The Trouble With Hypotheticals

“But I do know that it’s true,” said the author of The Book of Virtues, “that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky.”

Not the smoothest thought experiment ever ad-libbed by a lapsed academic opposed to utilitarian ethics. The firestorm ensued. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, declared himself “appalled.” The Rev. Al Sharpton denounced Bennett’s comments as “blatantly racist.” The White House labeled them “not appropriate.” NAACP President Bruce Gordon felt “personally offended.” Rep. Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat, detected “a spirit of hate and division.” Bennett, while not apologizing, had to resign under pressure from the educational company he co-founded.

It’s hardly the first time a hypothetical upended a national political figure mere proximity to one sometimes does the job. —Carlin RomanoThe Trouble With Hypotheticals (Chronicle)

An excellent analysis of a moment that really frustrated me.

Regardless of what you think of Bennett, to willfully ignore the entire context in which the quotation ensued in the desire to score points against the speaker requires either industrial-strength blinders, or deliberate malice.

13 thoughts on “The Trouble With Hypotheticals

  1. Agreed re the complex racial histories, Dennis: Republicans have come a long way since, as the Radical Republicans, they were the first genuinely radical political party the United States had.

    And I hear you agreeing with Romano that those in the “hypo-manic anti-hypo crowd [. . .] rely on a ‘master narrative’ hypothetical: If someone floats a thought in the antecedent of a conditional, the floater actually believes it or wishes it to happen” and that such a hypothetical is “hypocritical.” I’m just saying: not necessarily. Bernard Shaw’s question to Michael Dukakis in the 1988 debate about the hypothetical rape of his wife — despite the fact that it was a hypothetical question about capital punishment in the context of a political debate — had an ugly, leering quality, and many people were disgusted by it. I think they had every right to be.

  2. I don’t know whether race was part of the topic for that day’s call-in show. If not, then perhaps his reference to “black babies” when he might more sensibly have said “poor babies” is a kind of Freudian slip.

    Both parties have complex racial histories, since the GOP was the party of Lincoln, and the KKK’s influence in the deep south affected the leadership of the Democratic party (cf former Klansman Robert Byrd).

    In any case, Mike, within the broader context you describe, it’s perfectly permissible to criticize Bennett’s sensitivity and/or wisdom, but as Will noted, most of the people who only scanned the headlines and made snap decisions won’t bother to place it in a broader context.

    As I noted, Bennett didn’t really need to refer to black babies in order to make his point, and as a public figure he must be aware of and bear the consequences of his speech.

  3. Dennis, I’d like to hear you say more about questions of quotations being taken out of context, because — as my initial comment indicated — I think one rather obvious context is the relationship of the GOP to race. Bennett is certainly a prominent Republican, and the history of the GOP in relation to race issues is very different from the history of the Democrats in relation to race issues. You argue that there was an “entire context” from which the quotation was removed, and it’s fairly clear what immediate context you’re talking about. Might there be other contexts, as well?

  4. Dennis, I have not personally read “Freakonomics”, but I always thought the argument about why the possibility of having an abortion leads to a decrease in crime was a little different.

    My impression of the argument was that a child of a woman who was in a bad situation was much more likely to grow up to be a criminal. For example, a women coming from an unsupportive family herself gets pregnant in high school. If she has the child, now she has to drop out of high school, get a low paying job, and has no time to raise her child. Instead, the child is often left alone, gets raised by the tv, and becomes a criminal because he/she is desperately poor, sees no better alternative, and hasn’t been raised with any morals because it’s mother is never around because she has no choice but to be constantly working to pay for the child. On the other hand, if the girl finds out she’s pregnant right away and gets an abortion, she stays in high school, gets a better paying job, later in life meets a man, gets married, and has children. Now her child is raised in both a better economic situation, AND raised with two parents who can both contribute time and money to raising the child. This child is now much less likely to go out and commit crimes, having been raised both with more money and “in a better family”.

    I’ve also always been under the impression that the reason the crime topic is brought up is to show that there are real, moral benefits to the pro-choice position.

  5. On a slightly different topic, Bennett was actually also using a different argument tactic in addition to the hypothetical. By using the phrase “abort every black baby”, he’s starting his argument with an assumption that is the crux of the issue – if you have an abortion, are you getting rid of some something your body gets rid of anyways, or are you doing away with what we would consider a “baby”? That’s the real crux of the issue – when does a pregnancy stop being just something your body gives off (like hair, or fingernails) and become a living being?

