Fool always utters a word when a word would not do By Prof Dr Sohail Ansari & THE PARADIGM LEADS TO BAD REASONING By JANICE MOULTON

·         A wise man never utters a word when no word would do; but with a fool it’s the exact opposite.

People who build their arguments upon falsehood expose themselves to the wrath of Allah The Exalted. The Prophet   said: “If a person engages in a dispute based on falsehood while he knows that it is falsehood, he incurs the wrath of Allah on himself until he stops.” [Abu Dawood, Al-Albani - Saheeh]

THE PARADIGM LEADS TO BAD REASONING.

It has mistakenly been assumed that whatever reasoning an adversary would accept would be adequate reasoning for all other circumstances as well. The Adversary Paradigm accepts only the kind of reasoning whose goal is to convince an opponent, and ignores reasoning that might be used in other circumstances: To figure something out for oneself, to discuss something with like-minded thinkers, to convince the indifferent or the uncommitted. The relations of ideas used to arrive at a conclusion might very well be different from the relations of ideas needed to defend it to an adversary. And it is not just less reasoning, or fewer steps in the argument that distinguishes the relations of ideas, but that they must be, in some cases, quite different lines of thought. In illustration, let us consider the counterexample reasoning that is so effective in defending one’s conclusions against an adversary. When an adversary focusses on certain features of a problem, one can use those features to construct a counterexample. To construct a counterexample, one needs to abstract the essential features of the problem and find another example, an analogy, that has those features but which is different enough and clear enough to be considered dispassionately apart from the issue in question. The analogy must be able to show that the alleged effect of the essential features does not follow. But in order to reach a conclusion about moral issues or scientific theories or aesthetic judgments, one may have to consider all the important features and their interactions. And to construct an analogy with all the features and their interactions, which is not part of the issue in question, may well be impossible. Any example with all the features that are important may just be another example of the problem at issue. If we construct an analogy using only some of the important features, or ignoring their interactions, a decision based on this could be bad reasoning. It would ignore important aspects of the problem. Consider a work in the Adversary Paradigm, Judith Thomson’s excellent ‘A Defense of Abortion’. Thomson says: All right, let’s give the “right to lifers” all their premises. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that a fetus is a person, and even that it is a talented person. And then she shows by counterexample that it does not follow that the fetus has a right to life. Suppose that you woke up one morning and found that you were connected to a talented violinist (because he had a rare kidney disease and only you had the right blood type) and the Music Lover’s Society had plugged you together. When you protested, they said, “Don’t worry, it’s only for nine months, and then he’ll he cured. And you can’t unplug him because now that the connection has been made, he will die if you do.” Now, Thomson says to the right-to-lifers, surely you have the right to unplug yourself. If the time were shorter than nine months, say only nine minutes, you might be an awful person if you did not stay plugged in, but even then you have the right to do what you want with your body. The violinist analogy makes the main point, and Thomson explains it by comparing the right to one’s own body to the right to property (a right that the right-to-lifers are unlikely to deny). One’s right to property does not stop because some other person needs it, even if they need it to stay alive. The argument using a counterexample is as effective against adversaries as any argument could be, and therefore a good method for arguing within the adversary tradition. One uses the premises the adversary would accept – property rights, the fetus as a person – and shows that the conclusion – that “unplugging” yourself from the fetus is wrong – does not follow. In general, in order to handle adversaries one may abstract the features they claim to be important, and construct a counterexample which has those same features but in which the conclusion they claim does not hold. All Thomson tried to show was that abortion would not be wrong just because the fetus were a person. She did not show that abortion would, or would not, be wrong. There are many features beside personhood that are important to the people making a decision about abortion: That it is the result of sexual intercourse so that guilt, atonement or loyalty about the consequences may be appropriate; that the effects only occur to women, helping to keep a power-minority in a powerless position; that the developing embryo may be genetically like others who are loved; that the product would be a helpless infant brought into an unmanageable situation; that such a birth would bring shame or hardship to others. There are many questions connected to whole systems of ideas that need answers when abortion is a personal issue: What responsibility does one have to prevent shame and hardship to others – parents, friends, other children, future friends and future children? When do duties toward friends override duties of other sorts? How is being a decent person related to avoiding morally intolerable situations – dependence, hate, resentment, lying? There is a lot of very serious moral reasoning that goes on when an individual has to make a decision about abortion, and the decisions made are enormously varied. But this moral reasoning has largely been ignored by philosophers because it is different.