Seven Deadly Sins

Ashley Cooper, an influential 17th century philosopher, wrote this description of an alternative set of “Seven Deadly Sins”:

• Truth, if it becomes a weapon against persons.


• Beauty, if it becomes vanity.


• Love, if it becomes possessive.


• Loyalty, if it becomes blind, careless trust.


• Tolerance, if it becomes indifference.


• Self-confidence, if it becomes arrogance.


• Faith, if it becomes self-righteous.

It seems that overdoing a good thing can make it a bad thing! In critical thinking and argumentation, one of the factors in determining the strength (cogency) of an argument is its absence of fallacy. There are many well-defined fallacies, but the most dangerous are those that are true to an extent, but when stretched give a distorted. For instance, one might ask a man what he witnessed at a given event. Another person might caution us against accepting the man’s word, as he is known to drink and is therefore unreliable. While it may be true that a person that has had too much to drink may be an unreliable witness, we haven’t established in the above scenario that the person had drunk too much or even if he had drunk at all; just that he was known to drink. This is an example of an ad hominem (‘against the person’) fallacy that attacks a characteristic of a person (the witness) without addressing the content of the argument (his testimony).

These kinds of fallacies can used to try to persuade us in the absence of facts, or out of innocence by someone that is completely sincere but misguided. It is important to study the key logical fallacies in order to understand how to build strong arguments, and how to test arguments advanced by others.




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