Bennett's Logic Train Derails
by TChris
Bill Bennett now justifies his racist remarks as a "thought experiment" that proposed a deliberately racist hypothetical to illustrate its "noxious" nature. Bennett indeed proved that he has mastered the ability to think noxious thoughts, but his latest spin defies reason.
Bennett spoke in response to "a caller who suggested that Social Security would be in better financial shape if abortion were illegal, leaving more people to pay into the system." What fallacy in that suggestion does Bennett's response -- that "you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down" -- illuminate? The caller's hypothetical suggests that banning abortion would have a positive consequence, while Bennett argued that forcing abortion (but only with regard to black women) would also have a positive consequence. If this non sequitur was a "thought experiment," the experiment went badly awry.
Bennett began his response by musing that the caller's conclusion didn't necessarily follow from her premise. Bennett pointed out that her hypothetical relied on the questionable assumption that the non-aborted fetuses would eventually become productive taxpayers. Bennett wondered whether the contributions of the productive would outweigh the burdens imposed by the nonproductive, and he cited an argument advanced in Freakonomics: "that the declining crime rate, you know, they deal with this hypothesis, that one of the reasons crime is down is that abortion is up."
Benett's thought experiment made a bizarre turn when he introduced race into the conversation. Race wasn't an element of the caller's hypothetical. If Bennett merely wanted to make the point that one never knows whether an abortion will have a social cost or a social benefit, the insertion of race was both gratuitous and irrelevant to his argument.
Why did race occur to Bennett? As Bennett pondered the caller's hypothetical, did he assume that new white babies would be productive while new black babies would become nonproductive? When he mused about cost vs. benefit, was he really wondering whether new taxpaying whites would be unduly burdened by the cost of imprisoning new blacks? Is that why he asked whether aborting black babies would reduce the crime rate? The logic train seems implicit in Bennett's thought experiment.
Bennett also complains that his remarks were taken out of context. This is nonsense. News accounts routinely report that Bennett denounced the idea of forcing black women to abort as "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do." No serious writer has argued that Bennett wants to force black women to have abortions. The point is that Bennett introduced race into the conversation for no discernable reason, in an offensive "thought experiment" that implicitly assumed that blacks, but not whites, contribute to a rising crime rate.
As Last Night in Little Rock wrote here, Bennett still doesn't get it. It looks like he never will.
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