Imagine that you’re playing a game of football, and you make a field goal from the 10-yard line. Now imagine that the referee decides not to count your kick. Instead, he orders the goalpost to be moved back an additional ten yards. You make the goal again. He decides it’s still not good enough, and has it moved back another ten yards.
Would you think this was fair?
In argumentation, “moving the goalpost” refers to a similar tactic. Your opponent gives a certain criteria for you to meet, or asks for certain evidence. Then, once you provide it, he or she changes the criteria. It’s an extremely common fallacy, and one that can perpetuate a false controversy for years.
Perhaps the most famous modern example of moving the goalpost exists in the anti-vaccination movement. Concerns over whether vaccines cause autism actually began in the late 1990’s, in Great Britain. According to Michael Fitzpatrick, a British physician and author of several books and articles on the subject, the controversy began with a research paper published by a gastroenterologist named Andrew Wakefield and twelve co-authors (ten of whom later issued a partial retraction) in the journal The Lancet (which formally retracted the entire article last year).
The study looked at twelve children, nine of whom were autistic, who had experienced a form of intestinal inflammation that Wakefield speculated during a press conference was caused by the MMR vaccine. The media seized on it. Many subsequent studies thoroughly debunked his claims, but by then it was too late – the seeds had been planted in popular culture.
As the aftershocks of Wakefield's claims rippled through the U.K., he brought his concerns to the U.S. Only this time, the blame wasn’t laid on MMR; it was placed instead on a preservative called thimerosal, which contained a small amount of mercury. The argument was that because mercury is a known neurotoxin, it could be causing damage to a child’s normal development. This neglected the fact that the dose of mercury was well below dangerous thresholds. It also ignored the fact that there was no causal evidence to suggest a connection.
But that didn’t matter. The goalpost had effectively been moved.
Despite further research that found no link between thimerosal and autism, the U.S. government finally conceded to have the preservative removed from most vaccines in the early 2000’s. Autism rates, as one would expect, were not affected.
Eventually, critics of vaccines had to drop this second line of argument. That hasn’t made them any more reasonable, however. Over the past few years, they’ve built a whole new campaign around the idea that vaccines contain a debilitating cocktail of “toxins.” Antivaccinationists now target this brew as the cause of autism.
In a 2008 article for the blog Science-Based Medicine, surgical oncologist David Gorski unpacked, piece-by-piece, the emptiness of that approach: “for example, they either ignorantly or willfully confuse ethylene glycol (antifreeze, which is not in vaccines) with polyethylene glycol (a polymer of ethylene glycol, a chemically different compound which is in some vaccines and is also in a number of skin creams, tooth paste, and medications, including laxatives)…they’ll also rant on and on about formaldehyde, neglecting the fact that most people are exposed in a single day to more formaldehyde…than babies are exposed to from their entire vaccine schedule.”
Although Gorski and others have the facts on their side, they’re unlikely to convince the opponents of vaccines, no matter how much proof is provided. As long as the goalpost keeps being moved, it remains impossible to score.
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