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A logical fallacy example: THE MORALISTIC FALLACY

When you turn the naturalistic fallacy on its head, you get the moralistic fallacy, sometimes called wishful thinking or political correctness. In this example of a logical fallacy, “ought” = “is.” That is, you believe that what ought to be true actually is true—even though there’s no logical connection between “ought” and “is.”

A familiar example: human males and females ought to have the same brain structure and psychological constitution at birth. So (magically)...they do! Believing otherwise means condoning sexism. And, therefore, all of the empirical evidence showing that human males and females are in fact psychologically significantly different from each other at birth, shaped in the course of evolution by sex-based differences in adaptive pressures—all that evidence must somehow be wrong.

People believe all sorts of things about wonderful human nature—people aren’t greedy, people don’t lie, people don’t cheat—merely because they ought to be true, despite evidence to the contrary.

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