Either/Or Outlook Analysis

The Either/Or Outlook
Either/or Outlook – a claim that presents an artificially limited range of choices.
An either/or fallacy occurs when a speaker makes a claim (usually a premise in an otherwise valid deductive argument) that presents an artificial range of choices. For instance, he may suggest that there are only two choices possible, when three or more really exist. Those who use an either/or fallacy try to force their audience to accept a conclusion by presenting only two possible options, one of which is clearly more desirable.
FOR YOUR INFORMATION
These tactics are purposefully designed to seduce those who are not well informed on a given topic. A clever writer or speaker may use the either/or fallacy to make his idea look
better when compared to an even worse one. This type of selective contrast is also a form of stacking the deck. This type of argument violates the principles of civil discourse: arguments should enlighten people, making them more knowledgeable and more capable of acting intelligently and independently.

EXAMPLE 1
A mother may tell her child: “Eat your broccoli or you won’t get desert.”
Children need this type of black and white structuring until they can learn to make valid choices. These types of arguments become fallacious, however, when they reduce a complicated issue down to simple terms or when they deliberately obscure other alternatives. Either/Or choices can also assume the form of scare tactics. Sometimes, poorly-written multiple-choice tests contain these fallacies: sometimes the student can justify more than one correct choice, given different circumstances.

EXAMPLE 2
A firm believer states: “I 'm not pro-choice; I 'm pro-life.”
Politicians have wrapped this issue up into a messy ball of catch phrases. They assume that a person must have a definitive stand on the abortion issue across the board – either for it or against it. Using these terms, however, make this either/or fallacy especially comical. Who is not technically pro-“life”? We are all still here on this planet – living, eating, socializing, etc. – living life. We like life; we fully support it. On the other hand, we are all Americans whose speech is protected by the First Amendment that grants us freedom of intellectual choice. Therefore, aren’t we all technically pro-“choice” too?
We can play these word games for hours, but these terms cannot adequately help us arrive at a conclusion on this issue if they obscure the realities. Wouldn’t some anti-abortion advocates be in favor of aborting a fetus in order to save the life of the mother? So are they pro-“life” or “choice” if they sacrifice one of them instead of both? …Or neither? Do you see how this gets us nowhere? The pro-choice/life debate has been “dumbed down” to these two equivocated, loaded, slanted, and distorted terms that only get people mad. Life, death, and abortion are much too complicated to be understood on a bumper sticker.
CAUTION!
Be aware: the either/or assertion does not express a pair of contradictory alternatives; rather, they offer a pair of contrary alternatives (mere contraries do not exhaust the possibilities). Light and dark, for example, are contraries because they represent opposite qualities that are necessary in one in order to define the other. Yet there are several in-between states of light in our earth: dusk, twilight, eclipses, etc.
EXAMPLE 3
An ignorant friend might say: “I’m not a doctor, but your runny nose and cough tell me that you either have a cold or the flu.”
Well, the only truth about the above statement is that the speaker is not a doctor. Although most people with these symptoms really do have the common cold or a touch of the flu, these options are not the only two available. Allergies, bronchitis, or thousands of more serious diseases could all display these two common symptoms. See your doctor for a diagnosis without relying on overgeneralizations or either/or fallacies.

EXAMPLE 4
President George W. Bush: “You 're either with us or against us.”
These types of arguments falls because the audience is not given a fair choice – there exist many alternate (and often more desirable) choices that are never offered to the listener for consideration. Isn’t Switzerland a neutral country? (Yes.) So, are they “for” or “against” the United States? Do you love every part of your best friend’s personality? Does that mean that you too are “for” or “against” this person?

FOR YOUR INFORMATION
If you claim that an argument involves false dilemma, however, the burden of proof is on you to show why the dilemma is false: be prepared to identify at least one additional, relevant option which is omitted that creates a false dilemma.
NOTE: Not every either/or choice is fallacious — there may be only two reasonable alternatives. Many lights, for example, are wired so that they must exist in one of two states: on or off; likewise, a woman either is or is not pregnant, etc.

Absolutism

According to the Compact English Dictionary, “Relativism is the belief that knowledge, truth and morality exist in relation to culture, society, or historical context and are not always true”.
Saone’s. C.; Hawker S. (2006) Compact Oxford English Dictionary. Relativism: is the view that knowledge is not absolute, but rather is shaped by the individual’s Own perspective (Cohen, 2011). It is the nature and existence of items of knowledge, qualities, values or logical entities non-trivially obtain their natures and or existence from certain aspect of human activity, including but not limited to beliefs, culture, language etc. According to Matt Slick, Relativism is the philosophical position that all points of view are equally valid, and that all truth is relative to the individual. This means that all moral positions, all religious systems, all art forms, all political movements, etc., are truths that are relative to the individual.
There are three (3) basic types of relativism; these are Ethical relativism, Cultural relativism and Moral relativism. The distinctions between these three types of relativism are as follow;
Ethical relativism refers to the theory that morality is relative to the norms of one’s culture. That is, an action is right or wrong depending on the moral norms of the society in which it is practiced. Therefore a society, in which certain principle is practiced, would be considered normal and right by persons of such society. For e.g. In some societies it is seen as normal for children to kill their parents after they have reached a certain age because they believed that their parents will be better off in the afterlife if they entered it while physically active. On the other hand, we would consider such act as wrong because in our society we think that children should take care of their parents until they die of natural or other causes.

