Appeal to emotion

Sympathy in place of checking

Morgan: I think the budget forecast is off. The shipping costs look about 20% low.

Jamie: It’s right. I was up until two every night this week working on it, and if you tell the director it’s wrong, I’m the one who’ll take the blame.

Whether the forecast is right is a factual question, and the way to answer it is to check the shipping numbers. Jamie’s week was hard and the worry is real, but neither makes the numbers more accurate. This is the clear-cut form of the appeal to pity: sympathy offered as if it were evidence for a claim. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it plainly: sympathy alone is generally not evidence for believing any proposition.

Fear standing in for the numbers

A customer asks a home-security salesperson how common break-ins actually are on her street. He answers: “Picture coming home late, your door kicked in, your kids’ rooms torn apart. Can you really put a price on that feeling? Most people sign up the same day.”

This one is about a decision, and the fear of a break-in is a relevant thing to weigh when deciding whether to buy an alarm. The problem is that the customer asked for the facts that should decide how much to fear it, and the vivid picture is used to push that question aside. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s version of the rule fits this case: it’s fine to use emotions when you argue, but a mistake to use them as the key premises or to downplay relevant information. If the street’s break-in rate is low, the fear is also out of proportion to the facts, which is a second problem (see Variants).

Outrage turned into a verdict

An email to the neighborhood list: “They cut down the hundred-year-old oak on Elm Street this morning. Anyone who cares about this town should be furious. It’s obvious the new parks director has no idea what she’s doing.”

The anger is understandable, and losing an old tree may be a real loss. But the conclusion is a claim about the director’s competence, and the email offers only the strength of the feeling in support of it. The tree might have been diseased and a hazard, in which case removing it was competent. Anger that hasn’t checked its grounds is standing in for the missing facts, and the call to be “furious” invites readers to skip the checking too.

The left column moves straight from the feeling to the conclusion. The right column goes through the facts that the feeling is about, which is what makes it checkable.

• Appeal to pity (argumentum ad misericordiam): sympathy or compassion offered as a reason. Douglas Walton’s book-length study, Appeal to Pity (1997), argues that appeals to pity are fallacious when they block the critical questions that should be asked. As summarized by Hans V. Hansen, Walton names four tactics that do this: twisting the argument, a failure of relevance, exploiting the timing of the appeal so that the evidence is ignored, and staging the display of distress. It shouldn’t be confused with the appeal to poverty: an appeal to pity asks for sympathy or help, while an appeal to poverty treats someone’s hardship or humble life as a sign that they’re honest or right.
• Appeal to fear: frightening the listener into agreement, often called scare tactics. Jeremy Bentham labeled some of the political fallacies he catalogued ad metum, appeal to fear or threats. When the speaker is the one who will bring about the harm, it becomes an appeal to force. References disagree about how the two fit together: the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy cross-refers ad baculum to appeal to emotions (fear), while Walton’s Scare Tactics (2000), as described by Francisca Snoeck Henkemans, treats threats and fear appeals as separate kinds, on the grounds that a threat need not be meant to frighten.
• Appeal to anger, indignation or outrage: rousing resentment against a person, group or decision. Alan Brinton calls the argumentative form ad indignationem and argues that it can be legitimate (see below).
• Playing to the gallery: stirring up an audience’s shared feelings and prejudices instead of giving evidence. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy counts this as a version of the appeal to popularity.
• Other feelings: pride, vanity, snobbery, love, relief from grief. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists appeals to these under the same heading.

The philosopher John Deigh draws a useful line inside the family. An appeal to misplaced emotion points at facts that don’t bear on the question at all. An appeal to inflated emotion points at relevant facts but exaggerates them, calling a manageable risk “a disaster” or a minor loss “a tragedy”. On Deigh’s account the second is a false premise rather than a failure of relevance, but both are bad arguments.

Hoping a claim is true because its truth would feel good is a close relative: see Appeal to consequences.

