Student pub crawl specialists Carnage UK have come under fire for encouraging students to binge drink. According to students seeking to promote a responsible drinking campaign at the National Union of Students (NUS) annual conference, nights like those run by Carnage not only damage students’ reputation but also put their safety at risk.

Carnage’s response to this criticism was to list official university events that also encourage students to over-do it. Speaking for Carnage, Paul Bahia said,

‘At Liverpool University the union used to have a flagship night called Double Vision which offered a double spirit for £1, while York University student union promotes treble shots when you purchase a single shot, via their union website.’

Several of the student unions defended themselves, claiming to have changed their policies on discounted drinks. That, however, is beside the point; Carnage’s argument is a bog-standard tu quoque and in no way defends what they do.

Even if the student unions are being hypocritical, doing the very thing that they’re telling Carnage to stop doing, that doesn’t make what Carnage does any better. If Carnage are promoting irresponsible drinking, and the student unions are promoting irresponsible drinking, then they should both stop.

Carnage’s only other defence against the accusation that they promote excessive drinking was that they don’t discount alcoholic drinks at their events, that they are ”not a cheap option”.

That argument, though, confuses promoting excessive drinking with discounting drinks prices; there are plenty of other ways of encouraging people to drink more than is good for them. Carnage’s critics complain about the tone of the advertising of the event, and the peer pressure to drink experienced by students on them, not about the prices.

Both of the arguments offered by Carnage fail as justifications of their actions.

Professor Andrew Clark from the Paris School of Economics claims to have shown that religion is good for you. With religious faith, he suggests, we are better able to cope with setbacks in life such as divorce or redundancy, and as a result believers generally experience a higher level of life satisfaction than atheists.

However, that doesn’t mean that churches should expect to be inundated with calls from recanting atheists wanting to arrange to be baptised.

There’s a difference between beliefs being beneficial and beliefs being true, and we shouldn’t confuse the two. Plenty of beliefs that would increase well-being (e.g. the belief that people only ever say nice things about each other behind their backs) have no basis in fact whatsoever.

Arguments inferring that something must be true from the idea that it’s good for us to believe it (or that it isn’t true from the idea that it’s bad for us to believe it) commit the appeal to consequences fallacy.

Whether belief in God is good, bad, or indifferent for us is an entirely separate matter to whether it is true.

Football managers get sacked all the time. There’s near-constant speculation in the media about which manager will be the next to go. Bookies even run an annual “sack race”, with punters betting on which Premier League manager will get sacked first in the season. It’s difficult to think of a profession with worse job security.

Right now, Sam Allardyce’s job at Newcastle is looking vulnerable. He’s only been at the club for seven months, but the team are playing ugly football and losing, so there are calls for his head.

One of his senior players, Nicky Butt, has backed him using an argument that always comes up on these occasions: stability leads to success.

If you look at all the big teams, like United and Arsenal, they’re the clubs that have stood by managers for a long time. If we do that, I’m sure we’ll do it right.

[Source: BBC Sport: Allardyce has to stay, says Butt]

So the argument is that the big clubs have stood by their managers for a long time, so standing by their managers must be what made them successful.

The first concern with this argument is that it there may be some selective sampling going on. Man Utd and Arsenal may have had the same manager for years, but Chelsea have done fairly well recently despite sacking two successful managers since Abramovich bought the club a few years ago: Ranieri and Mourinho. Not all the big clubs have had stability. That’s a minor quibble though.

The real problem with the argument is that it seems to get the causal order wrong. Plausibly, it’s not standing by your manager that makes you successful; it’s being successful that makes you (more likely to) stand by your manager.

Sure, a few managers have been sacked when things have been going well on the pitch, but it’s much more normal for managers to get sacked when things are going badly. Even if stability didn’t lead to success, then, we would expect to see a correlation between teams doing well and their managers keeping their jobs.

Perhaps Man Utd and Arsenal don’t keep on winning because they’ve stuck by their managers; perhaps they’ve stuck by their managers because they keep on winning.