Original Position Fallacy

[Masterhawk]

The original position fallacy is when someone favors something that comes to the detriment of another, believing that they will benefit from it. Basically, it's a form of hypocrisy or argument from bad faith.

This is common among eugenicists, malthusians (the ones who want to kill people to reduce the population), and social darwinists. They want to kill all the bad people/genes to make the world a better place. One has to ask whether they would still favor such an ideology if they were on the receiving end of it. Social darwinists believe that the strong are more deserving than the weak. One guess as to which of the two make this argument.

A lot of socialists fall into this trap as well. They talk about neocolonialism and how the west is exploiting poorer nations for resources and labor. They presume that it's all by the global 1 percent which owns half of the world's wealth. What they might not know is that just by making minimum wage in the US and working full time for a full year, they already make more money than half of the world population. The global 1 percent consists of 76 million people and it consists of anyone who has at least $744,400 of total assets or makes $32,400. As you might imagine, a disproportionate amount of these people live in developed countries which is also where most breadtubers are from. Even though the US only holds 4% of the world's population, it holds nearly a quarter of its billionaires. By contrast, most people in extreme poverty live in Sub-Saharan Africa. What socialists seem to imply is that once their country becomes socialist, they should move production back to their country, send more foreign aid to develop those countries, and/or pay those workers more. One can presume that any one of these solutions will affect their paychecks in some way.

This can be applied to more moderate ideologies. Groups more likely to rely on welfare are more likely to vote Democrat because they're less likely to cut it while those who favor cutting welfare are less likely to be on it. Someone has to pay for these welfare programs but on the other hand, someone also benefits from it.

Government spending in general falls into this category. Most Americans believe that we need to cut government spending but support for cutting each individual program is quite a bit smaller. As a old person, you might favor cutting military spending, foreign aid, and welfare but God forbid someone lay a finger on your medicare or social security. People complain about the government not doing enough to help poor people. Then they complain about their taxes being too high. Then they complain about the deficit.

NIMBYs suffer from this to a great extent. They might agree with you that more housing needs to get built (or whatever project), just not here.

It's easy to call for reopening the economy when you're not at risk of getting seriously ill. Conversely, it's easy to favor keeping the economy closed when you can work from online as opposed to one living paycheck to paycheck and is now without a job or a small business owner who is struggling.


The reason we have separation of church and state and freedom of expression is to avert this trope. To make things fair for everyone, we have freedom for all. The golden rule is also meant to avert this line of thinking.

 

[Triton]

This is a good articulation of virtue signalling. Everyone wants to contribute until they have to contribute.

 

[soylentgreen]

The original position fallacy is when someone favors something that comes to the detriment of another, believing that they will benefit from it. Basically, it's a form of hypocrisy or argument from bad faith.

This is common among eugenicists, malthusians (the ones who want to kill people to reduce the population), and social darwinists. They want to kill all the bad people/genes to make the world a better place. One has to ask whether they would still favor such an ideology if they were on the receiving end of it. Social darwinists believe that the strong are more deserving than the weak. One guess as to which of the two make this argument.

A lot of socialists fall into this trap as well. They talk about neocolonialism and how the west is exploiting poorer nations for resources and labor. They presume that it's all by the global 1 percent which owns half of the world's wealth. What they might not know is that just by making minimum wage in the US and working full time for a full year, they already make more money than half of the world population. The global 1 percent consists of 76 million people and it consists of anyone who has at least $744,400 of total assets or makes $32,400. As you might imagine, a disproportionate amount of these people live in developed countries which is also where most breadtubers are from. Even though the US only holds 4% of the world's population, it holds nearly a quarter of its billionaires. By contrast, most people in extreme poverty live in Sub-Saharan Africa. What socialists seem to imply is that once their country becomes socialist, they should move production back to their country, send more foreign aid to develop those countries, and/or pay those workers more. One can presume that any one of these solutions will affect their paychecks in some way.

This can be applied to more moderate ideologies. Groups more likely to rely on welfare are more likely to vote Democrat because they're less likely to cut it while those who favor cutting welfare are less likely to be on it. Someone has to pay for these welfare programs but on the other hand, someone also benefits from it.

Government spending in general falls into this category. Most Americans believe that we need to cut government spending but support for cutting each individual program is quite a bit smaller. As a old person, you might favor cutting military spending, foreign aid, and welfare but God forbid someone lay a finger on your medicare or social security. People complain about the government not doing enough to help poor people. Then they complain about their taxes being too high. Then they complain about the deficit.

NIMBYs suffer from this to a great extent. They might agree with you that more housing needs to get built (or whatever project), just not here.

It's easy to call for reopening the economy when you're not at risk of getting seriously ill. Conversely, it's easy to favor keeping the economy closed when you can work from online as opposed to one living paycheck to paycheck and is now without a job or a small business owner who is struggling.


The reason we have separation of church and state and freedom of expression is to avert this trope. To make things fair for everyone, we have freedom for all. The golden rule is also meant to avert this line of thinking.

Apart from being sceptical of a right wing americans view on socialism I would also point out that now really is not the time to presume that the american government is the best choice for a role model on governance.

 

[Masterhawk]

This is a good articulation of virtue signalling. Everyone wants to contribute until they have to contribute.

 

[ashurbanipal]

The original position fallacy is when someone favors something that comes to the detriment of another, believing that they will benefit from it. Basically, it's a form of hypocrisy or argument from bad faith.

