Thufferin’ Thuccotash!
That still doesn’t do what you say is possible. You should be able to argue why you shouldn’t do it. That’s what you said: offer a counterargument. What you gave is essentially an ad hominem: you can discount the guy’s argument because of some characteristic about him.
There’s definitely something fishy about the argument, because taken to its logical conclusion, it leads to an absurdity. If it is not acceptable to expend resources (time, money) on anything when a greater need exists somewhere, then one is morally bound to devote all ones resources to the most desperate situation in the world, neglecting all local needs including the needs of one’s own family, until they in turn become the most desperate situation in the world.
A similarly fallacious argument is often directed against people who care about animal welfare, namely the accusation that because they care about animals, they do not care about humans.
I think the problem is that there are multiple logical conclusions that can take from the OPs examples. The second statement is retort to the first, not the construction of a logical expression A therefore B. We insert our varying conclusions. The implications of the combined statements would lead to the absurdity you propose, and when added to the statements forms various fallacies. But as stated it is more non sequitor than anything else.
Wow! I asked this very same question many years ago, and the title was, if not identical to yours, damn close to it. As I recall nobody could give a precise name to it, but said that it was similar to other fallacies. Just like in this thread.
It is a fallacy, though, because it’s a never-ending equation of the form A<B<C… where < means “is not as critical as”. Maybe that’s the name we should give it: the “never-ending equation” fallacy or “infinite less than” fallacy. Something like that.
A slightly different flavor of the fallacy of the excluded middle isn’t it?
I heard it once from a friend when the House of Lords was debating a change to procedure: “See, the House of Lords is completely useless. They’re talking about procedure when there are more important things to discuss!” to which my reply was “But they talk about the important stuff too.”
After reading this thread, I’m wondering if this is correct:
The OP’s examples are not logical fallacies; they’re a disagreement about priorities.
A: I help homeless animals.
B: You should help homeless people.
But B’s disagreement is, in effect, a non sequitur “disguised” as logic, and as such is a rhetorical device?
Or…what?
I agree that the OPs examples are not logical fallacies, because there is no logic at all. They are examples of rhetoric. If we transform the examples into logic statements, then we see that there is not necessarily any fallacy:
This example:
“I am donating money to my local homeless shelter”
“Don’t you know that thousands are dying everyday in East Bumfuqistan? You should send your money there.”
Becomes:
“I am donating money to my local homeless shelter”
“You should not donate money to your local homeless shelter, because there are alternatives such as […] that would have a larger impact as shown by study […], where impact is defined as […], with the premise that […]”
I am curious, however, what the name is of a rhetorical device that may be related to what the OP is after. I might call it the “First World Problem” tactic. An example would be: I complain about a minor defect in some product, and the complaint is dismissed with “LOL, FWP!” It is a rhetorical device that is related to a logical fallacy in that it can by implication be expanded to:
“This is a defect”
“It is not worth concerning oneself with the problem because there are much larger problems to tackle in one’s own life or others.”
I am not sure what the name of that logical fallacy is, if it even is one. It may be a fallacy that one cannot tackle problems large and small. Or it may be a fallacy to assume the legitimacy, efficacy, moral necessity, of helping others with larger problems than your own. I don’t know.
How is this not a logical fallacy? The logic, when it’s payed out to the end, is that you shouldn’t invest any time, effort or money in a cause unless it is the most critical and important cause in the world.
The fallacy as expressed in the OP is more than a debate about priorities. In fact even if we all agree that Cause A is not as important as Cause B, it does not mean that it is illegitimate or immoral to put time or money into Cause A, and that is the claim that the fallacy implies.
The thing is, it’s not never-ending, and if you follow the moral thinking through thoroughly, it is technically immoral to put time or money into a cause which is (morally) less “important” than another cause. In effect what the argument implies is that you draw up in your head, at any given moment, a utilitarian calculation of how your time and money can be best spent; both what the most important cause is, and also how effective you can be in helping it. If you work out that you can get the most “bang for your buck” by sending 95% of your month’s paycheck to Darfur, because sending it there will save more lives and have more benefit than sending it anywhere else or keeping it, then by utilitarian moral logic, it would be immoral to send that money anywhere else. If Cause A comes out lower in your moral calculation than Cause B, then it is indeed immoral to spend your time on Cause A, even if Cause A is helping sick kittens; you’ve calculated what the best way to spend your money is, and that’s how you should spend it. Doing anything else with it is immoral. The OP’s cited argument implies you should do this type of calculation at every moment, and act on it all the time.
Of course, the problem is that expectation is completely unrealistic (not fallacious, though). Humans are all selfish to some extent, and sometimes people want to buy a beer instead of sending that cash to Malawi, and plus it’s probably impossible to accurately perform such calculations anyway. It’s not a fallacy, it’s just a case of taking the way most of us think about morality to an extreme, and in a lot of cases that’s not realistic in practice. In some cases, it is - celebrities probably should spend the $1m they blow on a birthday party to charity, for instance. But when you start talking about whether someone should donate to homeless shelters in the US or starving kids in Africa, that’s when (for me) it starts to get unrealistic.
Original poster, Loach:
“…I’m not even sure if it is considered a logical fallacy.”
