The fallacious argument from poverty
Most debaters know the fallacy of ad hominem , where you respond to an argument by attacking your opponent. Ad hominem arguments generally take the form of You’re a bad person, so therefore, I must be right . There are many specific accusations one can make — that an opponent is dumb, a cheater, a liar, and so on — but the basic pattern remains the same.
There’s also a related, and distressingly common, fallacy, which I’ll call the argument from poverty . It tends to go, I am poor/sick/foreign/unlucky/otherwise disadvantaged, so therefore, I must be right . I call it the argument from poverty because it’s an easy name to remember, but this argument can be used with any unfortunate circumstance, not just being poor. What they all have in common is trying to make the audience think about feeling sympathetic rather than think about factual claims .
How does that work? Most debates are only partly about facts. If Alice and Bob are arguing with each other, we usually see the argument on two levels. One is Alice’s ideas vs. Bob’s ideas , and the other is Alice’s team vs. Bob’s team . Who wins is partly a matter of who’s right, but it’s also a matter of who we think is the more sympathetic team — which side we feel like rooting for . If debating is largely about competing teams of people, then you can win by using an ad hominem to make the other side seem less sympathetic, and you can also win by trying to make your side seem more sympathetic. It doesn’t make your arguments right … but it does mean that you win, which for many people is the most important thing.
So, we see many conversations like: Alice: Hey, this study from Harvardton University shows that purple fever medicine costs a billion dollars per life saved. Maybe we shouldn’t spend so much?
Bob: How dare you say that. My grandma has purple fever!
Alice: But there’s only a limited amount of money — we need to spend it where we can use the money most effectively, or we’ll make everyone worse off…
Bob: Why do you hate my grandma? You’re such an asshole.
Part of this argument is about the factual question of “how much should we spend on purple fever medicine?”. But it’s also about rooting for the right team — as if the world was divided into Purple Fever Patients vs. Healthy People, and we have to choose a side. Who would be against purple fever patients? I sure don’t want to get purple fever, and I don’t want anyone else to get it either. Trying to cure purple fever isn’t bad , all else being equal.
And yet, even if we are in favor of treating purple fever, that doesn’t mean we must always side with the purple fever patients in a factual dispute . For — quite apart from the fact that having purple fever doesn’t make you more likely to be right — we also have the problem of limited resources . There are many, many illnesses, and many other bad things besides. If we tried to fix all of them at once, we’d bankrupt the world a thousand times over, and then no one would get help. And we’d also all starve.
The limited resource problem isn’t as obvious with “awareness campaigns”, for people often complain they are short of money, while few say they are short of awareness. Yet, awareness is a limited resource too — there are only 24 hours in the day, and seven days in the week. There are plenty of things that some people really should be more aware of… but it follows that there must also be things they should be less aware of, for spending more time on X implies spending less time on something else. No, you cannot assign 90% of your budget to A, and 90% of your budget to B. Sorry, but it doesn’t work like that.