Sunday, October 13, 2002

Reporter fallacy

Anyone who ever took a decent ethics course in college has probably heard of something called the Naturalistic Fallacy. The Naturalistic Fallacy is the fallacy that one makes when they attempt to derive an "ought" from an "is". In other words, when someone makes a claim about the way the world "is", and then derives a law about the way the world "ought" to be, they are making a mistake. One cannot derive an ought from an is.

A simple example might be, that if one claims that men are stronger than women (which is usually true), they cannot conclude from that fact that men ought to dominate women. There is no way to know what should be the case, if we just know what is the case. That is the Naturalistic Fallacy.

A fallacy is generally given a name because it is a mistake that many people make. Many people make this mistake because it there is this general feeling that nature can give us clues as to how we ought to behave. We may think that we can draw some conclusion about ethics by analogy with nature.

There is an odd form of this that takes place in the world of newspapers and other media. When one looks at reporters like Ze'ev Schiff or Thomas Friedman (for example), both top notch reporters, one gets the impression that they really know a lot about what is going on in the world. We then allow them to write about what they see or find out about the world. They have both have great careers reporting on the Middle East, especially Israel and Lebanon.

Somehow after doing enough reporting they seem to believe that they can graduate to editorializing. (Most reporters don't really bother to wait, but that is another story.) One gets to write their opinions after they simply demonstrate enough competence in knowing what is going on. It is like assuming that scientists have any special insight in to right and wrong because they have a special understanding of nature. (The New York Times' ethicist is the same way, only worse.)

This is so pitiful. Certainly many reporters develop a feel for the people they report about. They develop instincts about what will happen under varying circumstances. But that does not make them experts on what ought to be done. It simply makes them good at being able to predict what would happen under different circumstances. This is a useful skill, but not deceitful. We are eventually supposed to believe that they have special insight in to what ought to be done simply on the basis that they always sound like they know what is going on. This is the fallacy. They know what goes on, but that is about it.