Shifting blame to the victim
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Original Question
Hi everyone!
I may well be citing a well documented fallacy here but I was having a discussion with someone who used an appalling argument to justify the consumption of animal products and I wondered if there was a name for the fallacy he used.
His argument was "if animals weren't made of food, they wouldn't be eaten"
I chose to explain how similar that sounded to people blaming women who are sexually attacked for wearing revealing clothing.
What is the name of this fallacy? It sounds like it would be something to do with shifting the blame from the victim to the oppressor but that's not very snappy!
Any ideas anyone?
Thanks!
Answers
5That's pretty circular
Why do you eat animals? Because they are made of food.
What is food? Something which is eaten.
So because people eat animals you can describe them as food. Which is then given as the justification.
This breaks down to:
It's okay to eat animals because people eat animals.
This is devoid of any actual justification and instead is sophistry. It is also a particular form of circular reasoning known as begging the question where the argument's premise assumes the conclusion rather than support it i.e. it is assumed that animals are food, therefore it's okay to eat them.
This is a Circular Reasoning Fallacy.
Logical Form:
X is true because of Y.
Y is true because of X.
Its true that we eat animals because they are food.
Its true that animals are food because we eat them.
People eat animals not because they were made to be eaten but because we have evolved to be addicted to the taste of animals, but many don't know about this feature, i.e., our taste buds and guts have co-evolved with animals for millions of years.
But since it is not politically correct to say that they love eating, love hunting, love chasing after women, they invent new reasons, a FAKE BECAUSE if you will to justify their hormones/nature with LOGIC.
Humans are selectively rational, i.e., they invoke reason when it fits them and then use and abuse the reason to make a profit from it or defend their egos and actions.
If Animals weren't made of food, they wouldn't be eaten.
But we need to ask who made the animals with food?
If he says - NATURE made animals with food - then it would be APPEAL TO NATURE.
If he says - GOD made animals as food - then it would be a teleological fallacy.
You are a fool, so you got cheated. It is your problem that you are foolish. This is victim-blaming.
If it is not the Thief's fault for robbing your home, it is your fault for not having guns and defending your home.
This is a form of Attribution Error where the cause and effect are inverted.
The animals were not enticing you to be eaten; they had not done anything provocative; they just existed, and you chased and ate them. Now you need to invent a reason to justify your desire to eat meat, so you have come up with an explanation, AD HOC RESCUE. You would blame nature, you would blame GOD, and everyone else, and quickly shift the blame to others, while it is your nature to crave animal food. This is pure SCAPEGOATING
You will do anything to protect yourself and your fragile ego from blame and accountability.
So, as you can see, it is not as easy as it sounds; this is a system of logical fallacies feeding off each other.
You need a system design of logical fallacies to answer this simple question.
SCAPEGOATING ---> AD HOC RESCUE --> FAKE BECAUSE (FALSE JUSTIFICATION) --> VICTIM BLAMING --> APPEAL TO NATURE --> TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
Remember, no logical fallacy exists in ISOLATION, each logical fallacy is built on the strong foundation of a few more logical fallacies.
If you try to eliminate one logical fallacy, two more will take its place. This is the Brandolini's Law or the BS Asymmetry principle, the effort required to disprove a myth is many orders of magnitude greater than the effort required to produce bull shit.
So the moment you realize someone is being foolish, the best course of action is to AGREE TO DISAGREE and move on. There is no point in trying to prove/disprove or argue, it would be a useless waste of time.
if animals weren't made of food, they wouldn't be eaten
Honestly, this sounds like a joke. At least I found it funny. Jokes are often purposely fallacious. Equivocation is a popular comedic tool. My guess is that the person who made this "argument" is not attempting to make a serious argument. Assuming this is the case, the best response is one of humor as well that also demonstrates your logical wisdom:
If you weren't a idiot, you wouldn't say such idiotic things.
Assuming the person was serious, you can explain that the category "food" refers to (some) animals because we eat them, not that we eat them because they are part of the category "food." But let's be charitable and change "made of food" to "edible." The argument would be
If it is edible, then we should eat it.
When in fact,
If it is edible, then we can (are capable of) eat(ing) it.
They have moved from an "is" to an "ought," committing the Naturalistic Fallacy .
The way this argument is worded, it is an obvious truth - the vast majority, nearly 100%, of people only eat food. So the argument is true on its face. The problem is that it defines animals as "made of food". I can think of several fallacies that fit to some extent, about the premise.
Appeal to Common Belief - that animals are universally considered to be made of food;
Appeal to Self-evident Belief - that it is self-evident that animals are made of food
Appeal to Stupidity - convince the other side that animals are made of food
False Conversion - do people eat animals because they are made of food, or are cows considered to be food because people eat them?
But it seems to me the most clear fallacy is the Definist fallacy: "Defining a term in such a way that makes one’s position much easier to defend". The arguer is defining animals as made of food, and claiming that something defined as made of food will be eaten. But animals can also be sources of food (milk) without being eaten, they can be farm labor animals , they can be pets . This doesn't happen with something that is only food. On the other hand, anything living is potentially "made of food". Just about any animal or bird or insect or plant is "food" to some other creature. Humans are made of food to polar bears. But humans do not eat humans (for the most part), even though they are made of food in some contexts.
Your second case is a bit different, I think. This seems to me to be primarily an Oversimplified Cause fallacy. While wearing revealing clothing may be a contributing factor, it is not a cause at all because the wearer is not the perpetrator of the assault, or as you say, the wearer is the victim, not the cause.
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