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Appeal to emotion
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An appeal to emotion (sometimes personal appeal or argumentum ad personam) is a logical fallacy that occurs when a debater attempts to win an argument by trying to get an emotional reaction from the opponent(s) and/or audience, e.g. eliciting fear or outrage. It is generally characterized by the use of loaded language and concepts (Religion, nationalism, and nostalgia being common good concepts, homosexuality, drugs, and crime common bad ones). In debating terms, it is often effective as a rhetorical device, but is dishonest as a logical argument, since it often appeals to listeners' prejudices instead of being a sober assessment of a situation.
Emotional appeal overlaps with other fallacies such as argumentum ad populum, appeal to consequences, appeal to shame, appeal to force, appeal to fear, and poisoning the well.
The fallacy is an informal fallacy.
Acceptable use
There are times when appealing to people's emotion is acceptable. This is usually when attempting to motivate people, rather than influence or alter their beliefs. Occasionally, this may still be unsound, particularly if the emotions being appealled to have little to do with the action that the appeal intends to motivate.[1]
Examples
Children
“”Won't somebody please think of the children?!
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| —Helen Lovejoy, The Simpsons |
Children are more often than not toddled out as an appeal to emotion. From pictures of starving children to motivate people to give to charity to using them as any excuse to ban things that children shouldn't even be aware of (porn, for example), they are repeatedly paraded in front of audiences to appeal to their emotional protective instincts, often overriding anyone's sense of rationality. "For the children" or "think of the children" as emotional appeals have been used with success in passing political motions such as Proposition Hate in California. More recently, conservatives have been pushing anti-trans bathroom laws, ostensibly to protect children from trans people (cis people never ever molest childrenDo You Believe That?). One case of a bill titled specifically for this emotional appeal is the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011,
which would require ISPs to store and provide the government with backlogs of every user's online activity on demand. By titling it that way, it makes it easy to claim opponents are in favor of child pornography even if they're talking about the privacy implications and 200 million dollar burden it imposes on private ISPs.
Animals
As with children, cute animals override most people's sense. Even if the pictures of animal testing put out by PETA are 50 years out of date, they still provoke an emotional response rather than a reasoned one when trying to assess cruelty in animal testing. This is also the reason PETA tried to rename fish "sea kittens", which resulted in the word getting the 2009 title of "Most Unnecessary Word of the year" by the American Dialect Society.
Autistic people
"Think of the autistic people!" is the new "Think of the children!" in some left-wing spaces. TERFs and ace exclusionists love to claim that autistic people are somehow victims of transgender and asexual people. (Never mind the existence of trans and asexual autistics, or the existence of autistic people telling them to knock it off.[2])
Unfortunately, using autistic people as a rhetorical prop often ends up infantilizing and speaking over them. The Autistic community has fought hard to be taken seriously and be allowed self-determination. Reducing them to helpless childlike figures in your argument is pretty darn horrible.
Of course, there are legitimate cases where autistic people are being harmed (think Autism Speaks and ABA therapy), and encouraging people to empathize with autistics can be a good thing. Many autistic adults are capable of using social media to say "X is hurting us." There's a huge difference between speaking in solidarity with them and speaking over them in order to use them as a tool against someone you don't like.
Emotion-baiting
The ever-prevalent "hysterical woman" caricature is a particularly ironic form of emotional appeal (combined with poisoning the well) as it automatically dismisses the opponent's argument as being entirely based on it regardless of their actual argument, even more so as most perpetrators of this argument claim to be completely rational. The target doesn't even have to be female, but we all know being motivated by emotion is a female trait.
Veterans
Since the advent of 9/11, appealing to veterans has become increasingly popular, particularly in the United States. One such popular example is the Colin Kaepernick National Anthem kneeling controversy. The argument successfully deflecting the intended purpose of Kaepernick's kneeling (protesting police brutality and institutionalized racism), to claiming that kneeling was disrespectful to veterans who "fought and died for the flag". Which in fact helped to further solidify Kaepernick's complaints in the first place.
The problems with this are numerous. One is that it is a clear-cut appeal to emotion ("Think of the veterans!") Another is that it is co-opting a social cause, and attaching veterans to something that has nothing directly to do with them. Another is that it completely disregards any civilians who likewise fought (and died) for civil rights, human rights, and/or "for their country".
See also
External links
- Emotional Appeal, Fallacy Files
- The Personal Appeals Family, Bruce Thompson
- Appeals to Emotion and Desire, Atheism/Agnosticism About.com
- Your logical fallacy is appeal to emotion, YLFI
- Role Models – Hillary Clinton showing Donald Trump to be a bad influence on children.