Justice

When someone starts a political argument with "Our Founding Fathers believed..." are they committing a logical fallacy?

Comments

It seems likely to me that there are some situations where such arguments are based on a fallacious 'inappropriate appeal to authority,' but that there are other circumstances where the views of the founders are deeply relevant. For example, if the question is 'how should the first amendment be interpreted' the actual views of the people who wrote the first amendment seem extremely relevant. Naturally, even in this situation we can criticize the founders and argue that we should believe something different than they did. Of course, there are other times when such arguments seem quite irrelevant. For example, George Washington warned against maintaining a 'standing army' but the realities of the 21st century seem to make his view quite impractical.

What bothers me more about these types of arguments is that people who make them (IMO) are often incorrect about what the Founders believed or at least engage in very selective 'memory' concerning them.

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