Bad Moves entry

Bad Moves: False analogies

By Julian Baggini

"…some of the same lawyers who spent years battling tobacco companies on behalf of sick smokers […] are arguing that the fast food industry is a similar risk to public health."
CNN.com, August 19 2002

Several lawsuits have already been filed against fast-food restaurants, claiming that they are responsible for the ill health of the obese who have fed for years on their products. None have so far been successful, and many people regard them as some kind of joke. But advocates point out that the first people to sue "big tobacco" were ridiculed. Yet in 1998, the Master Settlement Agreement saw the major US tobacco companies agree to pay $246bn over 25 years to settle lawsuits filed by US states.

The success of the tobacco suits has encouraged those who believe that the junk-food claims are analogous. In both cases, it is claimed that public health has been damaged by the actions of major corporations who concealed the health risks of their products. This makes them liable to pay damages to those who suffered as a result.

From a legal point of view, there are certainly precedents set by the tobacco suits which those pursuing fast-food manufacturers will want to learn from. But are the two cases truly analogous?

One legitimate way to draw an analogy in an argument is to identify a common logical structure. In such a case, it is not the content of the analogy that matters, but the structure of the inference. So, for example, it can be argued that the arguments against the tobacco and fast-food industries have a common structure, namely:

1. If a manufacturer covers up the harm its products can cause, it is responsible for any such harm its products do cause.
2. X has covered up the harm its products can cause.
3. Therefore X is responsible for any such harm its products have caused.

If (1) is true, then X can be substituted for anything which makes (2) true and the conclusion (3) will follow. In this way, the two arguments are analogous. In fact, they both share a basic valid form known as affirming the antecedent:

If P then Q
P
Therefore Q

But the tobacco case is not cited purely because the arguments there have the same logical structure. Rather, it is claimed that the relevant facts are the same. In other words, the similarity extends to the content of the premises.

This is where the analogy might break down, at least with the specific argument considered above. First, it is not clear that the Master Settlement Agreement was premised on the principle that "If a manufacturer covers up the harm its products can cause, it is responsible for any such harm its products do cause". But even if it were, the second premise - X has covered up the harm its products can cause - is almost certainly not equally true of the tobacco and fast food industries.

It should have been obvious to tobacco companies a long time ago that their products were intrinsically damaging to health. Warnings such as those now placed in adverts by the alcohol industry - "use our product responsibly" - would be incongruous on cigarette packets. But fast-food, like alcohol, can be enjoyed in moderation without harm to health. And furthermore, the facts about what constitutes a healthy diet are well enough known for it to be possible to make the case that consumers should choose for themselves how much fast-food they consume.

The complaints that can be made against the tobacco firms and the fast-food restaurants are thus disanalogous. Cigarette manufacturers are accused of not making public the at the time little known risks of using their products; fast-food manufacturers are accused of not doing enough to highlight the well-known risks of misusing of their products. In one case, it's about covering up the inevitable harm, in the other it's failure to advertise the potential harm caused by misuse. Hence the second premise of the argument is not the same in both cases and the analogy breaks down.

When determining whether an analogy is a good one, sometimes the main point being made is about the logic of the argument and it is just the structural similarities which count. But in other cases, such as this one, the relevant similarities must extend to contents of the premises if the argument is to be analogous.

However, what is interesting is that the analogy would become much closer if it could be shown that the fast-food manufacturers were concealing little-known facts about the dangers of their products. There would still be a difference, in that a healthy lifestyle can include moderate fast-food consumption, whereas it cannot include moderate smoking. But if legally the key concern is preventing information reaching the public domain, the analogy might nevertheless be close enough for some lawsuits to succeed.

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