8.8: Genetic Fallacy

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Bradley H. Dowden
California State University Sacramento

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A critic commits the genetic fallacy by attempting to discredit a claim because of its origin (genesis) when such a criticism is irrelevant to the claim. Suppose a friend of yours is reading the newspaper and mentions a report about Senator Friedman's bill to redraw the boundaries of the political districts in your state. Your friend is describing the senator's reasons for the new boundaries when he surprises you by mentioning that, according to the article, the senator got the idea for the new boundaries from a dream she had one night. You say to your friend, "Hey, stop right there. There's got to be something wrong with Senator Friedman's reasons, because she got the idea from a dream.” When you say this, you are committing the genetic fallacy because you are paying too much attention to the genesis of the idea rather than to the content of the idea and the justification offered for it.

Similarly, if Sigmund Freud, the father of psychiatry, had said that a patient's reasons for believing in God must be faulty because she arrived at her belief as a product of needing a strong father figure who would protect her and answer her prayers, Freud would have been committing the fallacy.

Sometimes more than fallacy label can be assigned to the same error. For example, suppose you were asked to evaluate the reasoning in the following passage:

In a recent American presidential campaign, a U.S. senator was running against the president for the party's nomination. The senator argued in a speech that the president should be held responsible for an international crisis that hurt American influence in the world because the president had advance signals of the coming crisis but had not acted effectively to prevent the crisis. How did the president reply? By dismissing the senator's argument on the grounds that it was "politically motivated.”

Clearly the president, and not the senator, made the error in reasoning here. What error, though? There are several ways to correctly label the mistake:

a. Ad hominem, because the president attacked the senator's character as being that of a politically motivated person.

b. Fallacy of avoiding the issue, because the president did not address the senator's question of who is responsible for the crisis but instead chose to change the issue to whether the senator's charges were politically motivated.

c. Genetic fallacy, because the president attacked the genesis or origin of the senator's complaint rather than the complaint itself.