The tiny town of Russell is so small that it only has one barber, a man named Jim-Bob. Since Jim-Bob is the only barber around, he shaves all the men in town who don’t shave themselves. And of course it would be silly to shave a man who already shaves himself, so the only people Jim-Bob shaves are the men in town who don’t shave themselves. Sounds reasonable, right? Wrong. In fact, it’s logically impossible. Jim-Bob literally cannot operate that way, because the concept is nonsense, like the concept of a married bachelor.
Unless you’ve heard of the Bachelor Paradox before (or you happen to have an extremely nerdy philosophy brain), you’re probably confused at this point. My explanation of how Jim-Bob operates sounds perfectly coherent and non-contradictory—why on earth is it nonsense?
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
I have a couple options about how to respond to your confusion.
Option 1: The answer is really obvious once you see it, so I could sit here looking down my nose because you don’t yet see something that feels obvious to me. Or,
Option 2: I could recognize that the fact that I happen to know a line of argument you haven’t heard before doesn’t mean I’m better than you, and just give you the explanation.
Let’s go for Option 2. Here’s why Jim-Bob can’t operate the way I said he does. Remember Jim-Bob’s rule: he shaves all the men in town who don’t shave themselves, and he only shaves the men in town who don’t shave themselves. Logically, either Jim-Bob shaves himself or he doesn’t shave himself. If he shaves himself, then he breaks Jim-Bob’s rule: It’s not true that he only shaves the men in town who don’t shave themselves. There’s one man in town Jim-Bob shaves who does shave himself—namely, Jim-Bob.
Ok, so Jim-Bob can’t follow Jim-Bob’s rule if he shaves himself. But what if he doesn’t shave himself? Well, then it turns out he breaks Jim-Bob’s rule the other way: It’s not true that he shaves all the men in town who don’t shave themselves. There’s one man in town who doesn’t shave himself whom Jim-Bob doesn’t shave—namely, Jim-Bob.
So: Jim-Bob has to either shave himself or not shave himself, because logic. If he shaves himself, he breaks Jim-Bob’s rule. If he doesn’t shave himself, he breaks Jim-Bob’s rule. So no matter what he does, he can’t follow Jim-Bob’s rule, just as surely as no matter what you do you can’t be a married bachelor.
It’s ok if that still feels a bit muddy; I went through it kind of fast, because it’s actually not my main point. Here’s the point: Just because something is obvious to you doesn’t mean it’s obvious to everyone. And it also doesn’t mean the people who don’t see it are being stupid or stubborn—just like if you didn’t see why it’s impossible for Jim-Bob to follow Jim-Bob’s rule before I explained it, that doesn’t mean that you’re stupid or stubborn.
Here are some things that feel extremely obvious to many pro-lifers—so obvious they’re barely worth stating, let alone giving arguments for:
- All human organisms, including human embryos, are people, with equal value and an equal right to protection from violence
- When a woman is pregnant, the embryo or fetus in her uterus is a distinct, whole, living human organism
- Bodily autonomy can’t give you the right to kill someone
- Things like preventing women from being stuck in poverty and preventing someone from having a difficult or traumatic childhood can’t justify killing people, so since human fetuses are people, those reasons can’t justify killing human fetuses
But there are a whole lot of pro-choice people who don’t see some or all of those things as obvious at all. If you do see them as obvious, that leaves you with the same two options I had with Jim-Bob:
Option 1: You could look down your nose at the pro-choice people, think to yourself, “Imagine being so stupid you don’t even see that,” and go on with your life feeling superior. Or,
Option 2: You could do the intellectual work to think about how to give an argument for it in a way that connects with someone who doesn’t already see it as obvious.
Here’s an example of someone who picked Option 1. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (the third book in the Chronicles of Narnia) describes the transformation of a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb. Eustace started out as a complete and utter brat who enjoyed making other kids miserable. At the beginning of the story, he accidentally stepped through a portal and found himself drowning in a Narnian ocean, and was promptly rescued by a Narnian ship. But far from being grateful (even after Edmund and Lucy, his cousins who had been to Narnia before, tried to explain what happened), he insisted that the Narnians had kidnapped him:
He began demanding to be put ashore and said that at the first port he would “lodge a disposition” against them all with the British Consul. But when [a Narnian mouse named] Reepicheep asked what a disposition was and how you lodged it (Reepicheep thought it was some new way of arranging a single combat) Eustace could only reply, “Fancy not knowing that.”
Eustace feels very superior looking down his nose at the Narnians as he says, “Fancy not knowing that.” But of course, what the fact that that’s the only answer he can give actually reveals is that Eustace doesn’t understand what a disposition is very well himself. If you can’t give an explanation of something you understand to someone who doesn’t understand it yet, that means that you don’t actually understand it very well yourself yet. You might have a crystal clear gut sense that human fetuses have equal value and equal rights, and that gut sense is a perfectly reasonable thing for you to have and to take into account as evidence when you’re forming beliefs. But if you can’t give an argument for why it’s true to someone who doesn’t have the same gut sense you do, that’s a gap in your understanding, not theirs. It doesn’t mean you’re wrong. But it does mean the best move is to learn the arguments, not look down your nose at someone who doesn’t see it without them.
When I talk with pro-choice people, usually the first argument they give me has a pro-life answer that’s really, really obvious to anyone (pro-life or pro-choice) who knows the abortion debate well. Which makes sense, because usually the person I’m talking to doesn’t know the abortion debate well. For example, take someone who tells me that abortion needs to be legal so kids don’t end up in foster care. I could just blurt out what feels obvious to me: “But it’s a baby! You can’t kill people to keep them from ending up in foster care!” Or, I could do the work to think through my own view enough to be able to explain it to someone who doesn’t already see it as obvious. And the great news is, when I do that, people get it. I don’t convince every pro-choice person I talk with to become pro-life—far from it. But I do convince almost every pro-choice person I talk with—like, easily over 90%—that pro-choice arguments like the one from foster care don’t work unless human fetuses aren’t people or bodily autonomy justifies abortion. That makes our conversations way more productive and changes the way they see the pro-life view and pro-life people. When we’re not willing or able to make arguments for things that feel obvious to us, we miss easy opportunities to help people see the truth more clearly.
he post Jim-Bob the Barber and Arguing for the Obvious originally appeared at the Equal Rights Institute blog. Subscribe to our email list with the form below and get a FREE gift. Click here to learn more about our pro-life apologetics course, “Equipped for Life: A Fresh Approach to Conversations About Abortion.”
