So some Men’s Rightsers are up in arms because the powers that be at Wikipedia just deleted a page devoted to a phony “logical fallacy” invented by a friend of Paul Elam. According to the now-deleted Wikipedia page, “the apex fallacy refers to judging groups primarily by the success or failure at those at the top rungs (the apex, such as the 1%) of society, rather than collective success of a group.”
In other words, it’s a convenient way for MRAs to hand-wave away any evidence that men, collectively, have more power than women. Mention that men hold the overwhelming majority of powerful positions in the worlds of politics and business, and, I don’t know, podiatry, and MRAs will shout “apex fallacy” and do a little victory dance. Rich and powerful dudes don’t count, because of poor and powerless dudes!
On the Wikipedia discussion page devoted to the question of deleting the apex fallacy entry, one Wikipedia editor – who voted “strong delete” – noted that
This is men’s rights activist astroturfing. The guy above [in the discussion] isn’t posting examples of its usage because they’re all on websites showcasing brutal misogyny and hateful ignorance, like A Voice for Men.
He’s got a point. When I did a Google search for the term, my top ten results (which may be different than your top ten results, because that’s how Google works) included posts on The Spearhead; The Men’s Rights subreddit; Genderratic (TyphonBlue’s blog); Emma the Emo’s Emo Musings; and a tweet from the little-followed Twitter account of someone calling himself Astrokid MHRA. In other words, five of the ten results were MRA sites, several of them with explicit links to A Voice for Men. (That “MHRA” is a dead giveaway.)
The top result, meanwhile, linked to a post on the blog of the delightful Stonerwithaboner, who doesn’t consider himself an MRA, as far as I know. But he’s still kind of a shit, and he did recently confess to being (as I suspected) the person who was going around posting comments on manosphere sites as David H. F*cktrelle, Male Feminist Extraordinaire ™.
So, in other words , I think it’s fair to say that the term “apex fallacy” has not yet achieved academic or philosophical respectability just yet.
The deleted Wikipedia page attributes the term “apex fallacy” to Helen Smith, a psychologist who is a longtime friend to A Voice for Men, and dates it to an interview Smith gave to the odious Bernard Chapin in 2008.
But the idea seems to be a simple reworking of a bad idea that’s been floating around in Men’s Rights circles for a lot longer than that.
Back in the 1990s, New Zealand Men’s Rights Activist Peter Zohrab came up with what he called the “Frontman Fallacy,” a notion he spread via the alt.mens-rights newsgroup on Usenet and elsewhere; the term has been widely adopted in Men’s Rights circles since then. As Zohrab defined the term,
the Frontman Fallacy is the mistaken belief that people (men, specifically) who are in positions of authority in democratic systems use their power mainly to benefit the categories of people (the category of “men”, in particular) that they belong to themselves.
So, in other words, if you mention that men hold the overwhelming majority of powerful positions in the worlds of politics, business, and podiatry, MRAs will shout out “frontman fallacy” and do a little victory dance. Rich and powerful dudes don’t count, because of poor and powerless dudes!
Like the extremely similar “apex fallacy,” this idea is rather too silly and facile to count as a real fallacy, but it has proven quite popular with MRAs. Looking through the google search results for “frontman fallacy,” I see links to a wide assortment of MRA sites using the term, including AVFM, Genderratic, Stand Your Ground, Backlash.com, Toysoldier, Mensactivism.org, Pro-Male Anti-Feminist Tech, Fathersmanifesto.net, Mensaid.com, and some others. Like “apex fallacy” it hasn’t made much progress outside the Men’s Rights movement.
What’s interesting about this to me is that this is not the only bad idea that Peter Zohrab has ever had.
Indeed, Zohrab had some extremely bad ideas about Marc Lepine, the woman-hating antifeminist who murdered 14 women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989.
While Zohrab, to my knowledge, never explicitly justified Lepine’s killings, he described the massacre in one notorious internet posting as an “Extremist Protest Against Media Censorship.” Of Lepine himself, he wrote
I bet you don’t know he wasn’t a misogynist – because you have been conned by the media (as usual). In fact, he was a Men’s Rights activist (albeit an extremist one), and one of the things he was protesting about was media censorship.
Zohrab went on to say that it was clear from Lepine’s writings – or at least writing alleged to have been written by him — that
he [was] against Feminists — not against women — he clearly states that he is protesting against various issues which are aspects of Feminist sexism.
Indeed, Zohrab seems not only sympathetic towards Lepine’s “cause” but seems to feel that he was being unfairly misrepresented:
The write-ups on Marc Lepine concentrate on character-assassination. They take things out of context, in the same way that fathers are slandered in the divorce/family court, in order to deprive them of custody or access. …
Marc Lepine was not only not sexist, as the media stated – he was actually fighting sexism!
