Stukel- Week 6

          A logical fallacy, as defined by your logicalfallacies.com, is a flaw in reasoning that can be used to trick people into believing a statement that may not be true in its entirety. One example of a logical fallacy in Jonathan Safron Foer’s book Eating Animals is found within Chapter Five: Influence/Speechlessness. In Chapter Five: Influence/ Speechlessness, Foer states, that if someone experiences a bug due to food-bourn illness it is likely that this bug is a direct result of factory farming. This is known as the logical fallacy of “false cause”. The logical fallacy of false cause is defined as presuming that a real or perceived relationship between things means that one is a cause of the other. Foer demonstrates this in his statement as he assumes that due to the poor conditions of factory farming in which the animals that we eat are held. However, though this statement may be true in some cases it also cannot be considered a factual statement. This is because there could be other outside forces affecting the food and contaminating it other than the conditions within factory farms. For instance, the food could have been exposed to bacteria during packaging, it could have been kept at a warmer temperature than it was supposed to during shipping, the expiration date could have been mislabeled, or it could have been left out too long before being put into the refrigerator at the store. The law of causality states, that in order to determine causality a statement must follow three laws: the cause must come before the effect, the effect must come after the cause, and most of all there can be no other possible causes that are affecting the effect. Because there are other ways food can become unsafe to eat it is not possible to directly blame factory farming.