Analogical Reasoning

How Analogy Relates to Legal and Moral Reasoning Analogical reasoning is among the most popular and common reasoning humans use. This is something you find in everyday life. When sitting down and deciding what to eat for lunch we usually tend to base our choices off of analogical reasoning. Maybe you are sitting there deciding you want to go back to the Mexican place around the corner because the last three times you went there it was delicious. Perhaps you decide to try the Italian place down the road because five of your friends have expressed good experiences to you about that Italian restaurant. Analogical Reasoning is used commonly in our day to day lives and is deeply integrated into our legal and moral reasoning. First off let us look

Let’s start with legal reasoning. Here in America we use analogical reasoning in our legal system a lot. In the average case you find in court has two sides to it. On one side you have your defendant trying to defend themselves against the prosecution who are trying to prove the defendant guilty of something. If you have ever watched any TV show that runs off of fiction or truth you’ll probably have noticed one of the lawyers present a case from the past in order to strengthen their argument. I find a really good example of this is cases that the law doesn’t quite cover. When you have those lawyers who pave a new way into the law books. Take cyberbullying for example, with new outlets for social media cyberbullying has become more and more popular. The law has not really caught up with our technology and so cyberbullying is somewhat vague in our laws. Let say you are a lawyer and you are taking the case of a 14 year old boy who has killed himself because he was bullied mercilessly by his classmates. You have some witnesses willing to tesify about some of the incidents that happened in school but mostly you have dozens of post from the young boys tormentors making fun of him bringing him down just being all around nasty. Let’s top it off with two posts that even have the bully telling the boy to kill himself, you have actual viable proof that the bully sent a message telling the kid “Go drink some antifreeze, do us all a favor and drop dead.” and another one saying, “Just kill yourself, no one likes you your pathetic.” Now lets say there haven’t been any actual cases of anyone getting charged for cyberbullying in America so you are carving a new path. All you have to really work with other than a few comments and some witnesses in your ground breaking case are other cases. So all you can really do is try to compare you case to another case