Variables in Arguments as a Source of Confusion

It seems to be known under the name of the equal treatment fallacy in various blogs and articles, although none of them are from particularly respectable sources. Other examples are the right of homosexuals to marry a member of the opposite gender, the right of soviet citizens to criticize the president of the USA, and Anatole France's famous statement that "in its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread".

I'm reminded of Douglas Hofstadter's bit about "do this!"

If Alice touches her finger to her nose and says "Do this!", should Bob interpret this as an instruction to touch Alice's nose, or to touch Bob's nose?

My usual approach to this kind of argument is to go meta... specifically, to ask what it is we are trying to achieve.

If it really is "freedom" expressed in generic abstract units, then sure, they have the same number of units of freedom, and that's all we care about... but this seems to describe precisely nobody in the real world. If it's something else for which freedom is a usually-convenient proxy, this is a good time to unpack the proxy and think about what we actually want.

In the specific case, I would likely ask "why is it valuable to a Linux user to be able to modify Linux source code? Do OSX users get the same value out of being able to modify Linux source code? Do we care about freedom even when it's valueless? Do we care about value?"

Clearly different people value different freedoms differently, so this has to be taken into account.

A bit of a (fake) formalization: Total freedom of a person_i = sum over j (freedom_j * usefulness of freedom_j to the person_i).

This takes care of most "gays can marry straight" arguments.

Fear me, for I applied linear algebra to ethics! Fi=U{ij}f_j

Oh, oh, and this can be extended to estimate freedoms of whole groups of people, only now we sum over all people and weigh each person's freedom by their usefulness/importance to the society. It's a dot product!

Oh, even more, let's maximize the total freedom, given some reasonable constraints, which we assume to be linear, Voila, simplex method! Look what we get for free: the optimum is almost always a vertex, something like a utility monster or a group of them. Damn, and it started so promising! Oh well, back to the drawing board on that last part.

Fun politics variant:

"Disallowing gay marriage does not limit freedom - a gay man can marry a woman and a lesbian woman can marry a man, just like straight people."

Relevant Language Log post

"Same" means "different".

When someone calls two things "the same", the real claim is that the two things (which are necessarily different, else they would be one thing) both fall into some category. When they are called "different", a line is being drawn between them, instead of around both.

There are many categories you can use to unite or split any collection of things in any way you like. Which of these categories matter and which are irrelevant doodles on the map cannot be answered merely by pointing to their existence.

The main flaw in both arguments is the implication that "freedom" is a scalar and is terminally valuable to everyone. There's lots of dimensionality to one's ability to choose various options, which prevents a meaningful comparison.

There's no disagreement over what each is allowed to do, the disagreement is over the value to each of those choices. And it's not much disagreement.

The OS X user has the same freedoms as the Linux user: both can modify Linux but can't modify OS X. However, the ability to modify Linux is more useful to the Linux user than to the OS X user, and the inability to modify OS X is more of a nuisance for the OS X user than for the Linux user.

I think this is much less a moral issue than the parallel cases mentioned elsewhere in the discussion, because no one owes you an OS you can modify in the same way as you're arguably owed the right to marry a partner you can love, the right to criticize the government that has power over you, or the right to find food to eat and a place to sleep, and because you can switch OS much more readily than sexual orientation, government, or level of wealth. It's for that reason that those instances are well framed as instances of inequality or even inequity in how different people are treated, whereas the differences between OS X and Linux are differences between those OSes rather than between particular people.

To whatever extent people are unable to use a different OS, those moral issues reappear and a framing in terms of inequality between people becomes more relevant. If everyone were assigned an OS at birth and forcibly prevented from using another, then this would be just like those other cases.

I think I might describe this more as equivocation between freedom as scope of local action and freedom as degree of global constraint: we're used to dealing with the word in terms of the categories of action that governments or cultural forces exclude from us, de facto or de jure, and not in terms of what the local environment allows us to do. (Prohibitions on shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater are rarely held to infringe free speech, to give a famous negative example.).

I'd hazard a guess that this is partly due to the common use of "freedom" as a political buzzword, almost always in the constraint sense.

I used to hear something similar in debates over gay marriage:

Gay person: "I only want to have the same right as a straight person: the right to marry the person I love."

Gay marriage opponent: "No no, you already have the same right as a straight person: the right to marry a person of the opposite sex. If you also want the right to marry a person of the same sex, you're asking for extra rights, special privileges just because you're gay. And that simply wouldn't be fair."

Edit: bramflakes beat me to it.

This is closely related to a failure mode of communication discussed here recently. The error made by the "fascists" and "rakes" in the linked post is a special case of the OP's error of assumed variables: in this case the hidden variable is whose morality applies.

My guess is that these miscommunications often arise from inadequate empathy or theory of mind. It's very common for assertions to have hidden or assumed variables that are reflexive, that is, they refer to the speaker. Some people have the ability to automatically transfer the hidden referent when changing such an assertion's subject, and others must to reminded to do so. (And indeed, in some cases some will argue that it's not appropriate to transfer the referent!)

The second argument is technically correct but misses the implicit point of the first. If the first said, "It is best to use software which is free", perhaps with some further justification, then the second argument would not address it.

I don't think that's a form of confusion that people can have without some serious mind-killing going on. If you can't figure out how to stop being mind-killed, no amount of arguing is going to help. If you can, getting around this problem is trivial. Either way, there's no point in bringing it to attention.