ETHICS ASSIGNMENT #1
Name______
For each of the following statements, identify which reasoning fallacy is being committed. Choose among: loaded language, appeal to authority, ad hominem, begging the question (circularity), slippery slope, straw man, hasty generalization, and bifurcation (false dilemma/false dichotomy).
1. You’re only opposed to prayer in school because you’re an atheist.
2. I don’t get these pro-choice people. How could anyone want people to get abortions?
3. Abortion is the genocide of the 21st century.
4. You may not like what the Aryan Nation has to say about minorities, but you can’t deny their right to speak their opinion. After all, the law protects freedom of speech.
5. How is it that you can care so much about the life of the fetus, but not the woman?
6. We can’t allow organ transplant teams to base decisions about who gets a transplant based on considerations of the patient’s responsibility for their condition. Once we do this, we’re on a path to denying all sorts of treatment based on judgments about the patient’s worth.
7. If we permit euthanasia, we’ll wind up weakening peoples’ respect for life so much that taking life won’t be considered to be morally wrong anymore. That’s exactly what happened in Nazi Germany—they accepted euthanasia and ended up accepting genocide.
8. Look, it’s right in the Bible—the story of Sodom and Gomorrah shows that homosexuality is morally wrong.
9. Capital punishment clearly doesn’t deter crime. The state executed two murderers last month, but then just yesterday someone committed another murder.
10. I can certainly understand why you’re so opposed to pornography, Joan. I mean, no one would want to see you in Playboy!
11. Kids have become more violent because of the violence in the video games they play. The two kids that carried out the Columbine shootings played those violent games all the time, and look what they did.
12. I can understand why some people don’t approve of the use of torture; but our enemies are everywhere, and if we can’t gather the information we need by whatever means we can, there’s bound to be another attack like 9/11.
13. Marriage needs to be kept a union between one man and one woman. Once we open up marriage to allow same-sex marriage, we’ll have to allow polygamy, underage marriage, and incest! We may even have to let people marry their pets!
14. Our nation definitely needs stricter immigration policies. Our current policies are letting terrorists and criminals just pour through our borders unchecked.
15. There goes Susie the Feminazi again! All this “women’s lib” and “patriarcy” stuff—I tell you, what she really needs is a good man.
16. We need to get rid of public assistance once and for all. People are abusing it by having all sorts of babies and collecting money from the state without supporting their kids—like that lady on the news last night. She had six kids living in squalor while she was using public aid to finance her new car.
17. I just don’t get why some people want to abolish the death penalty. How can anyone care about the rights of criminals but not about the rights of the victims and their families?
18. I can’t stand those anti-war protesters! They just don’t care about the troops that are dying over in Iraq to protect our freedoms!
19. How could anybody endorse homosexuality as a “lifestyle choice”? Jeffrey Dahmer was gay and he went around seducing young men and then killing them—how can we endorse this as a lifestyle?
20. It’s about time that the Catholic Church gives up its archaic approach to sex and starts allowing the use of birth control.