Appeal to poverty

The roadside honey

“Get the honey from the little stand by the road, not the store. Those people are obviously scraping by. They’re not going to water it down.”

Nothing about the sellers’ finances shows what’s in the jar. Small, struggling producers have the same reasons to cut corners as large ones, and arguably stronger ones. The honey might well be excellent, but the evidence for that would be its label, its source or a test, not how little money the sellers seem to have. This is the clear-cut case.

Humility as a performance

At a shareholders’ meeting, a company’s founder arrives in an old car, wearing a worn sweater, and mentions that he still lives in his first small house. When he predicts that sales will double next year, several investors say afterward that a man that down-to-earth wouldn’t exaggerate.

The founder isn’t poor, but he presents himself as humble, and the investors read that as a sign of honesty. His lifestyle says nothing about the sales forecast, which rests on orders, markets and costs that can be examined. Madsen Pirie describes people with money going to some lengths to “feign a similar poverty,” hoping to command the respect it brings. A humble image that can be put on that easily is a poor guide to honesty.

“You’ve never been broke”

Morgan explains to a friend why it helps to keep an emergency fund before paying extra on a low-interest loan. The friend cuts in: “Easy for you to say. You’ve never been broke in your life.”

This is the reverse form: comfortable circumstances treated as a reason to dismiss someone. Whether Morgan has been broke doesn’t change the reasoning about emergency funds, which can be judged on its own terms. It overlaps with the ad hominem that Erik Krabbe and Douglas Walton call situationally disqualifying: an attack claiming that the speaker’s situation, such as a lack of firsthand experience, disqualifies them from taking a position at all.

• Poor, therefore right: a claim accepted because the person making it is poor. Milos Jenicek’s definition is simply “the position is correct because it is held by the poor.”
• Humble, therefore honest: a simple or austere way of life taken as a sign of sincerity or wisdom, including when it’s put on for show.
• Comfortable, therefore wrong: someone dismissed because they’re well-off, as in the last example.

Its mirror image is the appeal to wealth (argumentum ad crumenam), which takes wealth as the sign of being right. Robert Lamm’s textbook Dynamic Argument includes both in the same list of appeals, glossing the appeal to poverty as “avoidance of wealth indicates virtue” and the appeal to wealth as “wealth is validating.”

Where the name comes from, and how well studied it is. Pirie traces the name to “the poor man, Lazarus,” a figure from a New Testament parable. The fallacy appears in textbook and reference lists (Lamm’s, Jenicek’s) and in popular guides such as Pirie’s. Unlike its mirror image, which has at least one scholarly article devoted to it, the appeal to poverty doesn’t appear to have been analyzed on its own in the research literature on argumentation, and no studies of how often it occurs or how persuasive it is turned up. The explanations below come from textbooks and general reasoning, not tested findings.

• The question is about living with little money. People who have lived on a tight budget know things about it that others may not: which costs are unavoidable, which services are hard to reach. Their experience is evidence on those questions.
• The question is how someone handles money. A modest salary or lifestyle can be relevant when the question is where money goes, as with a charity’s spending.
• Incentives are directly relevant. Someone with nothing to gain from a claim may be less likely to be biased about it, but that’s a point about their stake in the answer, and it has to be checked, not assumed from how much money they have.

The test: does the person’s situation give them knowledge or a track record relevant to this question, or is it only making them seem trustworthy?

Asking the people who use the food bank

A food bank is deciding when to open. Instead of choosing the hours that suit its volunteers, it surveys the families who rely on it, many of whom work hourly shifts, and opens on the evenings they say they can make.

The food bank gives special weight to what people on low incomes say. But it isn’t treating their poverty as a sign that they’re right in general. They have direct knowledge of the question being asked: when they can actually get there. This is the question is about living with little money condition.

The charity director’s salary

Choosing between two local charities, a donor notices that one director is paid a modest salary and the charity spends most of its budget on its programs, while the other spends heavily on administration. She gives to the first.

The donor counts a modest salary in the charity’s favor, which looks like rewarding humility. But the question she’s asking is where her donation will go, and salaries and overhead are part of the answer. She isn’t concluding that the director is wiser or that the charity’s programs work; that would need other evidence. This is the how someone handles money condition.

Pirie describes the appeal to poverty as “deeply engrained into our thinking.” Several ordinary intuitions feed it. People who have little seem to have less reason to deceive, and less to protect. Many moral and literary traditions portray the poor as virtuous and the rich as compromised. And sympathy for someone’s hardship can slide into agreement with what they say.

The result resembles the Halo effect: one sympathetic trait colors judgments of unrelated ones, such as honesty or good judgment. It differs from an appeal to pity, one of the forms of appeal to emotion. An appeal to pity asks for sympathy or help. An appeal to poverty uses someone’s hardship as a reason to believe them.

• Ask what their situation actually gives them. Firsthand knowledge of hardship is real evidence on some questions. On others it’s irrelevant.
• Judge the claim as if a stranger had made it. Would the reasoning still look good without the image of the person behind it?
• Be wary of humility on display. A modest image is easy to adopt and says little about honesty.
• In the reverse form, grant that someone may lack experience, then look at whether their reasoning depends on it.