Lots of MRAs love talking about the “frontman fallacy” or the new and improved “apex fallacy.” They don’t seem much interested in talking about Zohrab himself.
Like it or not, MRAs, this man is one of the leading figures in the emergence of the Men’s Rights movement online, and in the intellectual history of the movement, such as it is.
If I were a bit more paranoid, I might wonder if the emergence of the “apex fallacy” was some sort of an attempt as a rebranding, an attempt to push the “frontman fallacy” and its creator, the old, odd duck Peter Zohrab, with his embarrassingly sympathetic feelings toward a mass murderer of women, down that famous memory hole.
P.S. Don’t read the comments to that MensActivism.org posting, unless you want to get really depressed.
@Kitteh:
Kant actually makes a lot more sense when you think about what he was trying to get at in these terms:
Is lying bad because there are consequences, or does lying itself do something bad to you?
I.e., he’s trying to untangle the idea of sin and the idea of ethics. Because a lot of what we think about morality is tangled up in the idea of sin. And the axe murderer out to get your mother is right there at the heart of it.
Do the consequences of your words matter, or do the content of your words matter?
Welp, we’re post-modern. We can actually sit back and say ‘why not evaluate both?’ Kant was all ‘hey, if you lie, you’re a liar, and thus have no moral standing left!’
Because sin, duh.
Sometimes it does make me want to tear my hair out, in a completely utilitarian way.
But these days I interrogate deities for any hint of megalomania; friendliness is only a sign that they want you to sign away your soul willingly, it doesn’t mean they’re any nicer than Cthulu! Your soul is a tasty, delicious treat–never trust those who’ve tasted souls before!
(that last paragraph makes loads and loads of sense to me. If it doesn’t make sense to you, there are some lovely well-written books I mostly enjoyed you might like to try)
PS: my view of Kant may be colored by my utterly Utilitarian leanings. For-seriously, it is unlike any other 101-level philosophy class bullshit I’ve ever played with. You’re allowed to say things like “well, what would be the immediate consequences of this decision? On me? On other people? On society as a whole? What would be the long-term consequences?” Throwing in questions like that is totally and utterly game-changing to the whole idea of philosophy.
I mean, for certain values of the word “philosophy.” Not all philosophy is the kind of 101-level bullshitting that seemed like the most important thing in the world when I was 18.
So, I’m still reading the Joe-splosion. And Shiraz sez:
….somebody made a poo joke about this, right? Somebody? (I’ll keep catching up and find out, and if not I’ll go ahead and be That Guy)
Kitteh’s: Kant argued that the error was that, by lying (to anyone, about anything) you were denying their agency; converting them to means, not treating them as ends.
It’s a fundamental problem in any analysis of ethics. Utilitarianism is (in this regard) worse. Because utilitarianism requires that lots of people be treated as means to others’ ends; since making more people happy is good. Under strict utilitarianism (Yes, I’m looking at you Matt Yglesias) the collapse of the clothing factory in Bangladesh is trivial, not a crime at all, because more people are made happy by cheap shirts than suffered in the collapse. To change the enforcement of regulations would be to diminish their happiness, and so is immoral.
Strict utilitarianism makes Kant look great. It’s the refuge of many Libertarians. What it reifies is even less plausible than Kant’s reifications (the rational actor).
Kant is a slave to duty, the Utilitarian is slave to power.
Kant on women is problematic; in that he was a creature of his age, but also ahead of his time. Kant invented the concept of objectification.
Hey Aaliyah, fellow Kantian and Korsgaard-fan here. Wrote my entire dissertation on a Kantian/neo-Kantian idea of the connection between freedom and morality, that I originally came across in Korsgaard…
I think Kant got a lot of particulars wrong when applying his ethics to concrete cases. I think he was wrong in claiming that duties derived from the categorical imperative always give you consistent guidance; I think it’s clear that duties can clash. I don’t think having duties and being the object of duties are two sides of the same coin as Kant though, and I think Korsgaard has convincingly argued that they come apart and that we therefore owe duties TO other animals although they do not have duties to us. There’s also no clear rule in Kant’s writings for how specific you ought to make your maxims (the concrete examples Kant gives of maxims are sometimes fairly specific, like “when in financial trouble, borrow money with a false promise”, sometimes he talks about “lying” as if it’s ONE thing). An action could come out as right or wrong depending on how detailed a description you make of it. AND finally I don’t think the attempt to infer a set of moral rules from mere rational agency is watertight.