    Both extremes are repugnant to most people. Take the argument that as soon as their is anything in the reproductive process should be considered a “baby”. Perhaps we should force girls to get pregnant as soon as they get their period so they don’t “kill” the unused egg? (there’s another one of those hypotheticals – good thing I’m not a public figure!) On the other hand, most people would find it equally rediculous to say that it’s ok to “abort” a baby 5 minutes before it would be born, because the mother suddenly decided she didn’t want it and it’s not really a “baby” yet.

    I wish I could remember the argument term for making an implicit assumption in your argument like that…

  6. I believe this whole thing started when some took his hypothetical statement, didn’t include his next statement (which showed he was opposed to the first statement), and used that to blast him, leading to all these politician’s knee jerk reaction to call his statement “bad”. Politicians do it because it’s better for them to be seen as overeacting by some than it is to be seen as insensitive by others (the majority of people who read the headline about what this guy said, and don’t think any further than that).

    I don’t even agree with his stance, but I think his statement should have been fine – as you said, he was saying that abortion was reprehensible. We live in a very politically correct society (not that’s anything new – weren’t there times in history where you could be hanged just for critisizing the king?), where there’s often consequences for saying anything that could possibly be misinterpreted whatsoever, even when what you’re saying it correct. Just look at what happened to Bill Mauer. After 9/11, on his tv show, he said that the terrorists were certainly bad and evil, but they weren’t “cowards”. People who got on a plane and hijacked it, knowing they themselves were going to die as part of their plan, were evil, but they weren’t cowards. And what happened – advertisers pulled their ads from his show out of fear, and his show was cancelled (he later got a new show on HBO).

    It’s kind of sickening that a person gets similar consequences whether they actually said something “bad”, or they just said something that if you weren’t thinking when you heard it might be considered “bad”.

  7. I thought Bennett’s comment was the height of stupidity because he failed to take into account that race is a hot button for most people, and that irony and analogy aren’t exactly something the average reader will “get.” And how sick is someone who suggests that the Irish should kill and eat their children in order to solve their problems? Taking an extreme position is sometimes necessary to get a point across, but ignoring the social context of the times isn’t usually a great idea.

  8. Bennett was giving an ad-libbed response to a caller who was objecting to the idea that abortion could reduce crime. It wasn’t necessary for him to say “black” when he could have said “poor” or “all.” I don’t know why he chose the specific example he did.

    I don’t have my copy of Freakonomics anymore (I rented it from the library) so I can’t check to see whether or how race played into that chapter to which he was referring. But Amazon.com says that the abortion chapter runs from pages 117 to 146, and the index lists “African Americans” on pages 122 and 135.

    I don’t recall the exact context in which that chapter used race, but I know from my own research that the history of abortion in America is closely tied to Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, who was a member of an eugenics oganization with the motto “breed a race of thoroughbreds.”

    Here’s a quotation from Maragaret Sanger, which, if you look at it with the same suspicion that people have greeted Bennett, *seems* to put very damning statements in Sanger’s mouth.

    We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

    Here’s a hypothetical response to that quotation: “Gasp! What’s this? ‘We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.’ Gasp! Does that mean Sanger wants to exterminate the black race? Why else would she bring up this example?”

    I think I’ve made my point. If you look through transcripts and archives, it’s possible to find quotations that look damning when taken out of context. By manufacturing a new context of outrage and misinformation, those quotations can take on new meaning. Consider Al Gore’s supposed claim that he invented the internet, for instance.

    I’m picking another extreme example, but only to show how easy it is to make someone a monster by taking a quotation out of context. Whatever you think of Sanger as a feminist advocate, some of her eugenic beliefs are reprehensible when considered by today’s standards of dencency when treating the poor and the physically disabled, but she was not the only one who felt that way in mainstream society, which is why the Nazi variety of eugenics was able to gain a foothold (that is, because Sanger was one of many who held mainstream beliefs that were useful to the anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis, *not* because Sanger was willfully or subconsciously supporting a war against the Jewish race).

  9. Dennis: by your argument from Freakonomics that “if you abort white children, or all children of all races, then you’ll also see a drop in crime,” why couldn’t Bennett have instead suggested aborting white babies? Why, in fact, did race come up at all for Bennett? In other words: why was it necessary for Bennett to single out black children? Could that be where the racism lies, particularly for the GOP — which (as Colin Powell has publicly noted) has a historically vexed relation to race issues?

