False Equivalence: When Apples Get Compared to Hand Grenades

"Both sides are equally bad." It sounds like balanced thinking, intellectual maturity, a refusal to be partisan. It is often the opposite. False equivalence treats fundamentally unequal things as if they were the same — comparing jaywalking to murder, a minor policy blunder to a war crime, routine political friction to existential threat. Dressed in the language of fairness, it smuggles in a distortion that makes genuine moral judgement impossible.

What False Equivalence Actually Is

A false equivalence occurs when two things are presented as comparable — equal in kind, degree, or significance — when they are not. The claim isn't always explicitly "these are the same." More often, it takes the form of a rhetorical pairing: by mentioning two things in the same breath, treating them as mirror images of each other, the speaker implies equivalence without having to argue for it.

The classic logical form: "A did X, and B did Y — therefore A and B are equally guilty/bad/untrustworthy." The problem is that X and Y may differ enormously in scale, context, intent, or consequence. The structure of the comparison papers over the differences.

False equivalence is distinct from — but closely related to — False Balance, which is its institutional cousin. False balance is what happens when media present "both sides" of a debate as if they deserve equal airtime and credibility regardless of the evidence: climate scientists on one side, a single contrarian on the other, as if the weight of opinion were equal. False equivalence is the underlying logical error; false balance is how that error manifests in journalism and public discourse.

The Psychology: Why It's So Appealing

False equivalence exploits several deep cognitive tendencies:

• The proportionality instinct. Psychologists identify a "proportionality bias" — the intuition that big events must have big causes and small events small causes. By framing two things as equivalent, the rhetor exploits our discomfort with asymmetry.
• The fairness instinct. Humans have a strong preference for equal treatment. When someone says "both sides," they're borrowing the moral authority of fairness to smuggle in an empirical claim about equivalence that may not hold.
• Confirmation bias. Partisan audiences are especially susceptible to false equivalences that match their priors — the claim that "politicians on both sides lie equally" is comforting if you want to dismiss all political discourse without having to discriminate.

Research in political psychology, including work by scholars Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella on the "spiral of cynicism," suggests that persistent false equivalence in media coverage contributes to voter disengagement: if everyone is equally bad, why engage at all?

Classic Examples

Political "Both-Sidesism"

During the 2017 Charlottesville white supremacist rally, several media outlets reported "violence on many sides" — equating far-right marchers carrying torches and chanting antisemitic slogans with counter-protesters. The structural violence, the explicit ideology of the marchers, the asymmetry in numbers and organisation — all collapsed into a false equivalence that treated the situation as a symmetrical conflict between extremes.

"Whataboutism" — which deserves its own entry as a distinct tactic (see Whataboutism) — is a variant: when a party deflects criticism by pointing to equivalent wrongdoing by the other side, the implicit claim is that the two are equal and therefore neither can legitimately criticise the other. The Soviet Union was a master of this during the Cold War: every Western criticism of human rights abuses met with "but what about your treatment of Black Americans?"

Science Denial

In climate debates, the presentaton of a single dissenting scientist alongside a consensus of thousands as "two sides of the debate" is a textbook false equivalence. The numbers are not equal; the institutional backing is not equal; the peer-reviewed evidence is not equal. Yet the rhetorical framing suggests they are.

The tobacco industry pioneered this strategy in the 1950s and 1960s: funding researchers who would generate "controversy" around the link between smoking and lung cancer. As the internal memo famously stated, "doubt is our product." If equivalence can be manufactured, the asymmetric consensus looks like just another opinion.

Everyday Moral Comparisons

Less dramatic examples are everywhere:

• "You're upset that I came home two hours late — but you forgot to call me last Tuesday." (Two incidents of different severity, frequency, and context treated as cancelling each other out.)
• "All politicians lie" — conflating a politician who misstated a budget figure with one who systematically fabricated evidence for a war.
• "Vegans and factory farmers both have an agenda about food." (True in a trivial sense; meaningless as a basis for equivalence.)

The Relationship to Whataboutism and Tu Quoque

False equivalence often operates through specific sub-tactics. Tu Quoque ("you too!") is the move where criticism is deflected because the critic has also done something wrong. False equivalence provides the logical underpinning: "you did X, I did Y — therefore they're the same and your criticism is hypocritical." The argument fails if X and Y aren't actually equivalent, which they rarely are.

All three — false equivalence, whataboutism, and tu quoque — are fundamentally ways of avoiding accountability by manufacturing comparisons. The comparison serves not to illuminate but to obscure.

When Is a Comparison Legitimate?

Not all comparisons are false equivalences. Analogies, historical comparisons, and moral parallels are essential tools of reasoning. The question is whether the comparison holds on the dimensions that matter.

A comparison is legitimate when:

• The relevant features of both items are actually similar
• The scale, context, and consequences are comparable
• The comparison serves to illuminate rather than to distract

A comparison is a false equivalence when the differences in any of these dimensions are large enough to make the comparison misleading — when the person being compared to a Nazi is guilty of a minor policy blunder, when the "both sides" framing treats a systemic pattern of violence as equivalent to an isolated incident.

How to Counter It

The most effective response to a false equivalence is to name the comparison and then specify what makes it fail:

1. Identify the comparison being implied. "You seem to be saying that X and Y are equivalent."
2. Ask for the basis. "On what grounds? Scale? Intent? Consequence? Context?"
3. Specify the relevant differences. "X involved [specific factors]; Y involved [specific factors]. These differ in [dimension] by [amount]. The comparison doesn't hold."
4. Watch for the "fairness" frame. When someone accuses you of bias for pointing out an asymmetry, remember: recognising difference is not the same as taking sides. Genuine fairness requires proportionality, not false symmetry.

Why It Matters

False equivalence degrades the quality of public reasoning by making it impossible to make meaningful distinctions. If every accusation can be deflected with a "but they did it too," if every asymmetry can be smoothed over with "both sides," if mass atrocity and policy disagreement occupy the same moral space — then accountability becomes impossible and ethical judgement is replaced by cynicism.

The antidote isn't picking sides. It's insisting on proportionality: the willingness to say that some things are worse than others, that not all comparisons hold, and that genuine fairness means giving each thing the weight it deserves — no more, no less.

Sources & Further Reading

• Jamieson, Kathleen Hall & Cappella, Joseph N. Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Oreskes, Naomi & Conway, Erik M. Merchants of Doubt. Bloomsbury Press, 2010.
• Britannica: Whataboutism
• Wikipedia: False equivalence
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Fallacies