Reductio ad Incommodum

One of the things that really bothers me about metaphysical debates is the tendency of some people to claim a particular idea is impossible because its implications are 'absurd' or 'ridiculous'. This sort of argument is often called reductio ad absurdum though a more accurate term would be reductio ad incommodum.

In mathematics and logic reductio ad absurdum is more commonly called a proof by contradiction and is where the validity of a proposition is demonstrated by showing that the negation of the proposition would lead to a contradiction. Since the existence of a contradiction makes the negation logically impossible, the proposition is true by default. Conversely, reductio ad incommodum or 'reduction to the uncomfortable' is demonstrating that a given proposition has undesirable implications. This sort of argument implies nothing about the objective truth of a proposition. When dealing with ethical issues, this is not a problem. However, from a metaphysical point of view, reductio ad incommodum is not very useful.

People usually resort to reductio ad incommodum when they can find of no logical reason why a proposition should be impossible, but the proposition contradicts their views. Not surprisingly, this sort of argument arises frequently in discussions about the existence of god. In such situations, the difficulty or impracticality of proving or disproveing certain propositions combined with the desire for a particular view point to be true makes reductio ad incommodum seem very appealing, especially when trying to convince others.