Moving the Goal Posts

Moving the goal posts is a logical fallacy wherein one side "changes the rules" mid-discussion. This can take the form of one side demanding higher and higher standards of proof, or of changing definitions as their positions are debunked. An example of this involves two roommates, Cain & Abel. Cain maintains that he does more of the household tasks than Abel does, and that Abel should do more. Abel disagrees and requests that Cain put together a spreadsheet showing all the household chores, who does them and how much time it takes; if the spreadsheet shows that Cain spends more time doing household duties than Abel, then Abel will adjust. Two days later, Cain presents his spreadsheet to Abel. It clearly shows that Cain does 62% of all the housework. Abel points out that he works longer hours than Cain, 50 hours/week to Cain's 35, and that mowing the lawn is a more physically demanding task than washing the dishes, and cites this as a reason not to adjust. Abel has moved the goalposts, i.e. he has changed what they were measuring after they had agreed what would be measured. Another example is personal - I was participating in a forum of ex-members of a religious group. I was taking the position in a discussion that Christianity could not be demonstrated to be more "true" than any other religion. One of my fellow posters suggested that Christianity had stood the test of time - over 2000 years and counting - and that's what showed that God was behind it. I pointed out that Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism had all predated Christianity, and if we were going to use longevity as proof of truth, then Hinduism would be the winner. My fellow poster quickly dropped the longevity argument. She had changed the standard mid-discussion. I have run into this pretty regularly in my political discussions this election cycle.

I've encountered goal post moving fairly regularly during the election season. I've probably even done it a time or two myself! You might be in the middle of talking about Trump's immigration policies and point out that we actually do need to get better control over our borders, and that Trump is correct that as a sovereign nation we should not allow illegal immigration. The goalpost is: the premise that the United States need to control its borders. Any arguments should be restricted to whether that premise is correct or not. Someone else responds with "Yeah, but Trump's a bigot and he only wants to do this because he hates Mexicans, remember, he called them rapists. Do you see where the goal posts just moved? The argument isn't now about whether controlling the border is a good thing or a bad thing, it just became about whether Trump's policy is bad because he's a bigot. Okay, it's arguable whether Trump's a bigot, and that might be a legitimate point if we were talking about his fitness to lead, but we're not, we're talking about a specific policy. The goal post move now changed the standard for evaluating Trump's plan from "Is border control a good thing" to "Is border control advocated by a bigot a good thing".

A goal post move that pre-dated the election was the so-called "birther movement". Donald Trump and others speculated that Barack Obama might not have been born in the United States. The goal post was seeing a birth certificate proving that he was. When the birth certificate was produced, the goal post was moved to "we need to see he long form birth certificate". When that was produced many still didn't believe that it was genuine; those goal posts are turbocharged.

"Moving the Goal Posts" is just one logical fallacy that politicians and those who support them use in rationalizing their own positions.