The Hannity Hypothetical

One technique used often in debate, especially the loud sound-bite debating so prevalent nowadays, is to put a hypothetical question to your opponent. It involves forcing the opposition to choose between two and only two unrealistic alternatives, either of which will ultimately prove your point. It’s a cousin of the old standard of asking your opponent, “How often have you been beating your wife?”

I started thinking about this Monday night while listening to the tail end of Sean Hannity’s radio show. Normally I don’t listen to him, though I have in the past, but Michael Medved was off the air while the baseball playoffs were going on and I was paying bills in the downstairs office. I listened to Hannity berate a somewhat idealistic and naïve-sounding Christian woman who was trying to make a point contrary to his opinion. I don’t remember the specifics of the argument, but I do recall Hannity throwing out New Testament quotes to support his arguments.

Hannity often talks about his Catholicism on the air. I don’t think you need to be a Vatican theologian to know that it’s of the “cafeteria” variety. Just listen to him for a couple of hours. I also think it’s also fairly obvious as to his priorities: he’s a conservative republican first, and a Catholic second. The Catholicism is molded to fit the political ideology, not the other way around. Curious about this aspect of the man, I did a quick google and came to this page.

It’s a classic text-book example of the hypothetical. On his teevee show, Hannity is debating a priest who has dared to correct him on the Catholic view concerning birth control. So Hannity presents him with this hypothetical question:

“Would you rather a non-Catholic practice birth control or abortion?”

Gotcha!

There are several things wrong with a question such as this. First, it’s an artificial construction, a rhetorical device, and it does not have as a necessary property existence in the real world. In fact, hypotheticals asked in debate rarely, if ever, do exist in the real world. The famous “ticking time bomb” scenario used to justify torture falls into this category. Since it doesn’t apply to reality and since it is simply a rhetorical device to prove the questioner’s point, the person to which a hypothetical is put has no obligation to answer.

Of course, the questioner will trumpet such a refusal to answer the hypothetical as all but admitted defeat on his opponent’s part. But that’s not the case, and we, as intelligent, thinking individuals, now know this.

Next, for the Catholic who is serious about his faith, hypotheticals are an occasion to sin. As such, they should be avoided in asking and avoiding in answering. In addition to attempting to prove a foregone conclusion, they also serve to entice into sin. What do I mean? We can all agree, for example, that lying is wrong. To flat out tell a lie (let’s leave out the intentions and other circumstantial details) is a sin. What is also sinful is the consideration of lying. If I sit in my chair, scratch my chin and think of the pros and cons of lying to my wife about, oh, losing $500 at the track, and come up with scenarios and possible consequences, think of who I can enlist to help me make the lie more palatable (ie, get Joe to swear I came to him saying I was robbed) … this in itself is sinful. To dwell on a sin, or the hypothetical choice between sins, puts one in danger of actually sinning and must not be entertained.

So to entice others to contemplate sinful activity, or to allow ourselves to weigh and consider a moral calculus of our own, one that does not come from God, in debating the relative demerits of one sin versus another – this is sinful, and must be avoided.

Third, in this case especially, both of the false choices presented to the priest are intrinsically evil and may not be engaged in, if one considers oneself a practicing, faithful Catholic and takes his faith seriously. This hypothetical question cannot be answered as presented. It would be similar to Colmes asking Hannity, “Would you rather the newly-liberated Iraqi people choose a communist government or vote in another military dictatorship?” It’s unanswerable, because both choices are anathema to a conservative republican like Hannity. Nor is it, obviously, applicable to the real world. Hannity would not answer the question, and rightly so.

A rhetorical ploy like the unanswerable hypothetical persuades no one except, perhaps, the one asking it and, perhaps, those whose position already lies with the asker. A man as intelligent as Hannity must know this, even if he knows it only in the unspoken privacy of his innermost thoughts.

Or possibly he is still asleep, like so many of us have been and still are, just going about our daily routines as if it was the most important consideration of all, and just waiting to be awakened.