Straw Man - Examples

Examples

A: Sunny days are good.

B: If all days were sunny, we'd never have rain, and without rain, we'd have famine and death.

In this case, B falsely frames A's claim to imply that A believes only sunny days are good, and B argues against that assertion. A actually asserts that sunny days are good and, in fact, says nothing about rainy days.

C: We should give children ice cream after every school day.

D: That would be rather bad for their health.

C: Do you want our children to starve?

C says that children should be given ice cream after every school day. D replies to that statement assuming that children would be getting this in addition to their regular meals, and states that this would be unhealthy. C replies with the unreasonable suggestion that if children were not given ice cream, they would starve. Person C does this because it is harder for D to argue that children should starve than to argue that children should not be unhealthy.

Christopher Tindale presents, as an example, the following passage from a draft of a bill (HCR 74) considered by the Louisiana State Legislature in 2001:

Whereas, the writings of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, promoted the justification of racism, and his books On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life and The Descent of Man postulate a hierarchy of superior and inferior races. . . .
Therefore, be it resolved that the legislature of Louisiana does hereby deplore all instances and all ideologies of racism, does hereby reject the core concepts of Darwinist ideology that certain races and classes of humans are inherently superior to others, and does hereby condemn the extent to which these philosophies have been used to justify and approve racist practices.

Tindale comments that "the portrait painted of Darwinian ideology is a caricature, one not borne out by any objective survey of the works cited. That similar misrepresentations of Darwinian thinking have been used to justify and approve racist practices is beside the point: the position that the legislation is attacking and dismissing is a Straw Man. In subsequent debate this error was recognized, and the eventual bill omitted all mention of Darwin and Darwinist ideology."