By Robert L. Cain, Copyright 2013 Cain Publications, Inc.
Remember when we were kids? Well, us males, anyway. A common 12-year-old male’s question to his fellow 12-year-olds was something to the effect “Would you rather _________ or ______?” It was a choice between two gross and disgusting options. (Males, you can fill in the blanks because I am sure you remember the various options.) That was our introduction to the false dilemma fallacy. We had to choose between two objectionable things, without the choice of “neither.” In fact, if we objected that neither was something we wanted, the 12-year-old asking the question would tell us we didn’t have that option: we had to choose.
Today, all grown up now, we see this come up in poll questions. The June 6-9, 2013 poll by the Pew Research Center illustrates that. They asked, for all intents and purposes, “Would you rather have terrorists running around loose or give up your freedom?” as if there were no other option. Pollsters are good at disguising questions that if worded differently would elicit a response of “neither” or “I’m not going to answer such a ridiculous question.” This one was worded “NSA is getting secret court orders to track calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism.” Is that acceptable or not acceptable?
We can be safe from terrorism any number of ways that do not include intruding on people’s privacy and violating the Fourth Amendment right against illegal searches.
The question is a false dilemma because built in to that question is the requirement that it must be investigating terrorism or not investigating terrorism. The option is keeping our Fourth Amendment rights or not. No other option. A more objective way to word it would have been “Which of the following methods do you feel the government should use to investigate terrorism while still abiding by our constitutional guarantees against illegal or intrusive searches?” Then it could list several methods, one of which would be tracking people’s phone use. We have to wonder how that would come out.