By: steve-wang
Special pleading is a logical fallacy where someone applies double standards without a valid reason. This is an easy fallacy to spot when others apply it to themselves but hard to spot when we apply it to ourselves because, when we do it to ourselves there are other emotional aspects and biases involved. For instance, the self-serving bias, the confirmation bias, or the appeal to emotion. One example of my parents using special pleading is, when they use their phones during meals when they said people should not do that. Their justification would be, I am an adult or I am a parent so it is fine. This is clearly wrong because before, they said other adults should not do it too. They do not spot this because of the appeal to emotion because they do not use logic to backup their argument. Another example would be, when parents say if children don't study, they will be poor or unemployed in the future. Their argument would be the people with money studied a lot and the people who are poor must not have studied. This shows confirmation bias because there are rich people who did not study a lot and poor people who studied a lot. A situation where special pleading is reasonable would be when people who have disabilites get priority seats. This is reasonable because they do need help in some sitiations to work the same. To make sure I do not make the same mistake, I should think of it from a non-related person's point of view and access the sitiuation. The steps might be, is this an emergency, is this necessary, or is this the best thing to do?