What I think he does get right is
– He gets things in the right order. First there are agents, agents with rational thinking, who gotta decide what to do. Because we have to so decide, we need some kind of principles to act on. Since rationality is a social phenomenon, we need universalisable principles. Thus, morality. Kantian duties do involve producing certain consequences (you can’t really act at all unless you try to produce something) – for instance, he says it’s a duty to help others, and then you try to produce the consequence of the person getting helped, and actually,
Kantian duty ethics and rule utilitarianism actually aren’t that different (you could check out Derek Parfit’s latest for a lengthy argument to that effect) in what they tell people that they ought to do. I think the major difference is that utilitarians get the cart before the horse; they think that first there are values, things that just are valuable, be it happiness or preference-satisfaction or a whole list of abstract presumably intrinsically valuable things; from this follows that the more there is of this stuff in the world, the better; and from this follows that we agents ought to try to produce this stuff, and thus we have morality. I don’t think that’s how morality WORKS. Morality starts with agents that need to decide what to do, not with some abstract intrinsically valuable stuff that’s just there.
– I do think that duties can clash and sometimes you have to break a weaker duty to comply with a stronger one (in this I agree with Ross rather than Kant), BUT I think that the utility calculations of act utilitarianism is bogus. Act utilitarianism allows that one person is put through terrible suffering in order to increase the utility (happiness, preferences or however you define utility) of a large amount of people just a little bit. If the victim is made to suffer in a way that gives him 100 negative utility points, and a thousand sadistic spectators of his suffering gets just 1 positive utility point each, and if the alternative was doing nothing, you ought to make this person suffer. Sure, one can argue (fairly plausibly) that this isn’t gonna happen in real life; still, I think the example shows that utility calculations can’t be the heart of morality.
– Overall, I think respecting others is more basic than making people happy, although they usually coincide.
Regarding the fact that Kant had prejudices against women, for instance, it’s the same with most historical philosophers. And usually (in the case of Kant, that’s definitely so) you can easily shave the prejudices off from the philosophical core without losing anything.
This is why I love this place. Pecunium and Dvärghundspossen just simu-posted long, involved critiques of Kant detailing what they think he got right and they think he got wrong… and just offhand, it looks like both are fairly comprehensive, such that there’s lots of overlap.
I love this place.
And, to be fair to Kant, he was completely opposed to colonialism despite being a racist who thought POC:s were inferior to whites, because he didn’t think the fact that someone is less intelligent or a little less rational than you are give you the right to take over their country. He also thought it proper if women freely decided that there husbands made most of the decisions in the household since husbands are better suited for this task, but the husband can’t just force the wife to comply with him, since once again, even if someone is inferior to you in intelligence or rationality you must treat them with respect.
So yes, he really had prejudices, but he was also pretty consistent when it came to the importance of treating others with respect.
Thanks, Howard. Yeah, funny how we posted simultaneously. 🙂
Kitteh’s: As to why things like Kant matter in philosophy, I’ll quote Ruth Macklin, “The advantage of having a theory, as philosophers have argued at length, is that it enables particular judgments to
be systematic and well grounded, instead of ad hoc.”
Kant really suffers from having been 1: German, 2: a bit abstuse, and 3: of an age which we don’t really understand (the moreso for having been in the Germanies).
He is being translated, at least twice, just to get to English (once from his time, and once from German). That he is also speaking in the language of philosophy just adds another layer of difficulty.
Dvärghundspossen: Have you read Kant and the Utilitarians (Tore Nordenstam, Ethical Perspectives, 2001)?
Howard, I think you’d like it.
Yeesssss, this! Because I’ve found that when somebody says they’re Utilitarian it either means they’re a thoughtful person who is trying to work out the long-term effects of actions on society… (Ozy, who used to post here, took that stance) and the Glibertarians who handwave it all with ‘greater good,’ ‘happiness for more,’ and garbage like that.
Also, the SMBC comic about the happiness monster… let me see if I can find that.
Sorry, “Utility Monster“.
Pecunium, I’ll see if I can get that through my library.
Howard… the link is to a PDF.
@Pecunium: Nordenstams critique of the idea that Kant and rule utilitarianism aren’t that different after all seems to be
a) that Kant, unlike utilitarians, doesn’t begin with a concept of what’s good (which I pointed out above; I think Kant get things in the right order by starting with an agent who gotta decide what to do, rather than with some idea of what’s good in itself). This is an important difference on the theoretical level, but doesn’t necessarily matter much when asking which concrete actions are right or wrong.
