Health Care Reform: Endorsed by Obama Supporters?

By Victor Morawski

Fallacies are mistakes in reasoning that occur so often and are so easily made that, over the years, logicians have sought to give them names for convenient reference. While teaching a recent unit on fallacies to my Logic students, I plucked from the Internet, summarized, and placed on a test an argument advanced by a blogger to counter the evidence from polls that Health Care Reform legislation was unpopular with the American people.

What the blogger said in essence was: “It is wrong to say that the majority of the American people no longer support the legislation for comprehensive health care reform now before Congress. A majority of the American people elected Barack Obama as President. Health care reform was part of his platform. So, a majority of the American people support comprehensive health care reform.”

Now I would be happy to let this one go as a piece of shaky reasoning by an obscure liberal blogger that deserves little serious attention were it not for the fact that, just a few days ago, I heard the Rev. Al Sharpton use essentially the same argument on a national news broadcast. As acceptance of this reasoning may be more widespread than I had previously realized, I think that it deserves to be addressed.

If the above argument seems alright, don’t be misled. An additional characteristic of fallacies is that, while from a logical point of view they are leaky buckets that won’t hold water, they are often quite persuasive psychologically.

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