Swindon Borough Council are considering getting rid of their speed cameras. Roderick Bluh, the Council Leader, offered a truly awful argument for doing so on today’s BBC lunchtime news:

When you fine a motorist for speeding, he’s already been speeding. Would it not be best to invest and make sure that speeding is prevented in the first place?

There’s nothing wrong with the idea that it’s better to prevent a crime than to punish one. If we can implement measures (e.g. advertising, improved signage, etc.) to encourage drivers to slow down, then that’s great. However, whatever measures we take to reduce speeding are only going to be partially successful; there will still be some people out there who break the speed limit. So what should we do about them?

There’s no reason why, having done all we can to prevent people from breaking the law, we can’t also try to catch and punish people who break the law. The first problem with Bluh’s argument is therefore that it restricts the options, trying to force us to choose between prevention and punishment when we can in fact have both.

The second problem is that it ignores the fact that speed cameras act as a deterrant. If you know that if you speed you’ll get caught and fined, then there’s a good chance that you’ll slow down. Bluh’s argument thus generalises from the fact that speed cameras don’t stop some crimes (those that they detect) to the idea that they don’t stop any crimes. Speed cameras may not stop people who are fined from speeding, but they do stop plenty of people who aren’t fined from speeding.

Even without those problems, however, there would still have been reason to worry about Bluh’s argument. If its logic worked, and we should get rid of speed cameras because by the time we catch and fine someone for speeding it’s too late to prevent them from speeding, then we should get rid of more than speed cameras. When the police catch and imprison a murderer, his victim is already dead; should we therefore forget about trying to catch and imprison murderers? Bluh’s argument isn’t just an attack on speed cameras, it’s an attack on crime detection and punishment in general, so goes far too far to be plausible.

Whatever decision the Council reaches, hopefully they won’t get rid of the cameras on the basis of the argument above.

John Lennon once explained that he had known he was a genius since about the age of twelve: “I thought, ‘I’m a genius or I’m mad. Which is it? I can’t be mad because nobody’s put me away. Therefore I must be a genius.’”

On the face of it, this is a simple example of the restricting the options (or “false dilemma”) fallacy. The starting point of the argument, “I’m a genius or I’m mad”, discounts for no good reason the possibility of sane normality; plenty of people are neither mad nor a genius, so why couldn’t John Lennon have been one of those?

However, the argument isn’t about people in general, but about John Lennon specifically. He didn’t reason “Everyone is either a genius or mad, and I’m not mad so I must be a genius”; he reasoned “I’m either a genius or I’m mad, and I’m not mad so I must be a genius”. If there were some feature of John Lennon that justified this narrowing of the options then the argument might just go through.

So why think that John Lennon must either have been mad or a genius?

Well, how about the fact that he was already convinced he was a genius? He described his sense that he was smarter than everyone else, including his teachers, and his constant mystification that no one else had noticed this. Given that he thought like that, either he was right (in which case he really was a genius) or he was wrong (in which case he was mad in at least some mild sense of suffering from persistent delusions of grandeur).

So perhaps, at a push, we can grant Lennon the first part of the argument; either he was a genius, or he was mad (in some sense).

However, the argument still presents us with a false dilemma, it still commits the restricting the options fallacy.

The problem is with the penultimate step in the argument: “I can’t be mad because nobody’s put me away”. This short sentence contains a whole sub-argument of its own, with the same structure as the main argument. Filling in the implicit reasoning in the sub-argument, we get this: “Either I’m not mad or they would have put me away, but they haven’t put me away so I must not be mad.”

Again, Lennon begins by narrowing the options to two: “Either I’m not mad or they would have put me away.” This time, however, there aren’t good grounds for doing so. Suffering from persistent delusions of grandeur need not be particularly dangerous, so it would be perfectly possible for Lennon to have been mad in that sense without getting locked up.

The argument fails, therefore, not because Lennon can’t prove that he isn’t sane but normal, but because he can’t prove that he isn’t mad.

Starbucks has received a lot of criticism from the ethical lobby. Recently, though, it has tried to clean up its image, introducing and promoting fair trade coffee. However, in contrast to its superficial enthusiasm for fair trade are the figures. In 2005, 3.7% of its coffee sales were of fair trade coffee, with another 24.6% being of coffee from Starbucks’ own “coffee and farmer equity” scheme. That means that the vast majority of its coffee is still from non-fair trade sources.

Starbucks has an answer to these criticisms: fair trade certifiers only work with small co-operatives, and so can only supply a small section of the market. Fair trade coffee is necessarily a niche product that can’t be rolled out to the whole market. Assuming that this is true, does it excuse them for paying low prices to coffee producers?

The argument seems to be this: It’s impossible for Starbucks to source more of its coffee from fair trade schemes, therefore they can’t be blamed for paying low prices to coffee growers. We shouldn’t blame Starbucks for paying unfair prices to coffee-growers because there simply aren’t enough fair-trade schemes to supply the market. They have no choice but to buy from uncertified sources, paying under the odds as they do so.

This is a case of the restricting the options fallacy. Starbucks do not have to choose between just two options: buying from a fair trade co-operative and paying an unfair price. There is a third option available: they could pay a fair price to all of their suppliers, whether they are members of fair trade co-operatives or not. Of course, this wouldn’t entitle them to display the fair-trade symbol on their products, but that isn’t the point; the point is that they would be acting ethically in dealing with their suppliers.

For Starbucks’ defence to work, it would have to be the case that the only way of treating coffee farmers fairly is by using a fair-trade scheme. This conjures up images of Starbucks desperately trying to haggle the price of coffee beans upwards, but their coffee bean suppliers refusing to budge, insisting on receiving an unfair deal!

If this is the best defence that Starbucks has to offer, then it seems that the ethical criticism sticks.