One of the many fallacies of argumentation identified by Jeremy Bentham in his Handbook of Political Fallacies is argument ad misericordiam ? the appeal to pity. I like the way it’s defined here:
An Appeal to Pity is a fallacy in which a person substitutes a claim intended to create pity for evidence in an argument. The form of the “argument” is as follows:
1. P is presented, with the intent to create pity.
2. Therefore claim C is true.This line of “reasoning” is fallacious because pity does not serve as evidence for a claim. This is extremely clear in the following case: “You must accept that 1+1=46, after all I’m dying…” While you may pity me because I am dying, it would hardly make my claim true.
Why I mention this is because the News & Observer‘s Under the Dome section today quotes the interim dean of the UNC-Chapel Hill Law School, Gail Agrawal, who is introduced to the reading public with the dubious distinction of “nearly upstag[ing]” John Edwards. Agrawi grew up in New Orleans, you see, and her home was flooded in 1965, and she went without food for a day as a consequence. Then she “became an attorney and married a physician and “bought a house in New Orleans on higher ground. And therein lays the moral of her story.” As she says,
In New Orleans your income and your family’s wealth determines whether you live on higher or lower ground. Your income and your wealth determines whether your house floods, not just from hurricanes but from the torrential rains.
Your income determines whether your house floods? I don’t know about that theory; after all, Jesus taught that wise men don’t build their houses where they’re likely to be flooded.
