Today I want to write about something I have seen again and again in discussions about race and gender.
When someone treats a collection of many individuals as if it were a single individual, that’s the individual fallacy. When people argue for reparations on grounds that “The White Man” took from “The Black Man” and so now it is time for “The White Man” to repay “The Black Man,” you are seeing the individual fallacy. It makes perfect sense for person A to repay person B for damages that person A inflicted on person B. That said, reparations involves paying individuals who were never enslaved with money collected from people who owned slaves, which is completely illogical. After all, no white American alive now ever owned a slave, though some long dead white people did. Moreover, not a single black individual alive now was ever a slave, though some of his or her ancestors may have been. The rationale of reparations would be like me trying to collect money from someone else because his great great grandfather robbed my great great grandfather. It makes no sense because nothing was taken from me (so why I am owed anything?) nor was the act in any way under the control of the other person (so why should he be held responsible?).*
In an otherwise good article about “Men’s Rights Activism,” Julianne Ross commits this fallacy when she says (responding to the exclusion of women from the long abolished military draft):
“[R]egardless of whether you agree with a [military] draft in theory, it’s important to remember that military action (including the decision to go to war in the first place) has been legislated almost entirely by men, and that women historically have shown less support for war.”
A very small percentage of men, working as legislators, decided to wage a war, and so this somehow makes men outside of that legislative body responsible for picking up the tab? That’s illogical. A small percentage of people from your own sex doing something does not make each and every other individual from within that sex responsible as well. Keep an eye out for the “individual fallacy” whenever and wherever important topics about large segments of society are being discussed.
* There is a more reasonable case for something like reparations. It has been pointed out that the tremendous discrepancies between black and white people (income level, frequency of incarceration, etc.) is most plausibly explained as an after-effect of past slavery and discrimination that continued even up to just a few decades ago. It doesn’t seem like such a bad idea to have government funding directed towards minority scholarships and other programs that could alleviate these discrepancies. In fact, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all for the government to provide aid to all of those people who need it, and that can and should include helping a higher proportion of black individuals since the black community has more needy individuals than the white community. There can be no moral or philosophical problem with a program that is not race-specific, and a program that is simply geared towards helping people who need help (rather than simply helping black people or white people specifically) will wind up doing everything reparations proponents need it to do.
