There's a logical fallacy I've discussed previously on Facebook, but I'm not sure I've ever talked about it here. It deserves revisiting, because not only is it growing, it's now deadly. I've looked, but I've never found it listed among named fallacies. Surely, it deserves a name, but I've not yet come up with a good one.
Here's how it works. We have two people--let's call them Heather and Kristy. Heather and Kristy work at the same business, and there's a fridge in the break room where employees can store their lunches. One day, Heather stole Kristy's lunch. That was a Bad Thing.
Kristy now has the moral high ground. She has been victimized without provocation or justification. Heather had no defensible reason for depriving Kristy of Kristy's lunch, and she did it anyway. There's no equivocating about this. What Heather did to Kristy was wrong. If Kristy wants to make a big, dramatic display of publicly wailing about how mean Heather is, in a bid to get sympathy, she can do that. That's how victim culture works--you win by losing in the most public and pitiful way possible. You gain status and power by being beaten and pitied for it.
So Kristy does this. She wails and mourns her lost lunch and turns everyone against Heather. One might say that, in a sense, Kristy has received her compensation. She's gotten justice already--all the co-workers love her and hate Heather, and all it cost Kristy was a tuna sandwich and a fruit cup.
Still, for some reason, we don't account it that way. Even though Kristy has been awarded social approval and Heather has been sentenced with social scorn, we don't acknowledge that as having any material value. We still say that Heather is just as fully indebted to Kristy as if nobody had raised an eyebrow about the stolen lunch. In our culture of English common law, social standing is not regarded as fungible, outside of defamation lawsuits. As far as we're concerned, Kristy has yet to be made whole. Kristy is still the aggrieved party, and Heather is the scoundrel. Popularity is just a perk, and being regarded as a pariah is just...nature, I guess.
I want to pause here and just examine that a moment. Once upon a time, public shaming was a sentence. People would get locked in the stocks in the public square. Yes, the stocks were physically uncomfortable, but the point of it wasn't pain. It was that you were being publicly humiliated. Everyone who walked past you during the day, in that busiest part of town, would see that you had been bad. They would sneer and harden their hearts, and you would cry. That was the point of it. When people were publicly lashed, yes, it hurt and left scars. But it happened publicly--not just to terrorize the audience into compliance, but also so that they might look upon you judgmentally. Even further back, we have tales of executions by public stoning, where everyone in town would throw rocks at the condemned. These punishments were as much about social rejection by the collective as they were about physical pain and injury.
We mostly don't do that anymore, though. Liberals don't want it because they think it's cruel and unusual to make someone feel bad for being bad, and conservatives don't want it because they think that just making someone feel bad isn't cruel enough. But let's get back to Heather and Kristy.
The Bad Thing score is now Heather-1, Kristy-0. The next day, Kristy steals Heather's lunch. Just yesterday, she was getting all the co-workers to scorn Heather for being a lunch stealer, but now Kristy is a lunch stealer, too. The score is 1-1.
The school of thought that says the social scorn doesn't count for anything would say that Kristy's theft was justified, because she was merely collecting compensation that Heather owed to her. They're even now, right? Heather stole from Kristy, and now Kristy stole an equal amount right back.
Well, Kristy has been compensated for her loss, but has she been compensated for her feeling of being victimized? Has Heather been adequately punished for her act of unprovoked theft? If we look at her social standing among her co-workers, we could say that yes, she has been. But in this culture, that doesn't count. So on Day 3, Kristy steals Heather's lunch again. Surely, justice has now been served, hasn't it? If anything, it's been overkill. Heather took one sandwich and lost two. The old Biblical standard of "an eye for an eye" has been exceeded.
On Day 4, Kristy steals Heather's lunch again, because Kristy is still angry, and her idea of justice is, "I get to punish you until I feel better." That's not justice, of course, which is why it is generally dispensed by dispassionate third parties.
But here's the kicker--Kristy is still publicly denouncing Heather as being a lunch stealer. She's still publicly ranting about what a horrible person Heather is, and the whole foundation of that claim is that Heather is a Lunch Stealer. Someone needs to shake Kristy and say, "Bitch, you're three times the lunch stealer that Heather is! You have no room to talk."
The fallacy I want to address is that arguably by Day 2 and certainly by Day 3, Kristy has lost the morally superior position of Lunch Stealing Victim Who Has Never Stolen A Lunch Herself. As such, she no longer has standing to point a finger at Heather and denounce her as a lunch stealer. You can play the victim, or you can engage in tit-for-tat, but you can't do both. Once you start using lunch-stealing as a weapon to punish your opponent, you have abdicated the claim that Lunch Stealing Is Wrong. You have now shifted away from the position that Lunch-Stealing-Is-Wrong in favor of the claim that I-Am-Entitled-To-Do-This, even if it also means Lunch-Stealing-Is-Okay-When-It's-Justified.
The thing about shifting to a position of Lunch-Stealing-Is-Okay-When-It's-Justified is that maybe Heather felt justified in her original act of theft. Maybe Kristy had wronged Heather in some way, and Heather decided she was going to get back at Kristy by stealing her lunch. As long as we hold to the principle that Stealing-Lunches-Is-Always-Wrong, then Kristy can claim the moral high ground and say that no matter how she might have wronged Heather previously, stealing a lunch was crossing a line, and that nothing justifies such a heinous act. But the moment Kristy starts stealing Heather's lunches, it's no longer logical for her to make that claim. It's hypocritical.
Maybe that's why I can't find it listed among named fallacies. It does already have a name: hypocrisy. I think maybe the logicians and rhetoricians just couldn't imagine anyone being that unashamedly illogical.
For much of this century, and increasingly in the last decade, I've seen this particular type of hypocrisy being used in petty online debates, and then in politics. Someone will simultaneously denounce their opponent for doing a thing and do the same thing they're denouncing the other side for doing. Pick a position and stick with it! Either your opponent is bad because the thing they did is A Bad Thing, or it's not A Bad Thing, so it's okay for you to do it, too. One or the other. You can't have it both ways.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked civilians in Israel. The position of Israel and the pretty much the whole rest of the world is that attacking civilians is A Very Bad Thing. Israel shouted from the rooftops about how evil Hamas is for doing this Very Bad Thing, and we all agreed. "Yes, Israel, you're right--attacking civilians is a Very Bad Thing." And for the 34 days since then, Israel has been doing the very same thing every single day, only bigger, with much deadlier and more sophisticated weapons. And their justification has been, "But Hamas did it to us first!"
Pick one. Either killing civilians is always wrong, or killing civilians is justifiable when it's done as punitive retaliation. If it's always wrong, Israel has no claim to the moral high ground, because they've done more of it. If it's okay to do as punitive retaliation, then they've gone waaay beyond "an eye for an eye." Israel's retribution has been excessive.
Further, if you take the position that attacking civilians is fair game if it's done as retaliation for other crimes, then Hamas wasn't out of bounds in the first place, because they were retaliating against Israel for everything Israel has done to the Palestinians prior to October 7th. And if that's the case, then everything Israel has done since October 7th has been unjustified. If you don't like that position, go back to the original one that Attacking Civilians Is Always Wrong. There simply is no logically consistent standard under which Israel has the moral high ground while murdering 10,000 civilians.
