The Appeal to Current Affluence Fallacy

Ironhide reacts to Ultra Magnus' "what if we never had energon" lecture.

Ironhide reacts to Ultra Magnus’ “what if we never had energon?” lecture.

Here’s a certain kind of fallacy I’ve noticed that is a specific form of the appeal to consequences fallacy, where one person leverages a premise’s favorable or unfavorable state of affairs to a certain conclusion. The current affluence fallacy appeals to a person’s present sensibilities and comfort levels to imply that a different situation would necessarily be unfavorable or even morally wrong. In other words, the argument rests not on logic so much as on relative affluence or beliefs.

Person A: “The ‘Dark Ages’ weren’t as bad as you might think. There was a lot of development in science and philosophical thought.”
Person B: “Well, I would never want to live back then. They didn’t even have electricity!”

Person B’s argument only works for people who know the comforts of electricity. In the world of logic, it ‘works’ only in a very contextual manner—supposing they were traveling back in time or to a place without electricity. This argument might provide a strong reason not to do so. To the people of the Medieval period, “lack of electricity” just means life as usual; to the people back then, and to anyone who never had electricity, the argument loses its “love lost” effectiveness.

Another example, this one more anthropology-based.

Person A: “Religious belief, even if ultimately false, still can do some good for some people, like provide a sense of purpose in life.”
Person B: “Maybe. Christianity and Islam have a history of misogyny.”

For “misogyny” to be meaningful to anyone requires a very specific political and social context that was absent for most of world history, and still is absent in many parts of the world. To a Muslim or Christian of a certain social background, the term “misogyny” has no meaning or would be seen as a nonsense concept. Trying to convince them of it is equally nonsensical.

Even libertarians, who by nature tend to easily sniff out socially preprogrammed bullsh*t, commit this fallacy in atrocious form:

Person A: “We’re moving to North Korea. Huzzah!”
Person B: “You know North Koreans live in near slavery, right?”

Despite objectively “bad” things that North Koreans might face, many people living there might not see their political system as oppressive or totalitarian in the same way others might.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.