  10. Anonymous, is there a difference between “morally reprehensible” and “sick”? If you look at the quotation, you’ll see he says it would be “an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do.” Both you and he agree that the argument is a bad one.

    Bennett was talking about an idea brought up in the book Freakonomics. Have you read that book? I have, and the authors there actually talk about abortion in general, not about abortion of any one race. It’s an uncomfortable, disturbing argument — the idea that legalized abortion removed a high proportion of children who would otherwise have grown up in families that were at risk for committing crimes. They would have been at risk because of their poverty, not because of their race, but since black families are more likely to be poor, fewer children from black families means fewer children from poor families, which means fewer people living in crime-invested areas, which means crime goes down. Of course, if you abort white children, or all children of all races, then you’ll also see a drop in crime. Is that a sensible crime-prevention action? No, the authors of Freakonomics point out that for every potential criminal you’re aborting, you’re also aborting a high percentage of potential law-abiding citizens, and that the cost to society at large is too great. But it’s an observed, documented trend, that about 18 or 20 years after legalized abortion, there’s a drop in the population of 18-20 year-olds, and since that’s the group that’s most likely to commit violent crimes, society sees a drop in those crimes.

    Bennett was not “joking” about killing anybody. He wasn’t advocating it — he was giving an if-then statement.

    I can say “If the moon were made of green cheese, NASA would have to design this kind of a spacesuit in order to let astronauts eat the cheese on the moon.” You may disagree with my desire to spend time discussing hypothetical spacesuit design, or you may disagree with my conclusion that space travel is complex enough without designing a spacesuit that lets astronauts eat objects they find on the moon. But if you do want to disagree with me, don’t attack me by saying that I believe the moon is made of green cheese, or that I *wish* the moon were made of green cheese, or that I secretly think everyone should eat nothing but green cheese, or that I think that people who don’t eat green cheese deserve death, etc., etc.. etc.

    If you want to dislike Bennett or his political views, be my guest, but demonstrate your intelligence by talking about the things he actually advocates and believes, not attacking him for making a hypothetical statement that he himself calls “impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible.”

  11. Will, yes, that’s part of the basic argument, though the economist whose research is presented in Freakonomics (it’s co-authored with a journalist) notes that circumstances aren’t the only factor. Extending beyond the argument made in Freakonomics, the baby of a woman whose pregnancy is troubled just *might* grow up to be a serial murderer, but might also grow up to be a doctor who cures cancer, a lawyer who attacks a particular injustice, or simply an ordinary citizen who pays taxes and raises a family like everyone else. The pro-life position argues that unborn life is precious regardless of society’s opinion of the value of that life, regardless of soceity’s opinion of whether it IS a life, and regardless of the cost to society of the resources necessary to support the adult that will potentially result from a given conception. That’s part of the same argument that opposes the death penalty, in that the human dignity even of serial murderers is worth preserving, that killing a murderer doesn’t unmurder the victims.

    Of course, plenty of pro-life people are also pro-capital punishment, and plenty of people who have marched to save the life of a convicted killer or in support of the rights of animals have also marched in support of legalized abortion. All that hinges on the various values that the differing parties place on a fetus, a convicted murderer, and a fetus who might grow up to be a murderer.

    The book itself doesn’t take a stand on how its statistics SHOULD be used, but the economist does insert, in a coda near the end, the opinion that the cost to society of aborting all the potential criminals would make it an inefficient policy. In general, the book discusses the unexpected, hard-to-comprehend connections between different sets of data, and how a close analysis of statistics can lead to insights on human behavior that would otherwise be blocked by our natural squamishness or emotional reactions when the issue comes up.

    And, as this thread demonstrates, race, gender and abortion are definitely among those issues.

  12. No good person sits around hypothetically thinking about killing a whole race of babies without being a sick cookie. there are alot of sick americans who agree, with genocidal fantastasies. They used to lynch blacks, & have the kids playing around the hanging body. Its an American pastime I guess. Some of you are Going to hell in a hand basket. If Martin Luther King had said “the world would be better if all white children where killed, but that would be unreprehensible & we would never do that”. He was killed for wanting to make peace, so no talk of killing would have gotten him anywhere but dead faster. But white people are patting this fascist punk on the back for making statements that black children all should die, bringing down the crime rate. That is sick . Maybe some of you are sick too. Not a very Christian country, the USA. “They are joking about killing black babies, after all the abuse they put on those blacks the last 500 years, now the politictians are back at that again?”

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