This is common among eugenicists, malthusians (the ones who want to kill people to reduce the population), and social darwinists. They want to kill all the bad people/genes to make the world a better place. One has to ask whether they would still favor such an ideology if they were on the receiving end of it. Social darwinists believe that the strong are more deserving than the weak. One guess as to which of the two make this argument.

A lot of socialists fall into this trap as well. They talk about neocolonialism and how the west is exploiting poorer nations for resources and labor. They presume that it's all by the global 1 percent which owns half of the world's wealth. What they might not know is that just by making minimum wage in the US and working full time for a full year, they already make more money than half of the world population. The global 1 percent consists of 76 million people and it consists of anyone who has at least $744,400 of total assets or makes $32,400. As you might imagine, a disproportionate amount of these people live in developed countries which is also where most breadtubers are from. Even though the US only holds 4% of the world's population, it holds nearly a quarter of its billionaires. By contrast, most people in extreme poverty live in Sub-Saharan Africa. What socialists seem to imply is that once their country becomes socialist, they should move production back to their country, send more foreign aid to develop those countries, and/or pay those workers more. One can presume that any one of these solutions will affect their paychecks in some way.

This can be applied to more moderate ideologies. Groups more likely to rely on welfare are more likely to vote Democrat because they're less likely to cut it while those who favor cutting welfare are less likely to be on it. Someone has to pay for these welfare programs but on the other hand, someone also benefits from it.

Government spending in general falls into this category. Most Americans believe that we need to cut government spending but support for cutting each individual program is quite a bit smaller. As a old person, you might favor cutting military spending, foreign aid, and welfare but God forbid someone lay a finger on your medicare or social security. People complain about the government not doing enough to help poor people. Then they complain about their taxes being too high. Then they complain about the deficit.

NIMBYs suffer from this to a great extent. They might agree with you that more housing needs to get built (or whatever project), just not here.

It's easy to call for reopening the economy when you're not at risk of getting seriously ill. Conversely, it's easy to favor keeping the economy closed when you can work from online as opposed to one living paycheck to paycheck and is now without a job or a small business owner who is struggling.


The reason we have separation of church and state and freedom of expression is to avert this trope. To make things fair for everyone, we have freedom for all. The golden rule is also meant to avert this line of thinking.

This is not a fallacy. It's not in Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations nor the Prior Analytics. It's not in the Port Royal, Locke doesn't say anything about it, nor do Boole or Hamilton, nor any of the 20th century logicians.

The term "fallacy" means a mistake in reasoning. Someone may take a position from sound reasoning that only happens to benefit them and detriment others. For this to be a fallacy, it'd have to be a mistake in reasoning every time someone committed it.

 

[Masterhawk]

This is not a fallacy. It's not in Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations nor the Prior Analytics. It's not in the Port Royal, Locke doesn't say anything about it, nor do Boole or Hamilton, nor any of the 20th century logicians.

The term "fallacy" means a mistake in reasoning. Someone may take a position from sound reasoning that only happens to benefit them and detriment others. For this to be a fallacy, it'd have to be a mistake in reasoning every time someone committed it.

It's not quite a logical fallacy per se. It's more of a self centered hypocritical way of thinking.

 

[ashurbanipal]

It's not quite a logical fallacy per se. It's more of a self centered hypocritical way of thinking.

I agree with that. However, I don't think it's good to call it a fallacy. Better to just call it a self-centered hypocritical way of thinking when it occurs.

I've noticed that here and elsewhere on the internet, and even in the broader public discourse, there's been a tendency to call out this or that "fallacy" that another person has committed as a way of rejecting their argument and convincing others to reject it as well. This tactic has the effect of making the accuser sound smart while relieving them of any responsibility to produce a counter argument, all while distracting from the point the original "fallacious" argument was trying to establish. In tandem with this tendency, a veritable cottage industry of manufacturing fallacies has been hard at work producing harsh-sounding names for what can sometimes be good arguments. I've found myself accused of the "cauliflower fallacy," the "magnetic fallacy," the "springtime fallacy," and a host of others by people who don't have any clue what an argument is, much less a fallacy. As a working philosopher, I find this trend saddening. It's become a substitute for real thinking, and it needs to stop.

 

[OrphanSlug]

Apologies for being late to the thread.

In philosophy “original position” means something entirely different from what we are talking about. The phrase was coined by John Rawls and was to suggest “a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about fundamental principles of justice.” At the time and in that context all this means is jointly agreed principles of politics as related to the concept of absolute equality of people. It later became called a fallacy based on the idea that absolute equality is unlikely, or extremely difficult to obtain therefor ended up associated to criticality of everyone from libertarians to communists to theocracies, as politically the fallacy is you still end up with aristocracy of some form as central leadership no matter with some level of assigning authority and you still end up with varying levels of social and economic importance to a culture or nation.

To the OP the “fallacy” could be applied in terms of coming up with off the wall suggestions on the pretense that it helps everyone equally but only once you determine, ironically, the lesser value of what needs to be removed in order for others to benefit valued more.

But all of this is not really a fallacy when thinking about other debate fallacies, it is just unreasonable philosophical principles that at some point you can have true equality among people as an absolute. Just about every other philosopher known will comment about social or economic fault, but really varying participation in any society that is not in itself a showing of needing to answer some question to obtain new understanding.

That said the philosophy of society, law, and governance is still an area that generates good conclusions and we should be looking to that as a means to evolve (kinda the whole point of philosophy, perpetual questions from doubt and new understanding from exploration.) Even if sometimes someone like John Rawls comes up with the “original position” idea, we can look past that with better questions.