GMO Fallacies

If you honestly follow the debate surrounding Genetically Modified foods you will find that it is extremely difficult to find accurate, unbiased information on the subject. For every reputable article discussing the dangers of GM foods and the destruction they will wreak on the planet you will find an equally reputable article explaining how safe these foods are and the promises they hold for the future of humanity. As I am not a scientist, I won't take stand here on this issue (I have my views), but as a philosopher, I do feel quite qualified to look at some fallacious reasoning surrounding this issue.

The following quotation comes from an article written by Anna Lappe responding to a lengthy series of articles published over 6 months by Nathanael Johnson at Grist. For what it is worth, I think Lappe's response slightly misses the mark and doesn't really engage substantively with Johnson's claims, but that is neither here nor there. Instead, I want to focus on the following paragraph:

Consider Monsanto and Dow’s chemical 2,4-D used in an herbicide concoction called Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, which caused untold cancers, birth defects, and other serious illnesses among Vietnamese and veterans. (And the companies are now pushing the chemical again through corn and soybean seeds engineered to be resistant to, and therefore used with, 2,4-D.)

This paragraph is presented as evidence that Monsanto and Dow "are chemical companies with long histories of failures to protect human and ecosystem health—with tragic consequences." This is an example of the Genetic Fallacy in which one argues that an idea or concept (in this case GMO foods) is bad because the source of that idea or concept is bad or has done bad things in the past. Just because Dow and Monsanto produced chemical weapons for the US government does not mean that GMO foods are equally bad. Lots of companies are involved in a a variety of different industries. The fact that General Electric is a defense contractor does not mean that your GE coffeemaker is out to kill you.


More significantly, the above passage is also guilty of the fallacy of Division. This is a fallacy in which you erroneously derive a conclusion about the parts based on attributes of the whole. A simple example would be, "This machine is heavy. Therefore every part of this machine is heavy." The fallacious reasoning here should be obvious. Just because a machine has a certain weight does not mean that every part will have the same weight. It is easy to imagine a machine made up of a billion pieces, each of which weighs an ounce. Each piece is light, but when you add them together you get something quite heavy. In the passage above, Lappe is arguing that because Agent Orange is bad, every chemical component of Agent Orange is also bad. Now Agent Orange (WARNING: there are some gross images at the link) is certainly a nasty product, but if one reads the linked Wikipedia page, one finds that most of the concern is not with chemical 2,4-D, but with the other component of Agent Orange, chemical 2,4,5-T. Now I don't know anything about chemical 2,4-D beyond what I read at Wikipedia, but the key issue here is that one cannot legitimately argue that because a substance is bad, every component of that substance is also bad. To do so, as Lappe, does is to commit the fallacy of division. And it is because of stuff like this that it is so difficult to figure out the truth about GMO's.

Sometimes you forget how outrageous some people can be.

In a previous post, I had argued that the comparison of Obama to Hitler on gun regulation was a false analogy and a slippery slope. In that post, I took it for granted that Hitler had instituted some form of gun regulation during his tenure, and my objection was really based on the illegitimacy of comparing that action to what Obama is trying to do today. It turns out that that was a mistake because the story of Hitler and gun control isn't even true! Writing in Salon, Alex Seitz-Wald discusses the history of this false claim and exposes it as the lie it is.

The myth apparently began when it was cited by the head of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, in his 1994 book, Guns, Crime, and Freedom. There he wrote, "In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolph Hitler. In fact, this law actually did exactly the opposite of what LaPierre claims it does. To understand this, we need to step back a few years in history. At the end of WWI, the Germans were defeated, and as part of their punishment, numerous laws were imposed by the Treatise of Versailles on the German people of the Weimar Republic (the name given to the German state during the interwar period). One such law, passed in 1919, outlawed private ownership of firearms, and the government undertook to confiscate all guns currently in circulation.

