Halloween Masks Prevent Customer and Employee Safety

A local burger joint imperatively requests drive through customers to, “Remove your Halloween mask at this time for customer and team member safety.” A logical explanation to justify why you’re driving around with a Halloween mask on your face may seem impossible to compile, but what’s even more confusing is the logic behind this theory: removing your Halloween mask provides safety to customers and team members.

This poster fails to declare premises, a critical and almost necessary component when trying to convey a position or make any type of valid conclusion. The lack of essential construct leads me to believe this poster means absolutely nothing. I’d like to identify a few fallacies in this amazingly ridiculous request, but first, we must create a hypothetically sound argument since WHATABURGER failed to provide one.

Customers wearing a Halloween mask reduce the safety of our customers and team members.

A decrease in customer and team member safety is unacceptable.

Therefore, remove your Halloween mask for the safety of our customers and team members.

Begging The Question (Petitio Principii) Also known as circular reasoning, this is a common fallacy that’s easily identified. Without clarification as to how a customer wearing a Halloween mask jeopardizes safety, the initial premise is simply a declarative statement lacking proper justification, leading to an imperative conclusion that reiterates the poorly justified premise. Here’s another example. “Florida’s laws indicate wearing a safety belt while operating a motor vehicle is required. Failure to do so could result in a fine. You should wear your seat belt and avoid the fine because it’s a law, and the law is the law.”

Misleading Vividness A drawn out occurrence, real or not, that often contains dramatic details describing what could happen. The point is to convince the person responsible for the initial claim there’s a problem with their claim. Phil: “I love working around Halloween time, we get to see some pretty cool costumes!” Sally: “Phil, don’t you know those masks are made with hundreds of toxic chemicals that could catch fire at any moment? What if your drive through employee was handing some guy his change and all of sudden her hands are on fire, what are you going to do then? Or how about a mask so scary, it sends that 78 year old janitor guy into a seizure! ”

False Dilemma A false dilemma cites two options without considering additional possibilities. In this case, you either wear the mask and risk the safety of others, or you don’t wear the mask and ensure the safety of others. Alternatives involve placing the mask on top of your head so the face isn’t hidden, or arming yourself with a time delay bomb which would really decrease their customer’s and team member’s safety.

Gross Generalization This argument basically says anyone wearing a Halloween mask poses a threat to safety. Gross generalizations involve stereotyping a particular group of people, or things based on an isolated case or cases. History shows this type of argument hold little to no value. Hitler grossly generalized the Jews as a plague because they enjoyed business, excelled in business, dominated German cities with their businesses, which eventually lead Hitler to believe they were preventing non-Jewish German’s from succeeding. Similar to today, our president insists not a particular race or culture, but an ideology is a threat to our country. Gross generalizations have great potential to convince simple minds that typically group or classifying things without performing any sort of critical thinking.

More fallacies than I care to elaborate on exist in this argument , but the point is, excerpt faith in your customers and provide more justification than, “For The Safety.” Despite your gross generalization, we’re not all idiots.