Free The Ultimate South Park and Philosophy by Kevin S. Decker Robert Arp William Irwin Page B

episode, Alanis Morissette comes out with a hit song “Stinky Britches” that Chef had written some 20 years ago. Chef produces a tape of him performing the song and takes the record company to court, asking only that he be credited for writing the hit. The record company executives then hire Cochran. In his defense of the record company, Cochran shows the jury a picture of Chewbacca and claims that, because Chewbacca is from Kashyyyk and lives on Endor with the Ewoks, “It does not make sense.” Cochran continues: “Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense … If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.” The jury is so convinced by Cochran’s “argument,” that they deny Chef’s request to give him credit, but they also find Chef guilty of harassing a major record label, fining him two million dollars to be paid within 24 hours. Friends of Chef then organize “Chef Aid” to pay his fine.
    We laugh at Cochran’s defense because it has absolutely nothing to do with the actual case. It’s even more absurd when the Chewbacca Defense is also used to “prove” Chef is guilty of harassing the very record company that had produced his stolen song. The issue of Chewbacca living on Endor is completely irrelevant to whether Chef should receive credit for the song, or whether he’s actually harassed the record company. As rational thinkers, we recognize this, laugh at the absurdities, and wonder why anyone in their right mind would connect the Chewbacca Defense with these other issues.
    As we saw earlier in this chapter, logicians have a special term (a
fallacy
) for these bad arguments in which the conclusion doesn’t follow from premises. Fallacies are so common that logicians have names for different types of fallacies. The Chewbacca Defense, for example, is an instance of the
red herring
fallacy, which gets its name from a police dog exercise in which policemen used strong-smelling red herring fish in an attempt to throw dogs off the trail of a scent. In a red herring fallacy, claims and arguments that have nothing to do with the issue at hand are offered in order to point to the truth of a conclusion that the arguer wants us to accept. In the episode “Weight Gain 4000,” Wendy has a legitimate complaint against Cartman for cheating to win the essay contest, but people refuse to accept her conclusion because they’re distracted by the excitement of Kathy Lee Gifford coming to town. Even after Wendy shows the damning evidence that Cartman had just handed in a copy of Thoreau’s
Walden
as his essay, they simply don’t care about whether Cartman cheated or not. This happens in a lot of
South Park
episodes; it’s a humorous way for Trey and Matt to make their points about people’s faulty and crazy reasoning.
Slippery Slopes
    The
slippery slope
is another fallacy often lampooned on
South Park
. A person commits this fallacy when she claims that some initial occurrence or belief will inevitably lead to a further chain of events that we want to avoid, and so we should avoid the initial occurrence or reject the belief. It’s as if there’s an unavoidable “slippery” slope with no way to avoid sliding down it. Mrs. Broflovski’s reasoning about the banning the
Terrance and Phillip Show
, mentioned earlier, might go something like this: “If we allow something like the
Terrance and Phillip Show
on the air, then it will corrupt all of our kids, then shows like this one will crop up all over the TV, then more and more kids will be corrupted, then all of TV will be corrupted, then the corrupt TV producers will corrupt other areas of our life, etc., etc. So, we must take the
Terrance and Phillip Show
off the air; otherwise, it will lead to all this bad stuff!” We can clearly see the slippery slope. It isn’t ­necessarily true that the corrupt TV producers will corrupt other areas of our life, but