Appeal to the People
Benjamin W. McCraw
Among these diversities of opinion about injustice, it seems to be universally admitted that there may be unjust laws, and that law, consequently, is not the ultimate criterion of justice.
John Stuart Mill If the end, which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself, were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness.
John Stuart Mill
The appeal to the people fallacy (ATP; also known as argumentum ad populum) comes in two distinct variations. First, there’s what Woods and Walton (1989) call the “argument from popularity” (212). On this view, an ATP occurs “whenever someone takes a belief to be true merely because large numbers of people accept it” (Kelly 1990, 113). Thus defined, ATP has the following form: (a) Some large group of people believe/accept that if p, therefore p. Let’s call this the epistemic version of the ATP since it turns on the beliefs of the people. John Stuart Mill’s first quotation above is an instance of (a): everybody believes that there are unjust laws; therefore, there are unjust laws. Or, at least, this is how Mill appears to make the case.
Another version is the “emotive” ATP, again in Woods and Walton’s language (213). When this variant occurs, one attempts “to win popular assent to a conclusion by arousing the feelings of the multitude” (213; also Copi, Cohen, and McMahon 2010, 108). Here, the appeal is not to the beliefs or acceptances of the majority or populace but to their feelings or emotions. The emotive ad populum has this structure: (b) Some large group of people have strong (positive) feelings that if p, therefore p. The appeal to group feelings about p motivates an emotional response grounding the acceptance of p.
And this, I suggest, looks like the second quotation from Mill: we desire happiness as the chief human end; therefore, happiness is the chief human end. Or, again, this provides one plausible interpretation of the passage. Following Wreen’s (1993, 64) analysis, I propose a disjunctive account of the ATP. So, whenever an argument commits either (a) or (b), it makes the ad populum maneuver. We can develop (a) and (b) into subtypes.Some texts distinguish a “bandwagon” version whereby the following occurs: (c) Everyone does A, feels X, or believes p, you don’t want to be left out, therefore, do A, feel X, believe p. However, this just seems like a minor tweak on either (a) or (b) rather than a distinct subtype on its own. So, we’ll not define this as a separate variant of the ad populum. But one may appeal to a certain type or group of “the people” to whom one appeals. Generally, this is called the appeal to “snobbery” or “vanity” by picking out some exclusive, elite, or desirable group of people, motivating belief on the basis of this group’s beliefs or feelings. Thus:
(a*) Some exclusive group of people believe that p therefore p.
(b*) Some exclusive group of people have (positive) feelings about p therefore p.
Clearly, though, (a*) and (b*) serve only as limited, specified variations on (a) and (b).
There might be space here for a negative ATP: some exclusive (bad, inappropriate, disliked) group of people believe that p therefore not p. One can reason that if some scorned group has a belief (or has certain feelings about) p, then one infers the falsity of p. Political beliefs seem ideally representative of this point: some political person or political party with whom one typically disagrees advocates p, so one infers that p is false. But this won’t change the substance of the maneuver described in either (a*) or (b*) - just an interesting “tweak” of the ad populum maneuver.
Why think ATP is fallacious? Is it, in fact, fallacious? Well, the reasoning here for the defectiveness of ATP seems to be the following: simply believing that p or having (positive) feelings about p does not entail p, so appealing to a group or everyone’s belief that p will not guarantee the truth of the conclusion in (a) or (b) above.
Thus, the ATP cannot be deductively valid.Yet we might think that, at least, some ATPs may be inductively strong. I’ll just briefly mention a few plausible candidates and see if we can draw conclusions about when the ATP may succeed and when it is defective. First, we may deflate objections to (a*) especially but perhaps (b*) as one deflates an appeal to inappropriate authority by showing that the group to which one appeals has qualified authority on the issue. Mill (2001) famously argues that “competent judges” provide standards distinguishing higher (better) pleasures from lower (less good) ones. And Plato’s (1997) Gorgias has Callicles’s suggesting that we need a “craftsman” to distinguish good from bad pleasures (844). One may take it that “competent judges” qua competent and Callicles’s craftsman (by exercising the know-how of a craft) are adequate authorities on pleasure. Supposing Mill and Callicles are correct, this seems less an ATP and more of an inductively decent appeal to appropriate authority. Here is my general point: if the group to which one appeals in the ATP is (plausibly taken to be) an authority on the topic at issue, the maneuver seems inductively adequate and, thus, not fallacious. Otherwise, the appeal could be defective.
Another potentially successful ad populum could come from what is called consensus gentium (common consent) arguments. While more popular in the past and less so for contemporary philosophers, some thinkers find a way for consensus gentium arguments to offer some kind of (inductive) evidence that some widely believed proposition is true. Linda Zagzebski (2011) and Thomas Kelly (2011) focus on theistic consensus gentium arguments: Belief that God exists is widespread, therefore, probably, God exists. Whether this is a defective ATP fallacy or inductively innocent hangs upon the wider arguments that common consent does provide at least some probabilistic grounds to think the content of the consent is true.
References
Copi, Irving M., Carl Cohen, and Kenneth McMahon.
2010. Introduction to Logic.Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Kelly, David. 1990. The Art of Reasoning with Symbolic Logic. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
Kelly, Thomas. 2011. “Consensus Gentium: Reflections on the ‘Common Consent’ Argument for the Existence of God.” In Evidence and Religious Belief, edited by Kelly James Clark and Raymond J. VanArragon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 135-156.
Mill, John Stuart. 2001. Utilitarianism. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Plato. 1997. Gorgias. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Woods, John, and Douglas Walton. 1989. Fallacies: Selected Papers 1972-1982. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Wreen, Michael. 1993. “Jump with Common Spirits: Is an Ad Populum Argument Fallacious?” Metaphilosophy (24): 61-75.
Zagzebski, Linda. 2011. “Epistemic Self-Trust and the Consensus Gentium Argument.” In Evidence and Religious Belief, edited by Kelly James Clark and Raymond J. VanArragon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 22-36.