Bring back the Trivium.

There is an anti-domestic violence video out of Italy that has gone viral.




Heather Wilhelm has a reasonable summary, The Monsterization of Men. Ann Althouse has gotten in to a spat with her commenters over at What's wrong with that charming Italian PSA that tries to teach the good but obvious lesson men don't hit women?, revealing that they are interpreting one video in diametrically opposite ways without recognizing the respective positions.

The charged discussions seem to fall into four broad camps: 1) It is wrong to manipulate child actors in this way; 2) It is wrong to objectify and exploit the young girl actor; 3) It is wrong to project the assumption that domestic violence is strictly a male issue, that all males are potential beaters and that simply telling them that it is wrong will fix the problem; and 4) Wow! What a sweet video.

Obviously these map along recognizable lines (ethicists, third wave feminists, men's rights advocates, and the general public). And of course, there are innumerable shades of opinion between and beyond these particular positions.

I view this as a failure of interpretation traceable to our inclination towards several biases, logical fallacies and common heuristic errors such as the undistributed middle fallacy, false dichotomy, focusing effect, group attribution error, trait ascription bias, post hoc ergo propter hoc, affirming the consequent, congruence bias, strawman argument, and the fundamental attribution error.

More fundamentally, I think the various sources of outrage fail to distinguish between rhetoric and logic and empirical argument thereby creating a false dichotomy.

I think this is a brilliant rhetorical argument in video form. Charming children, a fresh genuineness in demeanor, exotic (foreign language), etc. If its message is simply that violence against women is so bad that even young children understand that, then I would say it succeeds. I don't think that it takes away from any other logical or empirical criticisms to acknowledge just how good it is in making an observer sympathetic to the message which is what rhetoric is about. Rhetoric seeks to persuade via the emotions, not persuade via logic and evidence.

Is it flawed from an ethical or empirical or logical perspective? Sure.

The ethics of using children to advance adult campaigns are always dicey. The implication that domestic violence is either solely or even disproportionately a male issue is both ethically and empirically wrong. The suggestion that the reaction of children to a videoed instruction is going to be the same as their real life actions is logically dubious. The argument that even-children understand the badness of violence towards women is on shaky ground. We might want to believe that but we also believe that people would not voluntarily torture fellow citizens even if instructed to do so and yet we know they do (Milgram Experiment).

From the point of view of evidence and logic, the video entirely fails to establish a case that domestic violence is entirely or disproportionately a male issue, the video fails to address counter evidence that demonstrates that normal people are fully capable of extreme indifference to the well being of others, the video fails to establish that simply knowing that violence is inappropriate response in virtually all human interactions.

If you want to criticize the video for failing to make a good logical or empirical argument, you are on solid ground. If you want to criticize the video for falsely propagating negative gender stereotypes, you are on solid ground. If you want to argue that such Public service Announcements are ineffective and a waste of time, you might be on solid ground. But to deny that the video is effective at engaging people and swaying their emotions is, I think, a failure to distinguish between three equally important forms of argument: rhetoric, logic, and empiricism. Bring back the Trivium.