174 Unit 4 Applied critical thinking
badly or misleadingly, in which case it creates
a flaw in the reasoning, not a strength.
An analogy is a comparison. For example,
suppose you are arguing about what it is to be
a good leader, and how a good leader should
behave towards the people he or she has been
chosen to lead. One approach is to compare
the nation-state to a family, so that being a
ruler is analogous to being the head of a
family. If we accept this broad analogy we can
draw certain conclusions from it. An obvious
conclusion is that a ruler does not merely
have authority over the citizens but also a
duty of care towards them, just as a parent
has a duty of care towards his or her children.
If you want to say that an authoritarian but
uncaring parent is a bad parent (as most
people would) you are also committed to
saying that – by analogy – a purely
authoritarian ruler is a bad ruler. This kind of
reasoning is what is meant by argument from
analogy. It stands or falls on whether the
analogy is a fair one or an unfair one; and
that is what you as the critic have to decide.
But what is a ‘fair’ analogy? Obviously the
two things being compared are not exactly
the same, or you wouldn’t need to draw the
comparison. What an analogy does is to say
that two things are alike in certain relevant
respects. In the analogy above, the role of a
ruler is being likened to that of the head of a
family. There is a difference in that the
citizens are not the ruler’s own offspring or
close relatives, and of course there is a
difference in the size of the ‘family’. But by
using the analogy for the argument you are
not suggesting that the two roles are exactly
the same: only that they are sufficiently
alike – in the relevant respect – for the same
kind of duties and responsibilities to apply.
Most people would probably agree that the
nation–family analogy was a fair one if it were
used to support the conclusion that rulers
should not treat their citizens more brutally or
unjustly than they would their own children;
or simply that rulers have a ‘duty of care’In fact, the comment suggests that there is
a fault in the argument very similar to the
one we were discussing in the last question.
The author is assuming that there is a choice
between using police time to catch ‘serious’
criminals (whatever that means) and chasing
‘bored young men’. And there is a further
assumption that the latter are not serious
criminals. Again, we have to ask whether this
is a straight choice. The objection implies
that it is not, suggesting that there may be
some circumstances in which the car thief is a
serious criminal: for example, an armed
robber using a stolen car as a getaway vehicle.
As this possibility could be used to support
a conclusion that car chases should not be
banned altogether, it does to some extent
undermine the argument. However, it is not a
particularly difficult challenge to counter.
There are several ways this could be
approached. One is to say that the argument
is mainly directed at the large number of
cases in which the car theft itself is the only
crime. Car theft in connection with more
serious crimes such as murder or armed
robbery is rare and a special case, and could
be given special treatment without altering
the author’s general conclusion. Another,
more robust, reply would be that it doesn’t
matter how serious a crime is, catching the
criminal is never a good enough reason for
endangering the lives of innocent bystanders.
And finally the author can fall back on her
last-but-one premise: that you don’t have to
chase stolen cars, because there are other,
safer ways of stopping them.
Taken together, these responses to the
statement take most of the sting out of it. The
best assessment is therefore that if it weakens
the argument at all, it does so only slightly.Using analogy
The last feature of this argument we are going
to examine is found in the first paragraph. It
is called arguing from analogy. Used well, it is a
very powerful tool. However, it is often used