Relative privation

The dripping faucet

A tenant emails the landlord that the kitchen faucet has been dripping for two weeks. The landlord replies: “Some of the older buildings on this street don’t even have reliable heat. A little drip is nothing to complain about.”

The buildings without heat may well be worse off, but they aren’t the tenant’s building, and fixing their heating isn’t what the landlord would do instead of fixing the faucet. Nothing about them changes whether this faucet leaks or whether it should be repaired. This is the clear-cut case: the worse problem is brought in only to make the complaint look petty.

Talking yourself out of a real problem

“I’ve had a headache every afternoon for three weeks, but I shouldn’t bother the doctor with it. My neighbor is going through chemotherapy. Compared to that, a headache is nothing.”

Relative privation doesn’t have to be aimed at someone else. The neighbor’s illness is far more serious, and keeping that in view may be a kind way to think about one’s own troubles. But the conclusion here is about what to do, and the comparison doesn’t bear on it: three weeks of daily headaches is a reason to see a doctor whatever anyone else is going through, and the neighbor’s treatment doesn’t use up the appointment.

A bug report that “doesn’t matter”

At a software team’s weekly meeting, a designer mentions that the sign-up page has a confusing error message. A developer answers: “The checkout page crashed twice last month. Honestly, the wording on the sign-up page doesn’t matter.”

This sounds like prioritizing, and part of it may be. If the same developer can only work on one of them this week, the crash should probably come first. But “doesn’t matter” goes further: it dismisses the problem instead of ranking it. If the wording fix takes ten minutes, or someone else would do it, there’s no trade-off at all, and the crash is being used only to close the topic. The line between this and legitimate triage is whether the two really compete (see the first look-alike below).

• “There are worse problems”: a complaint is dismissed because something more serious exists, often something far away or on a much larger scale. “You’re upset about a parking ticket? People lose their homes.”
• “It could be worse”: a situation or decision is defended by comparing it with a worse one that was never a real option. “The new schedule isn’t bad. At least we don’t work weekends like hospital staff.”
• Aimed at yourself: dismissing your own problem, and so not acting on it, because other people have it worse.

Where the name comes from, and how well studied it is. “Relative privation” and “appeal to worse problems” are names from online fallacy lists and popular guides. They don’t appear in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on fallacies, in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s list, or in Hurley and Watson’s widely used logic textbook, and no analysis of the move under this name turned up in the research literature on argumentation. The name does occasionally appear in academic writing: a 2021 paper in BMC Medical Ethics by Alessia Maccaro and colleagues calls “better than nothing” reasoning “a well-known logical fallacy, that of the relative privation”, citing a popular fallacy collection. This site uses the name because it’s the one readers are likely to meet, not because it has a scholarly pedigree.

The move itself falls under an old and well-studied family, the fallacies of relevance. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the traditional ignoratio elenchi (irrelevant conclusion) as misdirection: a claim isn’t defeated by a sound argument for a different claim. “Your faucet leaks” isn’t answered by showing that other buildings have worse problems, just as, in the encyclopedia’s example, the claim that a city is the fastest growing isn’t defeated by showing it isn’t the biggest. When the worse problem is raised to steer attention away, it works like a Red herring. Hurley and Watson define that fallacy as changing the subject “to a different but sometimes subtly related one” and then presuming a conclusion has been established, and their own leading example has a similar shape: worries about the dangers of nuclear power are answered by pointing out that hundreds of people are electrocuted by accident every year. Douglas Walton adds that calling something a red herring requires evidence of a diversion, a distracting issue brought in to lead away from the real one. No source classifies relative privation as a kind of red herring, so this site shows them as neighbors rather than filing one under the other.

Nearby errors use a different comparison. Two wrongs make a right excuses a wrong by pointing at someone else’s wrong, and the tu quoque (including “whataboutism”) deflects a criticism by pointing at the critic’s own conduct. Relative privation doesn’t excuse or accuse anyone; it shrinks the problem. The Nirvana fallacy makes the opposite comparison, rejecting an option because an ideal would be better, where relative privation accepts a situation because a worse one exists.

• The problems really compete. When there is one budget, one repair crew or one afternoon, and fixing one problem means leaving another, comparing how bad they are is exactly the right question.
• The comparison is with the real alternatives. Whether an option is good enough depends on what else is actually available. Pointing out that the only other option is worse is a relevant reply.
• The claim itself is comparative. “This is the worst storm we’ve had” or “this is our most urgent problem” is answered by comparing it with others.
• Perspective offered without dismissing. “That sounds awful, and I’m glad it wasn’t worse” acknowledges the problem while offering comfort. It becomes the error only when the comparison is used to conclude that the problem doesn’t count.

The test: does the worse problem compete with this one for the same resources, or is it only being used to make this one look small?

One repair this year

A family has saved enough for one home repair this year. The roof leaks when it rains hard, and the back door sticks. “The door is annoying, and we’ll get to it,” one of them says, “but the roof is causing water damage. Roof first.”

This ranks one problem below a worse one, which is the surface of relative privation. But the family has a fixed budget that can’t cover both, so the two problems really compete, and the door is acknowledged as a problem rather than dismissed. The conclusion is about order, not about whether the door matters. This is the problems really compete condition.

The slower bus route

At a public meeting about a new bus route, a rider says the proposed route will add ten minutes to her trip. The planner answers: “That’s true, and it’s a real cost. But the only other route the buses can use while the bridge is being rebuilt adds twenty-five minutes.”

The planner answers a complaint by pointing to something worse, and a listener could hear it as “stop complaining, it could be worse.” The difference is that the worse route is the actual alternative, not a distant misfortune brought in for contrast. Whether the ten-minute delay is acceptable depends on what else is possible. This is the real alternatives condition, and it’s the comparison the Nirvana fallacy entry recommends: against what would actually happen instead.

Comparison feels like measurement. Next to something terrible, a smaller problem really does seem small, and it’s easy to move from “smaller” to “not worth mentioning.” Because attention and effort are limited, ranking problems is a habit with real uses, and the habit gets applied even when nothing is being ranked.

The reply is also hard to push back on. The worse problem is usually true and serious, so insisting on the smaller one can feel petty or callous, and the conversation tends to end there. That makes it an easy way, sometimes an unintended one, to avoid dealing with a complaint.

• Grant the comparison. “Yes, that’s much worse” costs nothing and is usually true.
• Ask whether the two compete. Would fixing this one take anything away from the worse one? If not, the comparison has nothing to decide.
• Ask what the real alternatives are. If you’re told something could be worse, check whether the worse version was ever an option.
• Separate “is it a problem?” from “what comes first?” A smaller problem can be real and still wait its turn.