Friday, January 15, 2010

Logical Fallacy: False Dilemma

At fast food restaurants,

1. Diners clear their tables themselves, and if not
2. Those who want to use the tables after that have to do it for them.

Hence, if you don't want to make others suffer, clean up your table after you have finished your meal.
In a false dilemma, other alternatives are eliminated or hidden, so that one is manipulated to choose the only viable or acceptable choice. The obvious third choice here is the role of cleaners, who will...now have nothing to do, since we are doing their job for them. You can guess whether the restaurants would keep them on charitable grounds. Then, who are the real beneficieries of our kindness?

Call me cynical, but I'm not convinced at all by this latest campaign to get us to help Fast Food Restaurants to clean up their tables for them. If a restaurant is a place of public ownership, then we all have the civic duty to maintain it. But it isn't.

Is it not the duty of any respectable eating place to provide a clean environment for their patrons? And for us patrons, our duty and obligation in this business transaction is to pay and take the goods given. Where does kindness come in? We might as well ask businesses to show us kindness too and...slash their prices, now that we are dealing on humanitarian, and not mercenary terms anymore.

No, I refuse to be indoctrinated. Don't think that I can be misled by the use of civil society jargon. I'm not a good little girl eating in the school canteen now.

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