CULTURAL RELATIVISM

Cultural relativism is the view that all beliefs, customs and ethics are relative to the individual within his own social context.
This is basically saying that wrong or right is determined by your own culture. This means that you will believe in whatever you were taught in your society, but it does not mean that what you consider moral will be moral in all societies; this is so because no standard of moralities exist and therefore no one has the right to judge another society’s customs. Cultural relativism is closely related to ethical relativism which sees truth as variables and not as absolute.

SEEING THINGS DIFFERENTLY

Moral relativism is a philosophy that states there is no absolute moral law that governs all people. Moral laws would apply in areas of individual moral practice. This means that, no one law exists to govern all societies. Therefore what is considered as morally correct in one society may be deemed incorrect in another, in other words “you have your own way, I have my own way” this is so because the right way does not exist and everyone sees things differently. It is only seen as right in your way as an individual.

Bias for or against
change

Bias tends to follow our affections. Bias occur many aspects, such as bias toward majority or the minority, bias for or against change. If we feel more comfortable with the majority on our side, we may choose the majority view. If we identify with the weak or underdog and love to challenge or confronting superior numbers of people, we may embrace the minority view. Each of these choices can occur with little or no awareness of our underlying bias. And in each case we put feeling of comfort and personal preference above the evidence.
There’s the old saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”.
Bias for change assumes that change is always best; bias against change assumes that change is always for the worst. As Ruggiero states “bias for or against change depends on what is”. Bias against change may be older and more common than bias for change. Yet, the latter seems to be increasing today. For them, new is always better, some people find even small changes, like returning home and finding the furniture rearranged very upsetting. Major changes, like moving across the country can be even more
disturbing. Ruggiero suggest that most people prefer ideas that they know and comfortable with for e.g.:- When Galileo said, “The earth moves around the sun,” people were upset because for years they have seen thousands of sunrises and sunsets which had told them the sun did the moving, simply because they had never heard of the earth moving. This new idea threatened their fix belief that the earth was the center of the solar system. They had that idea packed in their minds for thousands of years because that was a part of their understanding of the universe. New ideas can have this effect on such people. Old beliefs provide a sense of comfort and security, when those beliefs are challenged, people may feel that reality has been pulled out from under them.
Neither perspective is consistent with critical thinking. Some new ideas are clearly better than the old ones they replace. Progress has in fact occurred in every area of life, Including science, technology, education and government. Yet this reality has another, less fortunate side. New ideas sometime contain serious flaws that go unnoticed at first. Time experience sometimes proves that the supposed great leap forward was actually several steps backward.

Status Quo Bias Can Kill Innovation

Status quo bias is an irrational desire that all normal humans have. It is a desire to keep things pretty much as they are; to avoid changing things. It is irrational in the sense that the bias exists even when there is no evidence that keeping things the same is a better outcome than change. Nevertheless, substantial psychological research has empirically demonstrated that status quo bias is a common place among us humans.
This is not a good thing for innovation which inevitably involves change. Moreover, it may explain why so many organizations find it easy to generate lots of ideas, but difficult to put the more creative ideas into practice (in other words, to innovate): the average human manager when faced with approving an idea that will result in significant change in operations is all too likely to find reasons not to approve the idea. The manager faced with a choice of several ideas ranging from incremental improvement to significant change is more likely to choose incremental improvement. It 's not her fault. It 's at least partly the result of status quo bias. Status quo bias may also explain why some companies innovate constantly, while others struggle to maintain a process of continual improvement.

“Mine is better” thinking

As small children we may have said “My mommy is smarter than any other mommy” perhaps we had similar thoughts about our belongings, such as our houses, communities and our cars. Our habits of thinking and acting seem to us the only right ways of thinking and acting.
As we grew up and we have gotten older, we probably don’t express this thinking. Yet we may still indulge it in ourselves. New ideas challenge our sense of security, so we tend to resist them. For example, the man in Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall”, he kept repairing the wall between his land and his neighbors not because there was still any good purpose in doing so, but only because his father had done so before him and he is not willing to change that approach. Such this thinking often occurs in matters that are important to us, such as our Race, Religion, Ethnic group, Social class, Political party or Philosophy of life. This habit is not always obvious; in fact, “mine is better” thinking can be quite subtle. Suddenly we feel a sense of kinship. We may think a person is rather dense until he says something that matches our view.
By way of reason or feeling, people may desire change, given that their current experiences have become undesirable or their perception of their experience has been outweighed by insight into a better area. Improvement is the most common and easy way to accept change. As with the example stated in the book, technology and all its beneficial upgrades seem to be the most accepted example of change. Technology is widely and easily accepted because as human, if we don’t see or understand the benefits, we will not willing accept the change.
Errors of perceptions are not blunder made while examining issues. They are faulty ways of seeing reality, preventing us from being open-minded even before we begin to apply our critical thinking, the following are especially serious. “Mine is better” thinking is natural and often harmless. Even so, this kind of thinking creates distance between people through a win-lose mentality. This can easily prevent us from learning from others in the areas mentioned above. To prevent this, remember that opening our mind to ideas from other people can broaden our perspective and lead us to fresh insight. Give every idea a fair hearing – even an idea that challenges your own. So all change is not bad, though perception can impede ones judgment.

References
1. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/perception.html#ixzz2fp7QPSDt
2. Absolutism. (2012, August 14). New World Encyclopedia, . Retrieved 09:46, September 18, 2013 from http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Absolutism&oldid=963220.
3. Michael Houdmann, S. (2002).What is Moral Absolutism. Retrieved September 18, 2013 from http://www.gotquestions.org/
4. Ruggiero, V. R. (2012). Beyond feelings: A guide to critical thinking. New York: McGraw-Hill.

http://carm.org/moral-relativism

. http://www.gotquestions.org/cultural-relativism.html
http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/decision/ethicalrelativism.html