Having heard that silly line for the umpteen-hundredth time this week, as uttered by President Obama while he outlined his gun-control proposals, it seemed an opportune moment to help slay a dangerous cliche.

Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, I first consulted one of JLF’s in-house experts on fallacies, Jon Sanders, who offered some helpful information about the logical fallacy of an appeal to emotion. Jonah Goldberg also seemed to be a good source to consult, given his authorship of the book Tyranny of Cliches. Here’s what Goldberg wrote recently about the same “if it saves one life” blather, as uttered by the president’s comic sidekick.

The notion that any government action is justified if it saves even a single life is malarkey, to borrow one of Mr. Biden’s favorite terms. Worse than that, it’s dangerous malarkey.

Let’s start with the malarkey part. The federal government could ban cars, fatty foods, ladders, plastic buckets, window blinds, or Lego pieces small enough to choke on and save far more than just one life. Is it imperative that the government do any of that? It’s a tragedy when people die in car accidents (roughly 35,000 fatalities per year), or when kids drown in plastic buckets (it happens an estimated 10 to 40 times a year), or when people die falling off ladders (about 300 per year). Would a law that prevents those deaths be worth it, no matter the cost?

Now one obvious response to this sort of argument ad absurdum is to say, “We don’t have to ban buckets or cars to reduce the number of deaths. We can simply regulate them.” And that’s true.

Indeed, that’s the point. But when we regulate things, we take into account things other than the singular consideration about saving lives. Banning cars would cost the economy trillions — and also probably cost lives in various unintended ways. So we regulate them with speed limits, seat-belt requirements, etc. And even here we accept a certain number of preventable deaths every year. Regulators don’t set the speed limit at 5 miles per hour, nor do they make highway guardrails 50 feet high.

Every serious student of public policy — starting with Joe Biden and Barack Obama — knows this to be true. Some just choose to pretend it isn’t true in order to push through their preferred policies.

The idea that the government can regulate or ban its way into a world where there are no tragedies, no premature deaths, is quite simply ridiculous. But that is precisely the assumption behind phrases like “if only one life is saved, it’s worth it.”

One last bit of information to add to the mix: A 2008 blog post suggests a good name for the “if it saves one life” argument — the Appeal to Immeasurable Value.

More formally this could be expressed as:

  1. X provides benefit Y
  2. The value of Y can’t be measured
  3. Therefore X is justified no matter what the cost

To make this concrete:

  1. Embedded RFID chips can detect kidnapped children in public places
  2. The value of a kidnapped child’s life is unmeasurable
  3. Therefore mandatory embedding of RFID chips in every child is justified

Or a more mundane example:

  1. Corporate charity sponsorship foster consumer goodwill
  2. Consumer goodwill is a largely unmeasurable benefit
  3. Therefore large charity budgets are justified

And very closely related:

  1. Doing Y has a minuscule chance of killing someone
  2. The cost of someone dying is unmeasurable
  3. Therefore no one should do Y