Justified True Belief

(●) Special pleading holds everyone to a rule except your own case, with no relevant reason for the exemption. + The name comes from the law courts, but a child knows the move long before the name: the rule is for other people. It gets made about parking, about diets, and about the cause of the universe. (1) The move is a rule with a hole cut in it for the speaker. - Everyone at the residents' meeting agrees the rule: nobody parks on the grass verge, because cars churn it to mud. Then Mrs. Hale explains that her case is different. Her drive is short, and she has a great many visitors. And so, she concludes, the rule is for the others. - Everything she says is true, and her car churns the verge exactly as much as anyone's. She has named a difference, just not one that touches the reason for the rule. - The reasons someone offers are the premises, and what they are meant to support is the conclusion. In special pleading the premise is a rule everyone accepts, the conclusion is an exemption nobody else would get, and nothing in between earns it. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls that a failure of consistency: a principle applied to every case but the one that interests the arguer, which it covers too. (2) It tempts because real exceptions get made all day. - The ambulance goes through the red light, and nobody calls that pleading: the reason is stated, it applies to everyone in the same position, and it outweighs the reason for the rule. That is a rule with a scope, and every good rule has one. - The fallacy borrows that feel. From the inside, "my case is different" and "my case is mine" are nearly impossible to tell apart: our own circumstances are the ones we know in detail, and detail feels like a reason. Ask whether the neighbour with the same short drive would get the exemption, and the feeling usually goes. (3) The name, and the cousins. - In the English common law, from the 1680s, a special plea did not deny the facts but brought in new ones to avoid their consequence: yes, I struck him, but he was breaking into my house. That was legitimate, and still is. Outside the courts the phrase became the everyday word for arguing a rule for one side only. - The double standard is the same move seen from outside: one measure for us, a stricter one for them. "Their scandal shows what they really are. Ours was one bad apple." - The ad hoc rescue (Latin for "for this", made up for the occasion) is an exemption invented on the spot to save a theory from a counterexample. The psychic whose powers fail in the laboratory because "skeptics in the room block the energy" has added a rule whose only job is to explain the failure. No true Scotsman, a fallacy in its own right, is the same rescue performed on a definition. Therefore, saying your case is different is no fallacy, since sometimes it is. Special pleading is saying it without a difference that would count for anyone else in your position.

(●) Simple example: "Speeding is dangerous, I know. But I'm a good driver." + The rule is granted in the first sentence and taken back in the second. Half the motorway says it. (1) What is claimed and what is offered. - The claim is that the speed limit does not apply to this driver. The support is that he is a good one, and he may well be. (2) Why the support does no work. - The limit exists because of stopping distances, reaction times, and what a collision does to a body at seventy rather than fifty. None of that consults skill: a good driver at seventy needs the same distance to stop as a bad one. - Try the swap. Every driver believes he is a good driver, so an exemption granted to him is granted to all of them, and the rule is gone. (3) What the reply was really doing. - It was keeping the rule for other people and the speed for himself. That is the comfort of the fallacy: you never have to say the rule is wrong, which would take an argument, and you never have to obey it either.

(●) A critic says: "The universe is just there, and that's all." + Bertrand Russell said it in 1948, in a BBC radio debate with the Jesuit philosopher Frederick Copleston, and it has been said across kitchen tables ever since. In its best published form it is not a fallacy at all. (1) What is being argued. - Copleston had argued that a world made of things which each depend on something else needs a cause outside itself. Russell's reply, in his own words: "I should say that the universe is just there, and that's all." The claim is that the universe needs no explanation. - Russell was not being lazy. His reason, when he gave it, was that "cause" is a word we learned from relations inside the world, and it may not reach the world as a whole. A rule proved on the parts does not automatically hold of the whole: every man has a mother, and yet the human race has no mother. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - Repeated without Russell's reason, as it usually is, the sentence is a double standard. The speaker demands an explanation for every star and every event inside the universe, then exempts the one thing that contains them all, on no stated ground beyond needing the exemption. That is Mrs. Hale's verge. - Copleston came straight back: "I can't see how you can rule out the legitimacy of asking the question how the total, or anything at all comes to be there. Why something rather than nothing, that is the question?" Declining to ask a question is not an answer to it. - Try the mirror. A Christian who says "God is just there, and that's all" is doing the same thing, and a critic is right to say so. Either way, the stopping point has to be earned. (3) The sound version. - Graham Oppy makes the strong form in Arguing about Gods and The Best Argument against God. The theist says God exists necessarily, meaning God could not have failed to exist and so needs no cause. Very well, says Oppy: let the naturalist say the same of the first state of the natural world. Now each side has one uncaused stopping point, and the question is which is more principled: which explains more and assumes less. Nobody there is pleading, because both are arguing. - The real fight is on its own ground: the contingency argument (a world of things which might not have existed needs something that must exist) and the Kalam (whatever begins to exist has a cause, and the universe began). (4) How to answer it. - "Fair enough. But you would not let me say 'God is just there' and stop. So tell me why the universe is the one thing that needs no reason, and then we can compare your stopping point with mine." See also: Natural Theology: The Kalam Argument Natural Theology: Leibniz' Contingency Argument

