“How to lose me in the first two sentences of your column on Afghanistan,” by Fareed Zakaria:
It is time to get real about Afghanistan. Withdrawal is not a serious option.
There is that “serious” word, again. I wouldn’t put myself in the “get out now” camp, but every “serious” person I know is seriously considering that option. In logic, Zakaria has committed the cardinal sin we call begging the question. To make this clear, we might pose a question:
Despite the massive investment the United States, NATO, the European Union and others have made in stabilizing Afghanistan over the past eight years, should they abandon it because the Taliban is proving a tougher foe than anticipated?
To which, Zakaria responds:
The United States, NATO, the European Union and others have invested massively in stabilizing that country over the past eight years, and they should not abandon it because the Taliban is proving a tougher foe than anticipated.
You hear people misuse the term ‘begging the question’ all the time. They use to it convey the idea that a certain piece of information calls for some additional information. For example, you might say that all the clogged traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway begs the question of whether or not another lane can be built to ease congestion. That usage is becoming so commonplace as to be accepted, but it’s wrong. Begging the question literally means something more like: rather than answering the question, you appealed to me to accept the question as settled. So, if I ask you whether God exists, you tell me that God exists because the Bible says that He exists. If I ask you if it is wise to leave Afghanistan despite all we have invested there, you tell me we must stay because of all we have invested there.
Once you beg the question in the first sentences of your essay, I know that you are making a fallacious argument. Why should I read on? But I did read on, until I came to this bit of advice:
Buying, renting or bribing Pashtun tribes should become the centerpiece of America’s stabilization strategy, as it was Britain’s when it ruled Afghanistan.
That worked out so well for the British, that we undoubtedly should prove our seriousness by giving it a second try.
[In 1842] more than 16,000 people had set out on the retreat from Kabul, and in the end only one man, Dr. William Brydon, a British Army surgeon, had made it alive to Jalalabad. The garrison there lit signal fires and sounded bugles to guide other British survivors to safety, but after several days they realized that Brydon would be the only one. It was believed the Afghans let him live so he could tell the grisly story.
If Zakaria cannot hear the echoes of Gandamak, I wonder if he can hear the echoes of the Kennedy administration’s 1963 debate over the fate of Ngo Dinh Diem.
U.S. officials should stop trashing Karzai. We have no alternative. Afghanistan needs a Pashtun leader; Karzai is a reasonably supportive one. Let’s assume the charges of corruption and vote rigging against him are true. Does anyone really think his successor would be any more honest and efficient?
It’s precisely because Karzai’s government is incompetent and corrupt, and because no alternative government is likely to be notably better, that ‘serious’ people are asking whether it might not be best to get out of the occupation business.
Yet, for all Zakaria’s lack of sense of historical irony, his recommendations are probably more sensible than a simple escalation of troops with no exit strategy.
Ignore history, individually or collectively, and you will pay the penalty, individually or collectively. Experts like Zakaria sure know the way to demolish an empire. Why do they hate America so?
This is not begging the question without the circular reference that is noted in your link – this is simply asserting a source that you do not accept as authoritative in and of itself.
yes. The idea is that your premise includes or assumes your conclusion. If you argue that God exists because your neighbor George said he met him on the road to the Pathmark, that’s appealing to flimsy authority. Appealing to the Bible is different. The Bible isn’t written by God in the same was as the Koran is considered to be, but it isn’t supposed to have any typos, if you know what I mean. If you examine the reasoning behind the premise that God must exist because it says so in the Bible, you’ll find another premise that the Bible is infallible, and another that God wouldn’t permit to contain errors. Thus, the circular logic is implied in this case in a way that it wouldn’t be if citing an article from Scientific American or even People Magazine.
But it’s not begging the question to assert that God exists because the Bible says that God exists – that’s simply a premise in an argument. The argument becomes begging the question when the next question is asked – “Why does it matter that the Bible says so?” and it is answered with “Because God wrote it” – those two premises, taken together, create a circular argument and is indeed logically falacious. There’s a difference between a factually errant argument and a logically fallacious argument.
Of course, I do indeed believe that God exists, and for me it is based on the testimony of Jesus.
That’s the same as saying because the Bible says so.
I appreciate that you have Faith, but it is Faith, not logic.
How so?
right, but when you do a problem in symbolic logic, all the premises have to be true, and you don’t get to ask why.
So, appealing to the authority of the Bible requires a premise that the Bible is authoritative, and that (when concerned the question of God’s existence) is implied confirmation of the conclusion.
The premise does not require that the Bible be authoritative – it requires that the Bible be accurate regarding the premise that it is supposed to support (I’m assuming that you’re not equating authoritative with accurate). Did George Washington exist? We have written record that he did. Is that record authoritative? Maybe, maybe not, but the only relevant question is whether or not it is accurate regarding the existence of George Washington. How do we know whether or not it is accurate? There are many ways to get at verifying the claims of a historical record – and some claims that can not be verified or denied with any degree of certainty – but that does not affect the validity of the argument, only its soundness. It is not logically fallacious, but if the Biblical record is not accepted as being true then the argument is not sound so long as the Biblical premise stands on its own as part of the argument.
