7.6 Principles 291
Principles vs pragmatics
A more general way of criticising Dieter’s
reasoning would be to say that he pushes
principle too far. He may have right on his
side, strictly speaking, but his use of the
principle is too heavy-handed. There are
further arguments he could have used which
might have been more appropriate, and which
would have left him looking less ‘self-
righteous’, as Carla calls him when she runs
out of more reasoned arguments.
For example, he could have developed the
argument that copyright infringement is
against the law for good reasons, even if it is
not taken as seriously, by most people, as
directly stealing goods. If copyright isn’t
respected, the best singers and songwriters
may not find it worthwhile producing records,
causing the general quality of musical output
to fall. Alternatively, the recording companies
may respond by charging even more for their
products to cover the costs of fighting lawsuits
or researching ways to beat the pirates. Then,
the argument would go, everyone suffers
because of those who cheat; or, conversely, if
people respect the law, everyone gains in the
long run. This is similar to the argument
against fare-dodgers on public transport, or
people who make false insurance claims. It is
the law-abiding passengers and policy holders
who pay in the end, through higher fares and
premiums, not the transport companies or big
insurers whom the cheats think they have
beaten.
Reasons like these are pragmatic, meaning
practical or sensible, or leading to a desirable
outcome.Ethical arguments
The issues involved here belong to the subject
of ethics. Dieter’s argument is an ethical, or
moral argument. Ethics is a big subject, and
this book is not the place to discuss it in detail.
However, there are a few quite basic principles
which are relevant to critical thinking, and‘slippery slope’ reasoning, which we met in
Chapter 4.9. The underlying assumption in a
slippery slope argument is that if you accept
one conclusion you have to accept another
conclusion that is only a little bit different,
and so on. But if you do that you eventually
have to accept some completely outrageous
conclusion. For example, if you tell me that
putting one grain of sugar in my tea won’t
make it taste noticeably sweeter than it did
with no sugar at all, I would have to agree
with you. I would also have to agree that
putting two grains of sugar in the tea wouldn’t
make it taste sweeter than one grain did, and
so on. I would even agree that there will not
be a single point at which the tea tastes
noticeably sweeter than the moment before.
The ‘logical’ conclusion would seem to be that
the tea will never taste noticeably sweeter,
however much sugar I put in. This is
obviously untrue, which means that a string
of evidently true premises have led to a false
conclusion! This shows that the argument is
unsound.
Dieter does something similar by saying
that if you accept the premise that a very
small-scale offence is fairly harmless, then we
have to accept that a slightly more serious one
is also fairly harmless, and so on until we end
up being stuck with the conclusion that any
offence, however serious, is harmless. Stealing
a paperclip is not significantly different from a
massive fraud!
Note: logically, of course, there is no
absolute difference. This creates a puzzle, or
paradox, which has been discussed by thinkers
since ancient times. It is known as the sorites
paradox, after the Greek word for a heap or
pile. If one or two grains of sand don’t make a
heap, adding one more won’t make a heap. So
when does any number of grains of sand
become a heap? In reverse, if a man loses one
hair from his head he is not instantly bald.
How many hairs must he lose before the
description is accurate?