Recognizing fallacies in deontological arguments

Deontological arguments are those that refer to properties of actions other than their consequences, e.g., vaccination, act vs.\ omission. These arguments are often used to justify public policies. In principle, they could make outcomes worse than the outcomes of utilitarian choices, i.e., those designed to yield the best expected consequences. Deontological arguments ought to explain why it is better to make things worse. We suggest that arguments attempting to do this are usually fallacious. We list several categories of fallacies. We report two demonstrations in which we ask whether people without special training can classify fallacies correctly. People vary in their classification ability, and that ability is correlated with acceptance of the standards of actively open-minded thinking, possibly because both traits require meta-cognitive competence.