(●) A Christian says: "The miracles in the Bible really happened. The ones other religions claim are frauds, or demons." + The same move from our side of the table, and more common than we like to admit. The Christian who says it means both halves sincerely; the trouble is what connects them. (1) What is being argued. - The claim is that the Gospel miracles are historical and the rivals' are not: the splitting of the moon in Islamic tradition, or the eleven who put their names to the golden plates of the Book of Mormon. The support, where it is stated at all, is that ours come from the true religion, which a Muslim can say back word for word. - Christians have never held that only God's side produces wonders. Pharaoh's magicians matched Moses (Exodus 7:11), the law warns of a prophet whose sign comes true and then preaches other gods (Deuteronomy 13:1-3), and Jesus said that "false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect" (Matthew 24:24). So a Christian may judge a rival wonder real and not from God. The fallacy is judging without a test. (2) Where the fallacy sits. - The rule at work is "a well-attested report of a miracle is credible". Applied to the Gospels it is granted; applied to the rival it is withdrawn, and the only difference named is whose religion the report supports, the very thing the miracle was meant to help decide. - David Hume saw the opening in 1748. Every religion has its miracles, he argued in the Enquiry (section X, part ii), each offered as proof of its own religion, so rival miracles count as evidence against one another. A Christian with no criterion has no reply, and on that sentence Hume is right. - Try the mirror. "The Qur'an's signs are real, and the Gospel miracles are legends." Every Christian can hear what is wrong with that, and it is the same thing. (3) The sound version. - State one evidential standard, apply it to every miracle claim, and accept what follows. How early are the sources? How many independent witnesses, and what did they stand to lose? Michael Licona's The Resurrection of Jesus (2010) sets out historical criteria before testing the resurrection against them, and Timothy and Lydia McGrew's "The Argument from Miracles" weighs the witness evidence as probability. In both, the standard comes first, which is the order the fallacy reverses. - Accepting what follows cuts both ways. Some Christian miracle stories, medieval and modern, are thinly attested, and a Christian should say so. Hume himself granted "such a cloud of witnesses" to the healings at the tomb of the Abbé Pâris, and rejected them anyway as impossible. That is not pleading: his principle was stated in advance and applied to every miracle, Christian ones included. Whether "miracles are impossible" assumes the very thing in dispute is another quarrel. (4) How to answer it. - "Hold on. What test are we using, and would we accept it from a Muslim about the moon? Let's state the test first and then see which reports pass it." See also: CE / Resurrection: Minimal Facts Argument (Habermas) World Religions / Mormonism: Lack of Credible Witnesses

(●) A charge that misses: "The Kalam says everything has a cause and then makes an exception for God. That is special pleading." + Russell gave the charge its classic form against the older first-cause argument in a lecture of 1927. It fails, and seeing why shows where the line runs between a special exception and a principled one. (1) What the charge claims. - The Kalam runs: whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; so the universe has a cause. The charge is that the first premise is really "everything has a cause", and that God is exempted only because the conclusion needs him to be. Russell put it this way: "If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God." - At its strongest the charge is a demand that the theist play by his own rule. That is fair, and it is exactly what was asked of Mrs. Hale. (2) Why the charge misses. - The premise was never "everything has a cause". It is "whatever begins to exist has a cause", and the reason behind it is that nothing comes from nothing: a thing that starts needs something to start it. God is held not to begin, so the rule never reached him, the way the parking rule never reached the ambulance. - The restriction was stated in advance and applies to everyone, which makes it principled rather than convenient. Whatever caused time to begin cannot itself have begun in time, and William Lane Craig and James Sinclair make that case. The same shelter is granted to the other side: a naturalist who says the universe never began, or that its first state exists necessarily, is not pleading either. - Copi, Cohen and Rodych name the mirror-image mistake. The fallacy of accident applies a general rule to a case it does not properly govern: the ambulance is fined for running the light. Special pleading refuses a rule whose reason plainly covers the case. The test to carry away: state the rule, state the difference that exempts your case, and ask whether you would grant the other side the same. A relevant difference stated in advance is a scope, not an exception. (3) What the charge would need to be true. - It would need to show that "begins to exist" was chosen because it exempts God, not because anything supports it. Wes Morriston presses close to that, asking whether a timeless, beginningless cause is even coherent, and whether the intuition behind the premise stops where the theist needs it to. That is a real question, and naming a fallacy cannot settle it. Only the arguments themselves can. - One more thing. Even if the charge landed, it would show that one argument had failed, not that the universe is uncaused. (4) How to answer it. - "The premise is not 'everything has a cause'. It is 'whatever begins to exist has a cause'. If you think God began, tell me why. If you think the universe never began, tell me why. Either way we are arguing, and neither of us is pleading." See also: Natural Theology: The Kalam Argument