Historical past

In La Bégueule (1772), Voltaire wrote Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien, which is commonly translated as “The right is the enemy of the nice” (actually: “The higher is the enemy of the nice”).

The nirvana fallacy was given its title by economist Harold Demsetz in 1969,^[2][3] who mentioned:^[1]

The view that now pervades a lot public coverage economics implicitly presents the related selection as between a really perfect norm and an present “imperfect” institutional association. This nirvana method differs significantly from a comparative establishment method during which the related selection is between various actual institutional preparations.

Good answer fallacy

The right answer fallacy is a associated casual fallacy that happens when an argument assumes that an ideal answer exists or {that a} answer needs to be rejected as a result of some a part of the issue would nonetheless exist after it have been carried out.^[4] That is an instance of black and white pondering, during which an individual fails to see the complicated interaction between a number of element parts of a scenario or drawback, and, consequently, reduces complicated issues to a pair of binary extremes.

It is not uncommon for arguments which commit this fallacy to omit any specifics about precisely how, or how badly, a proposed answer is claimed to fall in need of acceptability, expressing the rejection solely in imprecise phrases. Alternatively, it might be mixed with the fallacy of deceptive vividness, when a selected instance of an answer’s failure is described in emotionally highly effective element however base charges are ignored (see availability heuristic).

The fallacy is a sort of false dilemma.

Examples

Posit (fallacious)

These anti-drunk driving advert campaigns are usually not going to work. Persons are nonetheless going to drink and drive it doesn’t matter what.

Rebuttal

Full eradication of drunk driving just isn’t the anticipated end result. The purpose is discount.

Posit (fallacious)

Seat belts are a nasty concept. Persons are nonetheless going to die in automobile crashes.

Rebuttal

Whereas seat belts can’t make driving 100{ae90547d17d4d74b17007ee836a04674fd006933c139011dc78eb03c100070a7} secure, they do scale back one’s probability of dying in a automobile crash.

Posit (fallacious)

Medical testing on animals is ineffective. The drug thalidomide handed animal checks however resulted in horrific beginning defects when utilized by pregnant ladies.

Rebuttal

This in style argument ignores all of the 1000’s of medication that failed animal testing, any variety of which might have harmed people. Within the case of thalidomide, no testing was carried out on pregnant animals; had this not been the case, the influence on pregnant ladies might have been foreseen. The fault right here lay with lax mid-Twentieth-century rules, and never with medical testing itself.

See additionally