Moving the Goalposts

37 Moving the Goalposts

Tuomas W. Manninen

I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further!

Darth Vader to Lando Calrissian in The Empire Strikes Back

The fallacy of moving the goalposts (MG) ought to resonate with anyone who has familiarity with – or working knowledge of – 1980s popular culture. Not only have those who have watched The Empire Strikes Back seen Darth Vader commit this fallacy quite forcefully, but anyone who has played the classic Super Mario Bros. game on a Nintendo console (either around 1985, or thereafter) has come across this particular fallacy. In Super Mario Bros., the game’s protagonist – Mario – was set on a quest to rescue Princess Peach. At the end of the final level (World 1–4), and after defeating Bowser, he meets not the Princess, but Toad, who bears him the bad news: “Thank you, Mario. But our princess is in another castle.” So, despite completing all the levels in World 1, Mario must go on; the expected reward lies beyond additional obstacles. This captures the frustration of moving goalposts, although a game obstacle is not itself a fallacy or a broken agreement.

MG occurs when an accepted standard is replaced after it has been met. The following three conditions describe the pattern:

1. Person A requests Person B to meet a certain goal (evidential or otherwise).
2. Person B fulfills the goal as stipulated above (step #1).
3. Instead of admitting that Person B has met the goals or has discharged the conditions of the contract, Person A stipulates even further goals.

The name of the fallacy derives from football – if the goalposts for one team are moved farther away or closer, this can provide a (dis)advantage to the opposing team. It is quite straightforward to see why MG is incorrect reasoning. If you enter a competition under the assumption that in order to win, you need to satisfy objectives a, b, and c, and if you manage to accomplish this, then you can reasonably expect to be rewarded accordingly. However, if – unbeknownst to you, as this is when the fallacy most commonly occurs – further conditions are stipulated for your meeting the goals, you could call the competition anything but fair.

For a concrete and long‐running example of this fallacy, we can turn to Darwin’s The Origin of Species. In chapter 6, Darwin asks, “as by this theory [of descent by modification] innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?” (1902, 134). This has prompted an ongoing inquiry into the fossil record, by both proponents and opponents of Darwin’s theory alike. Although the first fossil specimen of Archaeopteryx was discovered mere years after Darwin published his book, it has been frequently heralded as a transitional form (by proponents) and decried as a hoax rather than a genuine “missing link” between dinosaurs and modern‐day birds (by opponents). Given the sesquicentennial nature of this argument, it would be practically impossible to include all the instances here. The following version, however, will serve our purposes.

Focusing on the Archaeopteryx fossil, the goalposts are shifted when it comes to the interpretations of it. Scientists who conclude that it is a genuine transitional fossil require that it shows features of dinosaurs and of birds, which the Archaeopteryx does. In contrast, the critics point out that the Archaeopteryx has features that no modern bird has, so it cannot be a direct ancestor of modern birds. Still, the critics’ demand goes beyond the scientists’ claim: a transitional form only needs to show that an intermediate species existed between dinosaurs and birds, and it does not need to show that all modern birds are related to the Archaeopteryx.

Another version appears when critics repeatedly replace a demand for evidence with a new demand after the original has been met:

Step 1: Paleontologists present evidence that the fossil A is an intermediate species (or transitional form) between clades X and Y.

Step 2: Critics challenge the significance of the discovery by pointing out the dearth of evidence for an intermediate transitional form between X and A, or A and Y.

Step 3: If evidence for such a transitional form is produced by paleontologists, the process is repeated.

Asking about remaining gaps is legitimate scientific inquiry. It becomes moving the goalposts when someone refuses to acknowledge that evidence has satisfied a previously accepted criterion and substitutes another condition for accepting the original claim.

MG is all too commonly found in conspiracy theories, from those focusing on the 9/11 terrorist attacks (“Truthers”) to those focusing on Barack Obama’s birthplace (“Birthers”) and beyond (see Aaronovitch 2009 for more examples). The latter of these insinuates that Obama was ineligible to serve as the President of the United States when he was elected; the US Constitution requires for the president to be “a natural born citizen,” and Obama’s detractors questioned whether he met this qualification. After several years of rampant speculation, President Obama released a copy of his birth certificate in 2011, and this clearly indicated that he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 6, 1961. Yet, this hardly served to quell the challenges. “What Obama released,” the detractors claimed, “was not a ‘Birth certificate,’ but merely a ‘Certification of Live Birth.’” The document that was released by President Obama to the public to view was not good enough – for the detractors – as it did not meet the criteria they had stipulated. Besides, even if the evidence provided by Obama met the criteria stipulated, it still was not good enough. As many commentators pointed out, there are records of Hawaii’s newspapers having run in the “Births Announced” section an announcement that a son was born to Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, on August 4, 1961. Yet, according to the detractors, these announcements must have fraudulently been placed in the newspapers by conspirators who intended to ensure that Barack Obama could become the President of the United States. Many other conspiracy theories share in MG in a similar way: once a claim advocated by the theorists has been debunked by evidence, the nature of the evidence is questioned or the claim is changed to a more demanding one. And so on.

The most straightforward way in which this fallacy can be avoided only requires a few steps, but these are such that they need to be completed beforehand. First, both (or all) of the parties to the argument should expect the other(s) to be arguing (or entering the contract) in good faith. Second, the parties ought to agree as to what amounts to a successful completion of the task at hand. As long as the terms of the contract or the argument are left ambiguous, one party can (and often will) try to take advantage of that ambiguity. For an example from the NFL, both teams should abide by the official standards, for example, that the ball be inflated to a certain gauge pressure, in order to avoid one team’s receiving an unfair advantage over the other. Third, one ought to remain wary when making contracts with individuals named Darth Vader (or any other Sith Lord, for that matter), or ‘Wimpy’ (especially when the contract involves hamburgers, and the payment for those), or arguing with individuals sporting “Where’s the birth certificate?” bumper stickers on their car.