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Appeal to Pity (Ad Misericordiam)
 
Description:
 
The argument attempts to persuade by provoking feelings of sympathy.
 

 
Comments:

 
The phrase "ad misericordiam" is a Latin phrase meaning "(appeal) to sympathy (or compassion)."
 

 
Examples:

"You should not find the defendant guilty of murder, since it would break his poor mother's heart to see him sent to jail."

"Is it not better to be unjust than just, when the just man, while obeying the law not to resist arrest, may be beaten, kicked, clubbed, insulted and abused, by those arresting him?"
 
 
    Discussion:
   
    Logicians have a reputation for being cold, heartless and unemotional. No character has captured this stereotype better than Mr. Spock, as played by Leonard Nimoy on the television series Star Trek. Leonard Nimoy makes logicians seem almost alien and inhuman. Probably the Ad Misericordiam fallacy has more to do with this stereotype than anything else. It is an ancient fallacy, recognized even by Plato. Hence, the idea that feelings of human sympathy are "illogical" (as Mr. Spock would say) has had a long time to become entrenched.

There are, of course, cases in which appealing to human suffering is fallacious, namely those in which the appeal is used to distract attention away from the issue at hand. In deciding the guilt or innocence of a person on trial, the question is "Did he do it?" His feelings, our feelings, and the feelings of his mother are irrelevant to the issue.

But the Ad Misericordiam fallacy is able to masquerade as good reasoning precisely because in most cases considerations of human suffering are the issue at hand. Should we take steps to reduce poverty? Should we permit doctor-assisted suicide for suffering, terminally ill patients? Should our foreign policy support dictators who abuse human rights? If we were not concerned with human suffering, there would be no motive to be rational. The most important thing we reason about is the alleviation of suffering. We want to reason well precisely because this will improve our chances of success. Logicians are not heartless and unemotional. Just the reverse: the more compassion and sympathy one feels, the more one understands the importance of doing something effective to help. We must reason well in order to know what to do.
 

 
Classification: A Fallacy of Irrelevance (a deductive fallacy of soundness with a falsehood in the major premiss) in the Emotional Appeals family.

 
Source: Plato collected examples of this fallacy, but did not name it. Cicero uses the phrase "inducere ad misericordiam," to mean reasoning from compassion, but it is not clear that he intends to name a form of fallacious reasoning. The Emotional Appeals category of fallacies was created by Isaac Watts, Logick; or, The Right Use of Reason (1725), who labeled them argumentum ad passiones. Curiously, while Appeal to Pity would appear to be the paradigm fallacy in this category, the term "ad misericordiam" is not on his list. The phrase "ad misericordiam" used to name a species of fallacious reasoning seems to have entered the vocabulary of logicians some time during the 20th century. It is used in Irving M. Copi, Introduction to Logic, the earliest edition of which appeared in 1953, and, although this is almost certainly not the earliest reference to this fallacy, I have not so far been able to identify and earlier source. Please contact me if you can point me to a potentially useful clue regarding the original source of this fallacy.
 

 

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