Chapter 4: Informal fallacies
5. False Dichotomy
Suppose I were to argue as follows:
Raising taxes on the wealthy will either hurt the economy or it will help it. But it won’t help the economy. Therefore, it will hurt the economy.
The standard form of this argument is:
- Either raising taxes on the wealthy will hurt the economy or it will help it.
- Raising taxes on the wealthy won’t help the economy.
- Therefore, raising taxes on the wealthy will hurt the economy.
This argument contains a fallacy called a “false dichotomy.” A false dichotomy is simply a disjunction that does not exhaust all of the possible options. In this case, the problematic disjunction is the first premise: either raising the taxes on the wealthy will hurt the economy or it will help it. But these aren’t the only options. Another option is that raising taxes on the wealthy will have no effect on the economy. Notice that the argument above has the form of a disjunctive syllogism:
A v B
~A
∴ B
However, since the first premise presents two options as if they were the only two options, when in fact they aren’t, the first premise is false and the argument fails. Notice that the form of the argument is perfectly good—the argument is valid. The problem is that this argument isn’t sound because the first premise of the argument commits the false dichotomy fallacy. False dichotomies are commonly encountered in the context of a disjunctive syllogism or constructive dilemma (see chapter 2).
In a speech made on April 5, 2004, President Bush made the following remarks about the causes of the Iraq war:
Saddam Hussein once again defied the demands of the world. And so I had a choice: Do I take the word of a madman, do I trust a person who had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people, plus people in the neighborhood, or do I take the steps necessary to defend the country? Given that choice, I will defend America every time.
The false dichotomy here is the claim that:
Either I trust the word of a madman or I defend America (by going to war against Saddam Hussein’s regime).
The problem is that these aren’t the only options. Other options include ongoing diplomacy and economic sanctions. Thus, even if it true that Bush shouldn’t have trusted the word of Hussein, it doesn’t follow that the only other option is going to war against Hussein’s regime. (Furthermore, it isn’t clear in what sense this was needed to defend America.) That is a false dichotomy.
As with all the previous informal fallacies we’ve considered, the false dichotomy fallacy requires an understanding of the concepts involved. Thus, we have to use our understanding of world in order to assess whether a false dichotomy fallacy is being committed or not.