Emotions aren’t the opposite of reasons. Most feelings are about something (pity is about undeserved suffering, anger about a wrong), so they can be well or badly grounded, and appealing to them can be good reasoning. As Douglas Walton put it in an early paper, “there need be nothing wrong with appeals to emotion as such.” His later book The Place of Emotion in Argument (1992) develops that view against textbooks that treat every emotional appeal as fallacious, a thesis John Deigh’s critical review calls “unassailable”.

• The conclusion is about what to do, and the feeling bears on it. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that appeals to pity and to threats have their natural home in practical reasoning, and that fallacy is more likely when they’re used to support a belief. Charles Kielkopf makes the same point with “should” claims: read as a claim that something meets a standard, an emotional appeal is irrelevant; read as a call to act, it may be exactly relevant.
• The appeal also says why the feeling is deserved. Hurley and Watson separate the fallacious appeal to pity from what they call arguments from compassion, which also give information about why the person genuinely deserves help: that they aren’t responsible for their situation, that the help asked for is appropriate, and that it will actually help.
• The feeling rests on true facts, and its strength matches them. Brinton suggests two questions for an appeal to indignation: would the facts given, if true, justify the feeling, and is the degree of feeling appropriate to them?
• Emotional language is the accurate description. Deigh points out that describing a real disaster in flat, affectless terms would itself mislead, because it conveys that the situation is less serious than it is.
• The feeling accompanies an argument rather than replacing it. A moving speech that also gives the facts is still an argument; the emotion becomes a fallacy only when it does the work the facts should do.
• The question is about the feeling. “Will this photo upset viewers?” is answered by how people feel.

The test: set the feeling aside for a moment. Do the facts it’s about still support the conclusion, and do they justify this much feeling?

A plea at sentencing that bears on the sentence

At a sentencing hearing for a nonviolent offense, a defense lawyer describes her client’s advanced kidney disease, his thrice-weekly dialysis, and what a prison term would mean for his treatment. She asks the judge for home detention instead.

This is meant to arouse sympathy, and it would be easy to call it an appeal to pity. But the question is what sentence is appropriate, and serious illness really does make imprisonment a much harsher punishment. Deigh uses nearly this case to contrast two pleas: one based on the client’s health rests on a relevant consideration, while one based on how hard his ancestors’ lives were would arouse misplaced sympathy, because that has nothing to do with the sentence. This meets the bears on what to do and rests on true facts conditions, as long as the lawyer doesn’t exaggerate the illness.

A fundraising letter after a flood

A food bank’s letter describes the families who lost their homes in last week’s flood, the children sleeping in the school gym and the empty shelves. It asks for donations of canned food and money by Friday.

The letter is designed to make readers feel something, and it asks them to act on that feeling. But the conclusion is a call to act, the facts behind the feeling are true and checkable, and they are exactly the facts that make giving worthwhile. A dry list of numbers would describe the same situation less accurately. This is the bears on what to do and accurate description conditions. It would become a fallacy if the letter used the same images to claim, say, that this food bank spends donations more efficiently than others.

Feelings carry a built-in sense that something matters. Brinton, drawing on Aristotle, notes that emotions are usually grounded in beliefs (pity in the belief that someone is suffering undeservedly, anger in the belief that someone was wronged), so a strong feeling arrives already feeling like a conclusion. It’s easy to skip the step of checking whether the belief underneath is true, and whether it bears on the question at hand.

Emotions also move people to act, which is why they’re appealed to in the first place. And a well-timed appeal can make questioning it feel heartless: Walton, as quoted by Hansen, observes that an inappropriate appeal to sympathy can put the listener “on the spot”, making a refusal look impolite or unhelpful. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy also discusses research connecting fallacies with motivated reasoning, in which desires and emotions shape how evidence gets weighed.

• Separate the claim from the decision. Ask whether you’re being asked to believe something or to do something. Feelings are far more likely to be relevant to the second.
• Ask what the feeling is about. Name the facts it rests on, then check whether they’re true and whether they bear on this question.
• Check the proportion. Is this a disaster, or an inconvenience described as one?
• Acknowledge the feeling before questioning the conclusion. “I can see this has been a brutal week. Can we look at the shipping numbers together?” keeps the question open without dismissing the person.