Encyclopedia > Two wrongs make a right

  Article Content

Two wrongs make a right

Two wrongs make a right is a commonly used abbreviation for the belief that, if one wrong is committed, a second wrong will cancel it out.

Commonly used to excuse capital punishment: execution is okay because a murderer is being killed.

(Which, by presupposing that "execution" is a wrong, provides a splendid example of the logical fallacy known as "Begging the Question.")

A better statement would be this:

Given that killing is accepted to be usually wrong:

Killing as a punishment is acceptable if the criminal is a killer.

This fallacy is often committed by children. An example:

Parent: Jim, why did you pull your sister's hair? Don't you know that's wrong?

Jim: I know, but she pinched me first.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
French resistance

... French general Henri Giraud[?]. Francois Mitterrand joined it 1943. There were other resistance groups like Liberte and Verite (that merged with Combat) and Gloria SMH ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 27.2 ms