You can have a valid premise that God is a character in the Bible. But such a premise cannot support the conclusion that God exists anymore than the valid premise that Alyosha Karamazov is a character in The Brothers Karamazov can be used to prove his existence.
You don’t have to include a second premise that the Bible is true to make the argument circular, because that is implied. Without the second premise it is the argument that it is invalid because the premise could be true without the conclusion being true. That’s the definition of an invalid argument, actually.
What you’re doing from a logically point of view is appealing to authority. Some trusted source says that x is the case. It is a form of begging the question because it can shown that your argument attempts to prove the conclusion that God exists by using a premise that merely asserts that He exists.
The difference is that The Brothers Karamazov does not assert that Alyosha is a real person; the Bible makes that claim about God, much like Team of Rivals asserts that Abraham Lincoln is a real person. Referring to the work that makes the assertion does not make an argument circular unless one says that Abraham Lincoln’s existence is proven simply because Team of Rivals says that Abraham Lincoln exists. Team of Rivals’ assertion can be part of a valid argument for the existence of Abraham Lincoln, but unless one accepts the authority of Team Of Rivals the book will only be part of the argument and not the argument in toto.
And to be clear, I have expressly avoided appealing to the authority of the Bible – I’m not really making an argument at all, so much as making the point that to beg the question you have to have a premise that presumes or is dependent upon the conclusion being true. Going back to your link this is begging the question:
This is not begging the question:
FWIW, it can not be proven that God exists in the same way that it can not be proven that other minds exists…
The problem is that no matter how well preserved the documents of the New Testament are, the character of God in those texts is not a human being that can be said to have existed. You might seek to prove the existence of St. Paul that way, but it doesn’t work with God.
Most efforts to prove the existence of God rely on causation, in that we are unfamiliar with uncreated things in our normal experience. Something as complex as the universe, or a biological cell, are not known to come into existence without some intelligent design. These arguments, too, ultimately fail the test because they can be demonstrated to beg the question.
But they are significantly stronger than arguments from authority.
My example with Aloysha is actually on point. Dostoyevsky never said (as far as I know) that the Brothers Karamazov were purely fictional characters. For all we know, he based the novel on real people. Someone might assert that Aloysha was a real person and use his existence in a book to prove it. The argument would obviously fail, but for the exact same reason that God’s presence in the Bible fails as proof of His existence.
It all comes back to the assertion that someone authoritative asserted that x is the case. In the case of Abraham Lincoln, you would not seek to prove his existence that way. You’d provide a copy of his birth certificate, photographs of him in the White House, etc.
There is another fallacy in the begging of the question.
It is the fallacy of sunk costs. That fallacy argues that if we are in a failing venture, we must double down in order to justify the previously sunk costs. When it is put that way, doubling down risks making it a doubly failing venture as many corporations have learned to their sorrow and as the US learned in Vietnam.
It always just blows me away to see “serious” people marketing the mantra of the addicted gambler as a policy justification. Without this kind of thinking the casinos would have followed the rest of the economy into the toilet.
Isn’t there a meta-begging of the question lurking behind the whole Afghanistan discussion? It’s taken for granted that a stable regime is essential to American/world security. Assuming it’s true that Sept 11 and other criminal/terrorist plots were hatched there under protection of the Taliban, does it follow that it continues to be a necessary cause of further crimes? Strikes me that the whole set of assumptions is kind of like burning down the house where the murders took place because we feel that it’s impregnated with “evil”.
In other words, is the Afghanistan push much more than a feel-good exercise in pretending that we’ll get terrorism “under control” by destroying its supposed lair? As far as anyone’s reported, Afghanistan has neither massive weaponry nor aggressive territorial ambitions. Is it gross naivete to wonder whether, left to their own devices (leavened with significant economic aid), the Afghanis would take care of the Taliban in their own way, once they were no longer driven into its arms by the international “peace force”? By all accounts the Taliban is not a popular favorite there.
Is it possible that the country would resplit into something like its pre-imperialist configuration? Most likely. Is that really any of our business?
Of course Zakaria ignores an even more pressing question: Does the present military operation really have much to do with international crime/terrorism at all? Or is it really about oil, gas, and opium? The latter has become much more prominent in discussions of the “war”. It looks to me like the US is ready to destroy Afghanistan like it is destroying northern Mexico simply by making our massive appetite for arbitrarily illegal drugs somebody else’s problem. Investments by definition are meant to have a payoff. It’s their reason for being. Until the invasion’s proponents can define what that payoff is supposed to be, nothing else they have to say is worth the electrons it takes to spew it.
Our primary objective is to convince the people of Afghanistan that the prosperity that democracy delivers is so much better than the poverty of their Taliban-riddled hellhole today, and we are doing that by propping up the dictatorship of the warlords?