158 How to Win Every Argument
Englishman's fallacy. The argumentum ad temperantiam suggests
that the moderate view is the correct one, regardless of its other
merits, it takes moderation to be a mark of the soundness of a
position.
The unions have asked for 6 per cent, the management have offered 2
per cent. Couldn't we avoid all the hardship and waste of a lengthy
strike, and agree on 4 per cent?
(If we did, next time the unions would demand 20 per cent and the
management would offer minus 4 per cent.)The argumentum ad temperantiam appeals to a common
instinct that everything is all right in moderation. Moderate
eating, moderate drinking and moderate pleasures have been
widely praised by cloistered philosophers without any extreme
desires of their own. The ad temperantiam appeals to that upper-
class English feeling that any kind of enthusiasm is a mark of bad
manners or bad breeding. One shouldn't be too keen. It helps to
explain why none of them are particularly good at anything, and
accounts for their steady, but moderate, decline.
The fallacy enters in because, while moderation may be a
useful maxim to regulate our desires, it has no specific merit in
argument. Where one view is correct, there is no rule that it will
be found by taking the average or mean of all of the views
expressed.
If two groups are locked in argument, one maintaining that
2+2 = 4 and the other claiming that 2+2 = 6, sure enough, an
Englishman will walk in and settle on 2+2 = 5, denouncing both
groups as extremists. He is correct to describe them as extre-
mists, but incorrect to suppose that this proves them wrong.
/ have tried, during my term of office, to steer a middle course between
partiality on the one hand and impartiality on the other.