Argument from Popular Practice: "Everyone Does It"
"Nobody in this industry discloses those fees." "All the other kids are allowed to stay out late." "Tax avoidance has been standard practice for decades." "Rolling stops are how everyone drives here." When a practice is widespread, its prevalence is often cited as justification for its continuation — or as a defence against the charge that it is wrong. This is the argument from popular practice, and like most argumentation schemes, it is both sometimes valid and frequently abused.
Opinion vs. Practice: A Crucial Distinction
The argument from popular practice is distinct from the argument from popular opinion, though the two are often conflated. Popular opinion asks: "What do most people think is true or right?" Popular practice asks: "What do most people actually do?" These are different questions, and they track different things.
What people believe is at least potentially evidence about what is true (especially in domains like ethics or social norms, where beliefs partly constitute the reality). What people do is evidence about incentives, habits, available options, and social pressures — but it does not straightforwardly tell us whether those actions are correct, safe, or morally acceptable.
Philosopher Douglas Walton, who formalised this argument scheme, frames the basic structure as follows:
- Practice premise: Most people in context C do action A.
- Appropriateness premise: Doing what most people do in C is acceptable (or wise, or prudent) in C.
- Conclusion: Therefore, doing A is acceptable (or wise, or prudent) in C.
The critical weight falls entirely on the appropriateness premise — and it is far from automatically true.
When Common Practice Is a Reasonable Guide
There are contexts where what most people do really is a sound guide to what you should do. Several distinct mechanisms make this true.
Accumulated practical wisdom. Many widespread practices encode generations of trial-and-error learning about what works. The traditional practices of farmers — soil rotation, companion planting, pest management — often embody locally adapted knowledge that agronomists have sometimes rediscovered the hard way after dismissing it. When a practice has survived across many generations and many independent users, that survival is at least weak evidence that it has some practical merit. This is the kernel of truth in conservative arguments about tradition.
Coordination and convention. Some practices are correct simply because they are conventions — and what makes conventions good is that everyone follows them. Driving on the left side of the road (as in the UK) is not intrinsically better than driving on the right. What matters is that everyone in a given jurisdiction does the same thing. In such cases, "everyone does it" is essentially the entire justification. Deviating from conventions — linguistic, legal, social — when they are not morally problematic is not virtuous nonconformity; it is unnecessary friction.
Safety in numbers for heuristics. In novel situations, what others do is sometimes useful information when you have no better data. A tourist navigating an unfamiliar market by imitating the purchasing behaviour of locals is making a reasonable inference: locals probably have more information than I do, and their revealed preferences embody that information. This is a weak but non-trivial form of evidence.
When "Everyone Does It" Fails as Justification
The argument from popular practice is at its most dangerous when it is used to normalise unethical, harmful, or simply bad behaviour.
Legal violations. "Everyone speeds on this road" does not make speeding safe or legal. "Every company in this sector cuts corners on worker safety" does not make corner-cutting permissible. The prevalence of a harmful practice tells us about the state of compliance and enforcement — it tells us nothing about whether the practice is safe or acceptable. The logic of "everyone does it" was precisely the argument offered by participants in Milgram's obedience experiments who harmed others because authority figures normalised the harm.
Financial and business ethics. "Industry standard practice" is one of the most powerful shields for dubious behaviour. Hidden fees, misleading advertising, hostile employment contracts, and short-changing pension obligations have all been defended on the grounds that they are standard in the industry. The widespread adoption of a problematic practice is an argument for regulatory reform — not an argument that the practice is acceptable. Compare the whataboutism pattern: shifting from "is this right?" to "but others do the same."
Moral evolution. Many practices that were once nearly universal are now recognised as deeply wrong. Slavery was universal across ancient economies. Child labour was standard practice in industrialising economies. Wife-beating was widely accepted in many legal systems well into the twentieth century. In each case, "everyone does it" was part of the justificatory apparatus. The universality of the practice did not make it right — it made it harder to see that it was wrong, and harder to challenge. The status quo bias compounds this: practices that are widespread feel normal and familiar, which is systematically confused with feeling justified.
Race to the bottom. In competitive environments, universal bad practice can emerge through dynamics that have nothing to do with the practice being good. If one company begins cutting corners on a product and gains a competitive advantage, others may feel compelled to follow simply to survive. The result is a race to the bottom: a practice becomes universal not because it is wise or beneficial but because the incentive structure punishes those who hold out. The prevalence of the practice reflects the structure of competition, not any merit of the practice itself.
The Critical Questions
Evaluating an argument from popular practice requires asking several key questions:
- Is the practice actually as widespread as claimed? "Everyone does it" is often an exaggeration. The actual distribution of a practice matters for assessing whether its prevalence constitutes meaningful evidence.
- Why is it widespread? Does the practice persist because it works, or because of inertia, competitive pressure, limited alternatives, or enforcement failure?
- Is the domain one where accumulated practice is likely to encode relevant wisdom? Traditional agricultural practices may reflect real knowledge; traditional medical practices frequently did not. The domain matters.
- Does the widespread practice cause harm? Even very widespread practices can be harmful. Prevalence is not the same as acceptability.
- Are there alternatives that most people haven't adopted, and why? A practice may be universal simply because better alternatives haven't been made available or visible, not because the practice is optimal.
The Moral Significance of Resistance
There is something worth saying for those who resist widespread bad practices even when "everyone else does it." Whistleblowers, reformers, and early adopters of better practices face real costs — social, economic, professional — precisely because they deviate from what is normal. The fact that a practice is widespread does not automatically legitimate it; the fact that most people comply with a problematic norm does not mean that those who comply bear no responsibility for it.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt's analysis of the "banality of evil" is the extreme version of this point: the most ordinary people, doing what everyone around them was doing, participated in extraordinary crimes because they never stopped to ask whether the universal practice was right. The argument from popular practice, taken uncritically, is the psychological mechanism through which collective moral failures become possible.
This does not mean that every deviation from common practice is virtuous, or that widespread practices should be presumed guilty until proven innocent. It means that popularity is not a moral laundering mechanism — it does not clean a practice of its potential wrongness. The question "is this practice right?" must always remain askable, regardless of how many people have stopped asking it.
Sources & Further Reading
- Walton, Douglas N. Argumentation Schemes for Presumptive Reasoning. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996.
- Walton, Douglas, Chris Reed, and Fabrizio Macagno. Argumentation Schemes. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Viking, 1963.
- Chesterton, G. K. "The Drift from Domesticity." The Thing, 1929. [Origin of "Chesterton's Fence"]
- Wikipedia: Appeal to tradition