Righteousness Fallacy with a Twist

Righteousness Fallacy - Assuming that just because a person's intentions are good, they have the truth or facts on their side.

This would appear to be very similar to psychologists' "halo effect," which you mentioned when answering my last question. In effect, a person's perceived goodness shines a light on his or her ideas or intentions, making them look good - even if they're actually bad. In other words, a good person's character can make a bad act look better.

Now imagine the opposite. Someone does something that's obviously good - like give food to hungry people. But the donor is a convicted murderer.

So we've now effectively reversed my first example, with a good act making a bad actor look good (or at least better).

Is there a name for this kind of fallacy? Or could it just be described as another version of the righteousness fallacy?

Thanks.

Essentially, what this boils down to is judging one's character by select deeds rather than all their deeds. It could be a version of cherry picking . I wouldn't be so quick to call it a fallacy (error in reasoning) because there is no "rule of reason" or logic that defines on how to judge one's character. What if a person changed and previous bad deeds were regretted? What if the good deeds far outweigh the bad? Some might see this person as good, others might not. This is a moral judgement—a subjective call.

I always try to avoid making judgements without facts e.g. murder trials in the news that I'm not hearing the evidence for, but all too many people seem eager to have a view based on gut feeling.

So in your example I would be okay to say that giving food to the homeless appears to be a good act, but even then I have very little to go on, perhaps interfered with the food, or been ordered to do community service.

However I wouldn't even consider making a judgement call on someone's nature on so little data. Even with the additional information of being a convicted murderer, I don't know how sound the conviction was, or whether there were mitigating circumstances.

If there's a fallacy here it's not making a bad person look good, it's making such a judgement without sufficient data. I think that would be:

Hasty generalisation is an informal fallacy of faulty generalisation by reaching an inductive generalisation based on insufficient evidence—essentially making a rushed conclusion without considering all of the variables. In statistics, it may involve basing broad conclusions regarding the statistics of a survey from a small sample group that fails to sufficiently represent an entire population. Its opposite fallacy is called slothful induction, or denying a reasonable conclusion of an inductive argument (e.g. "it was just a coincidence").