What I want to know is why would any sensible people allow the US petrochemical industry annually to produce 7.2 million metric tons of a poison that causes liver, lung, and brain cancer, and to distribute it as polyvinyl chloride in water pipes, gutters, rubber duckies, and My Little Pony dolls?Īnother surprising example: In an effort to reduce the town's use of fossil fuels, the city of Eugene, Oregon prohibited natural gas infrastructure in new residential construction. Finally, politicians, commentators and outraged citizens all posed these questions: how will we punish the railroads? And how can we make railroads safer? A familiar pattern followed: lamentations over the derailing a cascade of reporters a debate in Congress. When it is burned, it creates dioxin, another nasty carcinogen that now permeates the town. Vinyl chloride, a flammable petroleum product, is a potent carcinogen. Thirty-eight rail cars filled with vinyl chloride derailed and caught fire in East Palestine, Ohio. How dangerous was the Ohio chemical train derailment? I quiz my students: Explain, give examples. Time after time, the real issue stands before us, and we find ourselves baying after some side issue of far less importance. We shouldn't keep falling for it.īut we do. If our collective philosophical literacy were better, we might notice that this fallacy seems to be working spectacularly well for the fossil-fuel industry, the petrochemical industry, and a bunch of other bad actors who would like to throw us off the trail that would lead us fully to grasp their transgressions.
As a philosophy professor, this is how I explain the fallacy to my students: If the argument is not going your opponent's way, a common strategy - though a fallacious and dishonorable one - is to divert attention from the real issue by raising an issue that is only tangentially related to the first. This practice became the namesake of one of the best-known types of fallacies, the red herring fallacy. Thus did dogs learn not to be lured into barking up the wrong tree. If any dog veered off to follow the stench of the red herrings, the gamekeeper beat him with a stick. Red herrings are smoked fish that have been aged to a ruddy, stinking ripeness.
Once the dogs were baying along the rabbit's scent, the gamekeeper ran across the trail ahead of them, dragging a gunny sack of red herrings. In medieval times, gamekeepers trained dogs to the hunt by setting them on the trail of a dead rabbit they had dragged through the forest.
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