— Kevin B Korb, 30 Aug 2022
How often do we hear things like “What’s the point? I’m only one person. What I do won’t make a difference.” I most recently heard this on ABC Radio National, in the context of an argument for not … I don’t even recall what. No matter: this Inertia Argument is a nearly universal prescription for inaction, servicable on every occasion, from a refusal to vote, to saving one’s energy from social action for an alternative engagement with e-sports, to ex-PM Scott Morrison’s repeated assertion that as a contributor of around 1% of CO2 omissions Australia should be exempt from taking any serious climate action. The Inertia Argument is a Swiss army knife for the inert, who prefer not to be seen as shirkers, but instead as rational non-actors.
The logic of the argument is impeccable: in most cases where it’s employed, the action of a single human (or a single nation) would barely shift a needle; therefore, nothing should be done.
Interestingly, there is an equally compelling kind of argument that runs exactly in reverse while also advising inaction, the so-called Slippery Slope Argument. That is, if you should be willing to shift your position ever so slightly downhill, then you will inevitably slip and slide all the way to the bottom and a spectacular crash. For example, if you allow a blood alcohol concentration in drivers of, say, 0.01%, then before long you’ll be allowing 2% and then 5%. Or, if you allow abortions up to 6 weeks, then soon third trimester abortions will be legal, followed by infanticide. Oh wait! These are counterexamples! In both cases, societies have had no trouble at all intervening at some point, drawing a dividing line which, while being fairly arbitrary compared to microshifts up or down the scale, make for a legal divide that can be enforced and adhered to. So, the slippery slope isn’t nearly as slippery as its scare mongers generally assert.
The idea that Slippery Slope Arguments are compelling and that we must assert a stance of absolutely zero exceptions to a rule in order to maintain rules at all is deluded. It is akin to a common response to being exposed to philosophy by freshmen undergraduates, who often take some principle they’ve been introduced to and apply it without restraint to every case they can dream of. Religious extremists do the same. Either end of the stick — that a rule must be applied universally or not at all — simply exposes the wielder’s naivete, an unwillingness to acknowledge that we live in a world of color, mixtures and gradations, rather than one of black and white.
The Inertia Argument is equally bad, despite having a seductive appeal that leads huge numbers of people into a world of delusional belief. The classic move in argument analysis is to take an argument and find minimal hidden premises (those that strain credulity the least in attributing beliefs to the author of the argument) to make the argument strictly valid, that is, where there is no possibility of the conclusion being false when the premises are true. Finding those hidden premises exposes assumptions the author would, perhaps, prefer listeners to overlook. The Inertia Argument treated thus, goes:
The action of a single actor would have a negligible impact.
[Actions with negligible impact are not worth doing.]
Therefore, nothing should be done.
The bracketed sentence is the hidden premise making this argument valid. At first glance, it may seem innocuous. Certainly, actions which have no impact whatsoever are not worth doing; that’s hardly in dispute. So, why not also those actions with a negligible impact? Surely, they also shouldn’t be done.
The rub is that individually negligible actions are quite often not collectively negligible. Voting is a good example. The chances that your one vote will change the outcome of a large election are less than negligible; it’s akin to your chances of winning a lottery. And yet votes have frequently had dramatic and powerful consequences, throwing out hated corrupt governments, for example. If one Goth or Vandal had decided to attack the Roman Empire, that one barbarian would have died. But when their tribes and friends collectively attacked, even the Roman Empire could not stand. A single Egyptian could have hardly built a noticeable pyramid, but by now I’m sure you get the point.
Individual actions can be coordinated. That’s exactly what societies are for. Even if the efforts of a singleton left a singleton aren’t worth worrying about, the coordinated efforts of multiple singletons are. The employment of the specious Inertia Argument not just against individual action, but against collective action, as in Scott Morrison’s argument, is especially stupid. Collective action is where the payoff is, when the effects of individual actions are negligible.
So, the next time you hear the Inertia Argument used to defend inaction, perhaps you can ask your Arguer friend, “Why not take collective action and get a real payoff?” For example, the right response to Scott Morrison’s Inertia Argument that Australia can’t do anything significant about global warming would have been, “Why can’t Australia lead international action, rather than wallow in national inaction?” Apparently, this question never occurred to Australian journalists.
By the way, the theme that people who rely on argumentative form alone to tell them whether arguments are good or bad are, in fact, displaying very poor argument analysis skills is one you’ll find throughout this blog. Their argumentative world is as impoverished as those who think all rules are absolute and all principles universal.