Thoughts About Plausible Deniability

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A number of common fallacies in reasoning have a common property. They help us deny to ourselves the idea that we are responsible for harm to others.

For example, there is a logically fallacious bias in favor of inaction. "I didn't do anything" seems to most of us, on some level, to imply "I did nothing wrong" and this seems to imply "I'm not in the wrong."

There is also a fallacious bias in favor of non-contact. We tend to think the "trigger man" more responsible for a murderer than whoever hired him. The employer presumably was somewhere far away, which is exculpatory in some sense.

Further, that is key to an explanation for the prevalence of these fallacies offered by evolutionary psychologists. Human beings evolved to live in small groups. There was a lot of potential for violence between the groups, but selection pressures must have strongly favored the gene lines of those in groups with a lot of cohesion. Groups where conformist pressure was successful (non-violently successful).

This led to a situation i which we are hard wired to accept certain excuses from each other, and hard-wired to offer them. Such as the fallacies I mentioned above.

Worth some thought.

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