim special moral superiority for its adherents—just forgiveness. See Romans 3, esp. 3:28; or I John 1, esp. 1:8-9
- ↑ To be fair to White, he also cites additional evidence, viz.,
Secondly, this argument is wrong because, well, the Bible says so. If you poke around a little, you easily find revered holy men launching wars of extermination (Numbers 31, Joshua 6, 8 and 11), sending death squads against religious dissidents (Exodus 32, 1 Kings 18, ) and generally behaving every bit as badly as Pinochet or Papa Doc. Even if good Christians try to ignore these bad bits of the Bible, evil Christians can still find plenty of encouragement for their misdeeds in holy scripture.
Unfortunately, this is a pretty common problem for all forms of fundamentalism. A strictly naturalistic doctrine leads to a comparable dilemma, since the extinction of species is part of nature's plan, and so on. I'm not saying White's wrong, just that this is a harder problem to avoid than one might suppose. Never mind the problem that anything sublime is also prone to being misread. - ↑ At the present time approximately one quarter of the human race self-identifies as Christian. The growth rate of Christianity is somewhat slower than that for Islam, and both have somewhat slower growth rates than Hinduism. However, it's doubtful that Christianity ever had a much larger share of adherents than 25% of the human race. Also, recall that the overwhelming weight of human-years is in recent times. See John Robert McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century, W. W. Norton & Company (2001), p.9, where it is mentioned that ABOUT 20% of all human-years have been lived since 1900.
James R MacLean (14:11, 16 November 2007 (PST))