The 1938 law, then, did not restrict firearms (they were already illegal), but instead did just the opposite, relaxing restrictions on the ownership of guns. As Bernard E. Harcourt documents (PDF) in the Fordham Law Review:

The Nazi gun laws of 1938 reflect a liberalization of the gun control measures that had been enacted by the Weimar Republic with respect to the acquisition, transfer, and carrying of firearms.

Thus, the claim made by LaPierre and others is false, and a good example of Bullshit. In particular, LaPierre is only concerned about keeping guns as legal and accessible as possible, and he is willing to make up or repeat stuff without confirmation so long as it supports his position. This is the definition of bullshit, and it raises an interesting political question: How does one engage in a political debate when one side of that debate just makes up facts to support its position? This is a problem that is not just limited to gun control debates, but also issues like anthropogenic climate change, or the economy. I have no solutions to this dilemma, but I think it is the greatest challenge to progress and advancement currently facing the US.

The gun control opponents go there.

In the wake of the horrors at Sandy Hook, many gun owners in America have gone off the deep end. Not wanting to acknowledge the clear correlation between gun ownership and gun violence in the US, these individuals have taken to arguing that even a modest attempt to limit the accessibility and availability of drugs guns is tantamount to a fascist takeover of the US. This phenomena is, oddly enough, not just a product of folk on the right wing (as evidenced by the Drudge Report headline) but also folks on the left. For example, Mike Adams, the "Health Ranger" has made a similar claim in a blog post titled, "Obama to follow in footsteps of Hitler, Stalin with 'executive order' disarmament of the American people."

In both cases these authors are guilty of a variety of fallacies. First up is the Slippery Slope fallacy. All these authors are explicitly arguing, "Restrictions on guns today, totalitarian dictatorship tomorrow." In fact, Mike Adams begins his post by making the following claim,

It's official. President Obama is going to march America down the dark halls of history by following in the footsteps of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and all the other gun-grabbing madmen who have exploited fear to achieve the total concentration of power in the hands of dictatorial government.

Adams further goes on to suggest that the Government wants to take everyone's guns so that they can then exterminate the entire population. Lest you think I am strawmanning Adams, here are his own words:

It's all coming out. This is their true agenda: mass murder and / or genocide. Those who support gun disarmament of the American people are supporting mass murder: Michael Moore, Piers Morgan, Biden, Obama, Cuomo... they are all proponents of mass murder. They are the very same kind of people who once supported Hitler and Stalin, and now they're creating a new Hitler in Barack Obama, the would-be dictator who is thrusting America straight into a new civil war.

If we think about the claim here for just a second, it should be clear how absurd it is. Why would the government need to take guns in order to kill the populace (ignoring for a moment the question of why the government would want to eliminate its tax bases)? The US military spends more money than every other military in the world combined. The military has no shortage of extremely powerful weapons (far more powerful than anything even the most hardened gun lover might have). If they wanted to exterminate the population, they could just do it. Why would they need to confiscate guns first? What use is an assault rifle against a tank or a predator drone? For these reasons and others, it is clear that this larger argument is a good example of a slippery slope.

Moving on, these articles are also nice examples of Straw Men in that they seem to be grossly misrepresenting the gun control position. As far as I know, the gun control debates are not about handguns or hunting rifles. The debates are about assault rifles with high capacity magazines. The government is not trying to take everyone's guns away, they are merely debating the possibility of limiting access to devices whose only purpose is killing large numbers of people very quickly. This is obviously a contentious issue for many people, but it is unclear to me what purpose making such weapons available to the general public could possibly serve other than ensuring that people are killed by them. In any case, to claim, as Adams does that the government wants to get all your guns is a straw man.

I will conclude by noting the obvious False Analogy of comparing Obama to Hitler or Stalin. Not much needs be said here, but the situation Obama is confronting today is radically different from the situations confronting Stalin and Hitler. To suggest that there is a similarity between the two is to commit a false analogy.