Appeal to Tradition: The Fallacy of 'We've Always Done It This Way'

Core Idea

The appeal to tradition commits a fallacy by arguing that something is true or right merely because it has been practiced for a long time. Tradition may provide weak evidence (stability, collective wisdom), but it does not guarantee correctness. Past practice can be wrong; age alone does not establish validity.

How It's Best Learned

Show cases where tradition was provably wrong (flat earth, bloodletting in medicine). Distinguish between tradition as weak evidence (sometimes worth considering) and tradition as decisive justification (fallacious).

Common Misconceptions

Thinking tradition is never relevant to a decision (it can provide weak evidence of stability or broad acceptance). Conflating 'old' with 'good' or 'proven.'

Explainer

From your study of informal fallacies, you know that a fallacy is a pattern of reasoning that appears persuasive but fails to actually support the conclusion. The appeal to tradition — sometimes labeled *argumentum ad antiquitatem* — is one of the most common of these patterns in everyday argument. Its signature move is treating age or long practice as proof of correctness: "We've always done it this way, so it must be right" or "This custom has been observed for centuries — who are you to question it?"

The problem is that duration tells you nothing about truth or value. Bloodletting was practiced as medicine for over two thousand years. Geocentric astronomy was the consensus view for longer still. Practices can persist for reasons entirely disconnected from their validity — social inertia, authority structures, comfort with the familiar, or simply the absence of a challenger. The bare fact that something has survived a long time is not evidence that it is correct, beneficial, or morally justified. Time is not a truth-preserving mechanism.

This does not mean tradition is worthless as evidence. If a practice has persisted across many different cultures and time periods, that's weak evidence it may have some functional value — it has been tested under varied conditions and not abandoned. A long-standing engineering technique that has never caused structural failure carries some positive track record. The key distinction is between tradition as weak corroborating evidence (acceptable, with appropriate humility) and tradition as decisive justification (fallacious, as it bypasses substantive evaluation). "We've done it this way and it seems to work" is different from "We've done it this way, therefore it's right."

Spotting the fallacy in the wild requires attending to what argument is actually being made. If someone argues "traditional marriage has a long history" as the *sole* or *primary* reason to endorse a policy, they are committing the fallacy — the antiquity of the institution does not settle whether it is just or beneficial. If instead they argue that the institution produces certain goods supported by longitudinal evidence, that is a substantive argument, and tradition is mentioned only as context. The test is always: would the argument collapse if you removed the appeal to age? If yes, you are looking at an appeal to tradition.