Concealed quantification 33
Farmers benefit from price supports on beef; shoemakers gain from price
supports on shoes, and so on. Obviously the whole economy would
benefit if all products were subsidized.
(The point is that farmers and shoemakers only benefit if they are in a
small group which benefits at the expense of everyone else. If the
principle is extrapolated, everyone receives the subsidies, everyone
pays the taxes to fund them, and everyone loses out to the bureau-
crats who administer the transfers.)Society, indeed, provides the best place to use the fallacy with
intent to deceive. You should attribute all kinds of sympathetic
qualities to the people in our country. An audience of your
countrymen will have no difficulty in attesting to the truth of
them. When you slide in a surreptitious fallacy of composition to
urge the same for society as a unit, they will be reluctant to let go
of the good qualities they just claimed.
We all know that the average Briton is noted for a warmhearted gen-
erosity. That is why our society has to increase the rights of the old, the
sick, the unemployed, and those in less developed countries.
(These actions might be worthwhile, but are only generous when
done by individuals. To take money away from people to give to
others actually diminishes their opportunity to be generous.)You might just as well try: 'Irishmen tend to die young, you
know. I'm surprised the country is still going.'
Concealed quantification
When statements are made about a class, sometimes they are
about all of the members of it, sometimes about some of them,
and at other times it is not clear which is referred to. The fallacy