In Beverly Hills 90210, Donna Martin responded to critics of a plan to have condom machines in the high school:
It’s like if you have a swimming pool in your backyard, you can tell your children not to go in it, you can even build a fence around it, but if you know that they’re going to find a way in to that water, don’t you think you ought to teach those kids how to swim?
And Donna Martin drops the mic.
How can one respond to that? You don’t want to take a chance that kids will drown, do you?
The analogy is powerful because everyone has heard about kids who drowned in pools. It is really disturbing to think about, especially given our desire to protect children. It hits the right emotions that prevent most people from being able to look critically at it. For this reason it’s both an effective strategy, if well-executed, and harmful to those who hoped the debate would lead to better policy. I feel like this strategy is so effective and so awful that Schopenhauer should have featured it in his list of ways to win an argument.
However, there are effective ways to respond to these cheap emotional analogies.
Send an analogy back in return
One strategy is to use the same analogy to make a different argument — one that is unpopular. That will show flaws in the argument.
For example, when I was in high school there was an official school-sanctioned ‘smoking area’ on school grounds. The Principal argued that kids will smoke anyway, but if they’re not allowed to smoke outside they will smoke in the bathroom and damage school property. You don’t want school property damaged, do you? Sure, you can tell kids not to smoke, but we know that they will anyway. If you know they’re going to swim, shouldn’t you give them a safe place to do it?
Another strategy is to come up with an absurd example that follows the same line of logic. In this case you could argue:
We can tell kids to not use pot. But we know many of them will anyway. And if they are buying it from their friends, who knows what it will be laced with. Therefore, there should be marijuana dispensers at school.
Finally, you could use exactly the same argument, but change one thing to make it seem absurd. You could in this example argue for condom machines in restrooms at businesses.
It’s against company policy for people to have sex in their offices. However, we know office sex takes place anyway, and STIs are a real problem. Shouldn’t we at least make it easier for people to be safe? It’s like if you have a swimming pool in your backyard, you can tell your children not to go in it, you can even build a fence around it, but if you know that they’re going to find a way in to that water, don’t you think you ought to teach those kids how to swim?
Pick it apart
Another, but probably less effective, strategy is to point out specific (hidden-ish) assumptions. It’s helpful if you can relate it to the analogy.
For example, you could argue that a condom machine doesn’t teach kids how to have safe sex, so it’s not like teaching kids to swim. It’s more like making a life preserver available at a location far away from the pool (since most kids don’t have sex at school).
You could also point out that the analogy is based on the assumption that making condoms available will decrease the number of instances of unprotected sex. However, condoms available in schools could feel like an endorsement. That could affect the total number of sexual encounters in a given year (either positively or negatively). Even if condom availability increased the rate of condom use, if it also increased the number of sexual encounters then it’s possible there could be more instances of unprotected sex. In other words, if it lead to an increase in the number of sexual encounters, that’s like building more pools.
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