Your examples are not logical fallacies. They’re statements of opinion that suggest injustice because of misplaced priorities.
So the examples are rhetorical techniques of contrast, intended to diminish the credibility of the other party.
“I do A.”
“How can you do A, when you could do B, which I regard as more important.”
Which makes it a logical fallacy. There are formal and informal fallacies. This one would be an informal one.
I would agree that it’s an (informal) logical fallacy as in itself it is not a complete argument. It rests on a number of implicit assumptions.
For a start not everyone subscribes to this idea of “utilitarian moral logic”. For example, in my view a moral action is simply one intended to benefit others, particularly at a cost to oneself. I don’t believe it needs to get the most bang for buck to count as moral.
I don’t know. On the one hand, this sounds logical and rational; but on the other hand, it would mean that one big problem could, in effect, hold all other problems hostage, so that no one could contribute to them until the biggie is solved. As long as there’s a Darfur (or whatever your “Cause B” is)—and there always will be something like that—it’d be immoral for anyone to contribute to anything else.
Not really. Informal fallacies still progress with invalid reasoning. The reasoning here is valid. It’s just not something that’s very likely to happen in practice because it’s so time-consuming.
Most people do instinctively subscribe to a form of utilitarian moral logic though, involving these sorts of moral “calculations”, including you and me.
Take this example: you’re at a campsite in the middle of nowhere, in an area renowned for being home to a certain type of venomous snakes. You’ve brought one vial of anti-venom for yourself. You wake up in the middle of the night and realize you’ve just been bitten by such a snake, and that in about 20 minutes you will start to feel agonizing pain. However you realize two people with you at the campsite have also been bitten by such snakes - an adult father and his 6-year-old son. You know the snake’s venom is not usually strong enough to kill adults, although it will put them in agony for a couple of days. However, a 6-year-old would be likely to die from the venom. Both the father and the son are in a lot of pain already and are not really aware of what’s going on around them. Who should you inject with the anti-venom, and why?
Under the moral theory you’ve just laid out (“a moral action is simply one intended to benefit others, particularly at a cost to oneself. I don’t believe it needs to get the most bang for buck to count as moral”), it would be perfectly moral to inject the father. You’d be benefitting someone else, and at your expense.
But that’s obviously not the moral thing to do, right? Clearly you should inject the child, because he needs it more. Whether you realize it or not, you’ve done the calculation in your head and worked out it’s more important to save a child’s life than to save his father from a couple days’ worth of pain. If you injected the father he would be furious with you afterwards, right? That’s because we all generally subscribe to this type of utilitarian moral reasoning to some extent, calculations and all.
The argument the OP is talking about just takes that reasoning to its logical extreme, at which point it becomes unrealistic to expect people to act that way. It’s not fallacious, it’s just not realistic.
The calculation isn’t just “what’s the biggest problem?” though. It involves working out what’s the best “bang for the buck”: if the problem in Darfur is causing the most suffering out of any problem in the world, but your $100 is going to make very little difference to change it, then it won’t come out top in your calculation of where to send your money.
It’s obviously not reasonable to think like this - it would mean you could basically never buy anything except absolute essentials, and could never do anything with your time apart from earn money (to give to charity) or do charity work. But it’s the logical extreme of the way most of us do instinctively think about morality, and that’s why the OP’s argument is so hard to refute. The real answer is “I’m selfish, so I’m going to buy a beer with this $5 instead of sending it to Malawi”, but we don’t really like to think of it like that.
Do you consider strawmen, ad hominems, red herrings, slippery slopes, etc. to be logical fallacies? They are normally listed along with other logical fallacies, but I don’t think they would meet your strict definition.
I’d say the difference is that someone who says “it’s immoral to buy yourself a beer for $5, because that $5 could save a life in Darfur”, hasn’t made any sort of error at all. There’s no false assumptions, no shifting the argument. They’ve taken the way we all do tend to think about morality (see my example above about the snakes/campsite, for instance) and pushed it to its extreme. And pushed to its extreme, it turns out that we all act “immorally” by our own instinctive standards.
Nope. It is more along the lines of A should never be done until B is taken care of. Comparing and contrasting different viewpoints is fine. Maybe not enough is being done to take care of B. that is a valid argument. But plenty of things must take up our time too. Such as work, family local issues. Where logic fails is that there is always something that can be perceived as more urgent. But that does not mean that there aren’t many other things that must be done also. And logic also fails when it is put forth that only one thing can be done at a time.
I am somewhat at a loss to see where we disagree here.
If taking a line of reasoning to its logical extreme results in an absurdity, it proves that the reasoning is incorrect.
In one of your posts, you mention sending 95% of your month’s paycheck to Darfur. However this reasoning does not permit retaining 5% to spend on your own needs. While that 5% may be necessary for the survival of yourself and your family, it is safe to assume that, somewhere in the world, more lives can be saved by that same money than would be saved by spending it on yourself and your family.
In other words, it is immoral to spend any money at all on food or shelter for yourself and your family - you are morally obliged to starve and to direct that money to where it can do more good.
Since we surely agree that that conclusion is morally repugnant, how can we fail to agree that that argument that leads to that conclusion is flawed?