Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Eat all of your food, people in China are starving!
My mom used to tell me this all of the time. The claim was that people in China were starving and if I wasted food I was in fact throwing away something that someone in China could have eaten. As a result of me throwing the food away, versus sending it to China, I was contributing to the starvation problem. This is of course a non-sequitur logical fallacy. Whatever I do with my food here, on my plate has nothing directly to do with anyone in China starving. I think it also might qualify as a "argument from adverse consequences" fallacy because it was being implied that if I did not eat all of my food I was throwing away something that someone in China could have eaten, therefore, causing further famine. The people starving in China have nothing to do with whether or not I finish all of the food on my plate.
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I used to think the same thing!! Like, "is me stuffing myself going to do ANYTHING for the starving people in China?" Aren't I just contributing to gluttony, not the food crisis overseas? Also, what as a 14 year old, could I do to put a stop to the famine in China. But I guess it wasn't to be taken seriously. It was more as a proactive role in the fate of another country. Ok, so eating all the food on my plate won't help them but it is such a problem my parents are making me feel guilty about what I am NOT eating. What can I do? It's a starting off point to asking yourself what a difference one person can make.
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