Overall, Kant does moral philosophy in a very different way from a utilitarian, in that I agree. I agree that the similarities between a utilitarian and a Kantian are firstly on an extremely abstract and vague level (moral rules are universal) but I also think there are similarities if we move down to a very concrete level and ask what’s right in a particular situation, on versions of utilitarianism and Kantianism respectively that are sophisticated enough to be plausible (although Nordenstam might think “diluted enough to be uninteresting”, perhaps). In the middle level, so to speak, I agree that there are really big differences.
b) Kant thought rightness was determined by what actions one can consistently will (and he thought reasons or maxims are by their nature universal, which I think there’s some truth in – when people want to make an exception of themselves they pretty much always come up with some reason why they or their circumstances are different from others in some purportedly morally relevant way). HOWEVER, I agree with all those critics who think that Kant couldn’t get as much substantial morality as we need to determine what’s right in various situations from this pretty meagre rightness requirement, and here I might be in disagreement with Nordenstam. Even if you agree that it’s inconsistent to hold that it’s right to lie to get money when in financial trouble, Kant almost agrees himself that it’s not EXACTLY inconsistent to follow the maxim of only caring for oneself and never helping others, and yet he wants to claim that this is immoral. So he says that nobody can seriously will a state of affairs where everyone follows that maxim, since the agent zirself might get in trouble one day, and would presumably want help then. In praxis, although that’s not what he sets out to do, he slides towards taking consequences into account in a more utilitarian fashion now and then.
I think Ted Honderich was right when he claimed that the really dividing difference between on the one hand all kinds of consequentualism, on the other hand all kinds of deontology, and on the third hand (three hands?) all kinds of virtue ethics, is this: What the respective moral school take as the most basic layer of morality, and what they consider to be merely derived from this basic layer. Every moral system say something about what you ought to try to produce, what kind of principles you ought to use when deciding what to do, and what kind of person you ought to be, but they differ in what they consider as more basic than the rest.
@Howard, that was a great comic. Actually, a utilitarian professor at my department argued that this scenario isn’t a problem for utilitarianism after all. Felix is pretty far from any real human being. If there were a Felix in real life, perhaps we’d regard someone as different from us as close to divine, and it wouldn’t seem strange that we ought to sacrifice everything for his sake.
I stand unconvinced.
Yeah, the actual fix to the utility monster problem is to slightly reword your goal to “ideal happiness levels for as many people as possible.”
Plus, doesn’t more money make you happier, so a few billionaires make up for poor people? Nooooope. The utility of money for happiness can be measured, and any raise over 75,000$ a year is marginal and can be discounted.
What does 75,000$ a year actually mean? I crunched those numbers, and for most people that means A) enough money to meet immediate physical needs, B) enough money to have health insurance so you don’t worry about the immediate future, C) enough money to plan for retirement.
So realistically we would worry about providing that to everybody before we got to making Felix happy.
But Felix is funny as all getout because he is the epitome of the sloppily-worded-philosophy-loophole.
Ah, it is a link to a PDF! I saw the title, though “book,” and went no further. Intellectual incuriosity, thou shalt be the end of me yet!
This is a problem I have with the principle of utility as well. But to be fair, John Stuart Mill’s political philosophy, which rests on utilitarianism, is a pretty good defense of rights and liberty. I seriously doubt Mill would condone what happened in Bangladesh.
My biggest problem with utilitarianism is its grounds for justification. Mill’s justification for utilitarianism strikes me as extremely shaky and specious. I fail to see how arguing that the only thing desirable is happiness is enough to make the demands of utilitarianism binding.
My alpha vibrator is shaped like a mighty dolphin, the domliest doms of the sea. We had a *terrific* evening.
Dolphins are perverts!
…deep discussion of philoso-whaa? ;D
Says the man who refused to accept statistics from the fucking CDC, because he won’t read anything “written by a feminist”.
I love how you think you’re the one with any credibility here.
Or that credibility even matters here, on this site that specifically says it’s about mocking stuff…
I’ll admit to favoring utilitarian approaches (and rule utilitarianism, specifically), though it’s been decades since I’ve done any formal reading on the subject. I don’t think the Felix issue really undermines that position, because in general, it ignores variables in ‘personal happiness’–that is, Felix’s happiness being so ridiculously easy to trigger wouldn’t be factored into any decision.
It also addresses situations like in the first panel, since living under a rule system where you have no assurance your spouse is not cheating on you is going to create a general level of anxiety about relationship security that isn’t going to be adequately countered by a comparatively small number of cheaters.
In addition, I think there’s a school of utilitarianism–and if there’s not, there bloody well should be–where unhappiness (or, more precisely, misery) inflicted is weighted differently than happiness derived. That would deal well with most of the cases involving sweatshops (which inflict a great deal of misery on a small handful of people in order to provide an almost negligible level of happiness on a hoard of people).
Exactly! In most Christian-influenced worldviews your own personal state of morality is such a highly rendered important thing–even once you’ve decoupled from the original reason for that–that I think folks who are still trying to get at the whole moral or virtue ethics, getting that state of self to perfection really need to grapple with WHY that’s more basic than the effect you have on the world.
Actually getting down and wrestling with the why is something I didn’t even touch till I was over 30. Part of that was because I had a religious answer before then, so it was easy to gloss over. After that I actually had to consider it, and that was harder.
A belated thank you to Aaliyah for the glittery FUCK CANCER, which I shared with friend who said it made her LOL in a way that amused her physical therapist. 😀