What fallacy says we have rights as long as we don't use them?

Question

This topic is a little more complex and confusing than I expected. I'm tempted to change the title to "Which fallacy blames the victims rather than their oppressors?" But I'm not sure if that's a better title or something completely different.

See my clarification at the end of this post.

---

Imagine a political activist who says something that's true but not politically correct. The government responds by passing a law making it illegal to say what he said.

Instead of criticizing the government, some people tell the activist, "Thanks a lot. If you had kept your mouth shut, we wouldn't have lost more of our rights."

To put it another way, they're saying that we have the right to do certain things...as long as we don't actually do them.

What kind of fallacy is this, if any?

---

EDIT

This is not a question about the definition or judgment of right and wrong, nor is it about moral relativism.

Just as some philosophers believe in a Christian god, so are there some philosophers who believe in right and wrong, many of whom further believe that murder and pedophilia are immoral.

I want to frame my question from just such a perspective: Let's imagine a society where murder and pedophilia are widely regarded as both immoral and illegal. However, there are members of this community who are murderers and/or pedophiles. Some of these people are very powerful, influential and maybe even respected.

So when one of these individuals is exposed as a criminal, members of the community may attack the whistle-blower, for a number of reasons. Some of the attacks come from propagandists or friends of the accused who simply do what all propagandists do. Other attacks come from seemingly ordinary citizens who simply get upset when someone rocks the boat or says things that they think casts the community in a bad light.

Here's a hypothetical example:

Imagine a member of the community who criticizes a judge who has been exposed as a pedophile. The government retaliates by passing a law making it illegal to criticize pedophile judges.

Rather than rally behind the pedophile judge's victims, the general public rallies behind the judge and government, blaming the obviously disgusting law on the whistle-blower. A newspaper headline reads "Self-appointed whistle-blower responsible for law shielding pedophiles."

This can obviously be classified as propaganda, but can we further identify it as a particular kind of fallacy?

Answer 1

It isn't a fallacy at all. The point is, the law will not make illegal exactly the thing he said, but a whole class of statements including the one he said. This will include things that should not be said (presumably the one thing that the person said is one of those things, at least in the view of the people who complain), but inevitably will also include things that should be allowed to be said.

Note that there are two concepts involved:

• On one hand there are things you should be allowed to to, and things you should not be allowed to do.

• On the other hand, there are things that are legal, and things that are illegal.

Ideally, the set of things that are legal to do would be exactly the set of things that you should be allowed to do. However it is rarely possible to do this. Therefore at any time, the law will either permit some bad behaviour, or forbid some good behaviour, or both. More freedom means the law errs more on the side to allow bad behaviour than on the side to disallow good behaviour.

Now if someone believes he is entitled to show some bad behaviour because it is, after all, not illegal, then if that behaviour is seen by the government as too bad to allow, the government will make a law that disallows that bad behaviour. But as always, the same law will also disallow certain good behaviour as collateral damage. And by disallowing the good behaviour, it will reduce freedom.

Now of course another problem is that not all people agree what is behaviour that should be allowed, and what is behaviour that should not be allowed. But that's a separate problem, because people usually know quite well where they themselves put some behaviour they are complaining about.

Or in short, the idea that you are entitled to do something just because it is not illegal does real damage by promoting the idea of making stricter laws to forbid currently allowed undesirable behaviour that some people show, which then in return also restricts some acceptable behaviour, and thus reduces the freedom of everyone.

The question is always whether it does more damage to allow some undesirable behaviour, or more damage to forbid some perfectly fine or possibly even desirable behaviour as collateral damage.

On your constructed example of the pedophile judge:

Quite obviously, the (hypothetical) people who complain don't have an issue with that pedophile judge (or else they would behave differently). Therefore in their view it was wrong to criticise the judge over it. However they do believe that in other cases, it is the right thing to criticise a pedophile judge, and the law caused by that incidence disallows them to do so. Therefore from their view is is completely consistent to complain, and thus not a fallacy.

Remember, if you conclude wrong consequences from wrong premises using correct reasoning, you are not committing a fallacy.

Answer 2

EDIT

See my note at the end.

---

I may have answered my own question...

I was going to edit my post again, adding the phrase "shooting the messenger" to make it a little more familiar. I then typed "shooting the messenger" + fallacy into Google and followed one of the top hits (Shooting the messenger) to an article that says,

Shooting the messenger" is a metaphoric phrase used to describe the act of blaming the bearer of bad news. . . . Shooting the messenger is a subdivision of the ad hominem logical fallacy.

However, that sounds a little lame to me. Yes, it's a personal attack, but couldn't we refine it a bit more?

I posted a similar question over at Logically Fallacious, and the discussion was remarkably short compared to this discussion. Verdict:

If the activist could be blamed for the government's actions, then it's like an inconsistency fallacy.

If the activist had nothing to do with the new law - even though the government and/or media may have said something to the contrary - it could be a false cause fallacy.

But even that may not cover all the bases. I think this type of situation may be a combination of fallacy and mental baggage (e.g. cognitive biases). It's more complex than I at first realized.

Another point: The fallacy I describe is similar to yet distinct from the shoot the messenger fallacy. We might call it the shoot the activist fallacy, or the condemn the one who cares fallacy.

It's probably significantly more complex than the shooting the messenger fallacy. A messenger simply delivers news, welcome (good) or unwelcome (bad). An activist, on the other hand, makes news.

It can be very difficult to understand precisely why various people would condemn someone for criticizing a loathsome individual. Many people may know that a pedophile judge, for example, deserves to be criticized (and worse), but their allegiance lies with their bank accounts, not children.

Conformism is another factor. If everyone seems to be cheering for a disgraced judge and condemning the whistle-blower who brought him to justice, then most people will follow the flock.

I've observed many people who are simply insane (or at least not terribly bright) and don't seem to have a clue about anything.

So if a person says, "See what you've done? Thanks to your activism, the government just took a bite out of our free speech!" we can interpret it it in at least a couple ways:

1. The person is an idiot who just made a nonsensical statement.
2. The person is a propagandist who wants other people to think the activist is doing bad things, rather than good things.

Here's a video of someone talking about inconsistency fallacy. At about 2:50 he says it would normally be classified as a formal fallacy, but it's actually an informal fallacy because you often have to "examine the content" in order to determine if there's an inconsistency.

I just became aware of yet another red flag, though I'm not sure if it qualifies as a fallacy. The activist is being promoted as the worst of two evils, when the pedophile judge is in fact the worst. In fact, the activist in this case shouldn't be regarded as evil, period.

The term for this type of propaganda is demonization. This also qualifies as a fallacy: the ad hominem fallacy.

So this would appear to be a case of two fallacies - inconsistency and ad hominem - being used simultaneously.

---

On another note, this discussion says a lot about the value of philosophy. Imagine a person who discovers a politician who's a murderer or a school official who's a pedophile. He's trying to summon the courage to speak out, but a friend warns him...

Joe, I'm glad you care, but I have to be honest and tell you that you're alone. Your neighbors are going to rally behind the pedophile and condemn you. Even philosophers will trivialize his monstrous crimes as "moral relativism" [link to this webpage]. And if the government passes a new law that helps make it harder to bring such people to justice, that's going to be blamed on you as well.

So what's the point of discussing ethics if the philosophical community can't even make up its collective mind regarding the morality of a pedophile judge or the person who brings him to justice?