8.4: False Dilemma Fallacy

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Bradley H. Dowden
California State University Sacramento

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Reflect on your own work experience, then respond to this item from a questionnaire.

On average, each week your present employer (or your previous employer if you are not now employed) is drunk on the job

a. occasionally
b. usually
c. always

Suppose your employer is never drunk on the job. What answer could you choose? You don't have one to pick, so you are in a dilemma. Because it is false to say that the three given choices are all that exist, the dilemma is a false one, and the error of reasoning committed by the creator of the question is called the false dilemma fallacy. To remove the fallacy, the question could be revised to add a fourth choice, "never." False dilemma reasoning is an example of slanting by unfairly presenting too few choices. It loads the set of choices unfairly by not offering a fair range of choices.

The black-white fallacy is a false dilemma fallacy that limits you unfairly to only two choices, as if you were made to choose between black and white. Real life is often not so black and white. What about part black and part white? What about the gray? Saying "You are either for our proposal or you are against it" is the most common example of the fallacy. Dick Gregory put it this way: "Either you are part of the solution or you are part of the problem." If you rightly complain that the dilemma you face is unfair and that there is another choice you should be offered, then you are finding a way to escape between the horns of the dilemma. That is, you escape being gored by the choices offered. For three-horned false dilemmas you may escape among the horns instead of between the horns.

Not all dilemmas are false ones. If your employer's drinking problem does occasionally interfere with the quality of his (or her) work, you have to consider whether you will ignore it or instead report it to someone. Now you face a true dilemma. If you do nothing, the problem may not get solved. But if you blow the whistle by reporting the problem to another superior, you might have to deal with your employer's reaction when he finds out. He could start assigning you the more unpleasant assignments and you may suddenly find letters in your personnel file describing your poor work performance.

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Which of the following passages, if any, contain a false dilemma fallacy?

a. Would you vote for the president if he were to run again, provided that code section D of article 20 were repealed, and supposing that under provision 60B the president were to declare his assets and swear not to have been involved in lobbying for a foreign power in the interim?
b. How many alcoholic beverages have you drunk in the last 24 hours?
c. Is the president doing about the same quality job as he was doing last year or is he doing better this year?
d. Please suggest improvements, if any, you would make in Einstein's theory of relativity.
e. Is Einstein's theory of relativity better than Isaac Newton's for predicting orbits of planets.

Answer: Answer (c). Maybe the president is doing worse.

Here is a false dilemma fallacy you can commit on purpose if you want to trick a toddler into doing something:

Do you want to go to bed now or after you’ve had a glass of apple juice?

The child who doesn't want to go to bed at all might be tricked into choosing the apple juice. After the child is done with the juice you can say, "OK, remember you agreed to go to bed after the juice." The child who can see his or her way through the horns of this petty manipulation has reached a definite step up in logical reasoning ability.

A politically significant example of the false dilemma fallacy occurs in this resolution adopted by a major political party in Arizona. It states that the United States is "a republic based on the absolute laws of the Bible, not a democracy based on the changing whims of people."¹ A logical reasoner should ask, "Must it be one or the other?" One of the two choices offered by the resolution is that democracy is based on whims; the readers are offered no choice of a democracy based on something else, such as on reasoned opinion hammered out in the marketplace of competing ideas. By slanting the list of acceptable choices, the resolution guides the reader to making the favored choice. Successful stacking of the deck has to be somewhat subtle. If the resolution had said "a republic based on the Bible, not a democracy based on the changing whims of the stupid voters," it would not have passed because it would not have been subtle enough to pass.

Does the sign below commit the false dilemma fallacy?

This is not an easy question. Whether it commits the fallacy depends on whether there are really only two choices. Are there? How you answer this question may depend on your ideology or world-view. People with certain ideologies would say that ultimately there are just these two choices—Jesus Christ or Satan. Those with a different ideology—Christian Scientists or Muslims or atheists, for example—will say that there are other choices. So, to decide whether the fallacy has been committed here, we first need to settle the issue of the correctness of the religious ideology that says there are just these two choices. That is a large task, not one well suited to this book. However, it would be incorrect to answer the question of whether the sign commits the false dilemma fallacy by saying, "Yes, it's a false dilemma if you have one ideology; but it's not a false dilemma if you have another ideology." This would be incorrect because the sign either does or doesn't commit the fallacy. Whether it does depends on whether the religious assumption behind the sign is correct. Thus, what it would be correct to say is that people who hold one sort of ideology will say, "Yes, it's a false dilemma, "whereas those who hold another ideology are apt to say, "No, it's not a false dilemma.'' In short, the issue of whether the sign commits a false dilemma fallacy depends in turn on resolving another issue, the correctness of the religious assumptions behind it.

To summarize, by using the false dilemma fallacy, a speaker withholds important choices. The choices presented divert the reader's or hearer's attention away from the other choices. Pointing out one of those other choices is called escaping between the horns of the dilemma.

¹ From "Justice O'Connor Regrets 'Christian Nation' Letter," James H. Rubin, The Sacramento Bee, March 16,1989, p. A28.