Special pleading

The rule’s own reason

A parent sets a rule: “No phones at dinner. It’s rude to the people you’re eating with.” Halfway through dinner the parent reads and answers a work email. When their teenager objects, the parent says: “That’s different, it’s work.”

The reason given for the rule was that phones at the table are rude to the people eating with you. A work email is just as rude to them as a text from a friend, so the rule’s own reason covers the parent. Work might justify an exception in some cases (see below), but “it’s work” alone doesn’t say why this reason stops applying. This is the clear-cut case, and it shows the most useful check: go back to the reason the rule was given for.

A stricter standard for unwelcome evidence

A runner reads a study suggesting that her favorite running shoe doesn’t reduce injuries. “It only followed 40 runners for six months. That’s far too small to conclude anything.” A week later she recommends the shoe to a friend, citing a study that followed 25 runners for three months and found fewer injuries.

Her objection to the first study is a good one: small, short studies can easily produce misleading results. But the same objection applies even more strongly to the study she likes, and she doesn’t apply it. This form is easy to miss, because each judgment on its own sounds like careful reasoning. The special pleading shows up only when you put the two side by side and ask whether the same standard was used.

A favored case

Watching a basketball game, a fan shouts that a player on the other team should have been called for a foul after bumping a shooter. Two minutes later, a player on the fan’s team bumps a shooter in the same way. “That was incidental contact. Let them play.”

The exemption isn’t for the fan personally but for a team the fan favors, which works the same way. Unless something about the second play really was different (the shooter had already released the ball, say), the only difference is which team did it, and that has nothing to do with whether it was a foul.

• Exempting yourself: the rule applies to everyone but me.
• Exempting a favored case: a friend, a team, a product or a theory you like gets a pass the others don’t.
• Double standards for evidence: holding claims you dislike to a higher standard of proof than claims you like. Dowden’s list in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives double standard a separate entry (judging two things by different standards when they should be judged by the same one), but the two describe much the same inconsistency.

The logician Susan Stebbing discussed special pleading in Thinking to Some Purpose (1939). Her example, as quoted by Maheshi Gunawardane, came from the interwar dispute over Germany’s former colonies: many in Britain answered the demand for their return by saying colonies were a liability Germany would be better off without, while Britain kept its own. Had the refusal been defended on a different ground (she suggested strategic value), Stebbing wrote, “the reply would be free from fallacy”. What she objected to was the inconsistent reason, not the refusal itself.

Treating cases differently is fine when something about them really is different.

• A relevant difference. The exception rests on a feature that bears on the reasons behind the rule. An ambulance may run a red light because the rule exists for safety, and a medical emergency changes that balance.
• The exception is general, not personal. It covers anyone in the same situation, not just you or your side. “Whoever is on call can keep their phone at the table” is a rule; “I can, because it’s me” isn’t.
• It’s stated up front. An exception announced when the rule is made can be judged on its merits. One discovered only when the rule becomes inconvenient deserves a closer look (though it may still be justified).
• The rule was never meant to be universal, and said so.
• The inconsistency is admitted and fixed. Noticing a double standard and then applying the rule to your own case, or loosening it for everyone, isn’t special pleading.

The test: would you accept this exemption, for this reason, if someone you disagree with claimed it?

Extra time on the exam

A teacher allows no extra time on a handwritten history exam. One student, whose writing hand is in a cast after a fall, is given an extra twenty minutes. Another student complains that the rule is being bent for one person.

The complaint has the right shape to catch special pleading, but here there is a difference, and it bears on the rule’s purpose. The exam is meant to measure what students know about history, not how fast they can write, and a broken writing hand slows one student down for reasons that have nothing to do with that. The exception would apply to anyone with the same injury. This is the relevant difference condition.

The on-call parent

The same family has a rule: no phones at dinner. When they agreed on it, they added: “Except for whoever is on call that night.” One parent is a nurse who is sometimes on call, and keeps a phone by her plate on those evenings.

This looks like the parent in the first example, but the exception was set up in advance, covers anyone in that position, and rests on a reason that outweighs the rule’s (a missed call could matter a lot more than a moment of rudeness). The general, stated up front conditions are met.

Your own situation always looks full of details that seem to matter, because you know them: why you need to check this email, why this study is different. Other people’s situations look simpler from outside, so the rule seems to fit them cleanly. That makes it easy to feel that your case is special without being able to say what makes it special in a way that bears on the rule.

Wanting a particular answer makes this easier still. When you’d like a conclusion to be true, it’s easy to let the standard you apply to the evidence shift, and hard to notice the shift, because each judgment on its own sounds principled. The evidence version is closely related to Confirmation bias.

• Go back to the reason for the rule. Ask whether that reason applies to the exempted case. If it does, ask what the relevant difference is supposed to be.
• Swap the cases. Would the exemption be accepted if the other person, or the other team, claimed it for the same reason?
• Remember that inconsistency shows only that one of the two judgments is wrong, not which one. Sometimes the exemption is right and the rule is too strict. Treating someone’s inconsistency as proof that their rule is wrong is the tu quoque form of Ad hominem. Trudy Govier points out that noting the inconsistency is fair, and can reasonably lower how seriously you take that person’s advocacy of the rule, but it doesn’t make the rule false.
• In yourself, when you hear yourself say “that’s different”, finish the sentence: different how, and does that difference bear on why the rule exists?