Anti-hunters are baby killers?

            The rhetorical fallacy that I have chosen is “guilt by association.” It consists of judging or attacking a person solely based on their affiliation with a specific group. The idea is that, because certain members of a group do certain unpopular or bad things, all members of the group are involved in those things, therefore this specific member is also involved and is a bad person. It destroys the person’s (or group’s) authority by immediately painting them in a bad light in mind of the reader. It is a fallacy because of how blatantly wrong it can be and most of the time is.

            An example of when I saw this was a few weeks back when I was reading an article about people who are anti-hunting. The author was trying to prove his point that people shouldn’t judge those who go hunting. He started out well by describing the different reasons people hunt and the benefits that certain styles of hunting can give. But then he tries to discredit the people who verbally attack those who hunt by using this “guilt by association.” He makes the assumption that all those who are saying that it’s horrible to go out and kill animals are the same people that say it’s perfectly ok to kill babies if they haven’t been born yet. He tries to make the point that it’s completely ridiculous that they would support animal rights and yet negate rights to members of their own species. However, it’s extremely unlikely that all people who fall into the one group are also in the other, so it makes it a completely unfair connection and ruins the image of those who are pro animal rights in the mind of the reader. When I first read the article I didn’t really think about this bit too much at the time. It wasn’t until I was reading some of the comments on it about how arrogant the author was to say such a thing that I realized how detrimental it actually was, and not so much to the group he was attacking as to his actual article. It made him seem like he couldn’t find anything real against the actual group he was attacking (the pro-animal people) so all he could do was associate them with an entirely different group to paint them in as negative a light as possible. Hopefully in the future I will recognize such errors on my own, rather than having to rely on comments by other people that point out those errors.