Just because we’ve always done it doesn’t mean we should keep doing it
“We’ve always done it this way.”
Four of the most dangerous words in policy, business, and everyday life.
Not because tradition is always wrong. Plenty of old practices exist because they work. The problem is that “we’ve always done it this way” is a description, not an argument. It tells you the practice is old. It tells you nothing about whether the practice is correct.
Appeal to tradition is the fallacy of treating the age or longevity of a practice as evidence that it’s good.
The Latin name is argumentum ad antiquitatem. The longer something has been done, the argument goes, the more it must be worth keeping. The reasoning assumes that time itself is a quality-control mechanism, weeding out bad ideas and leaving only the useful ones behind.
That assumption is wrong.
How long something has existed tells you nothing about whether it works or whether it’s just. Child labor was traditional. Debtors’ prisons were traditional. Women needing their husbands’ permission to open a bank account was traditional. Lead in gasoline was standard practice for decades. Bloodletting as medical treatment was considered obviously correct for centuries. Every single one of those was defended as time-tested when it was first challenged. Every single one was also a disaster.
Tradition is just the accumulation of past decisions.
Some of those decisions were good. Some were made in ignorance. Some served the interests of people with power at the expense of everyone else. Age alone can’t tell you which is which. A bad idea can be hundreds of years old and still be a bad idea. A good idea can be five years old and already be correct.
The fallacy shows up in recognizable phrases.
“Time-tested.” “Proven by history.” “Traditional wisdom.” “The way things have always been.” These phrases do rhetorical work by invoking gravitas that implies the practice has been validated. It hasn’t. It’s just old. The gravitas comes from how the sentence sounds, not from what it actually proves.
Financial markets love this one.
“This is how markets have always operated” gets used to defend practices that economists with mountains of evidence have shown to be harmful. The pharmaceutical industry does the same move – “doctors have prescribed this for decades” as if the passage of time validated a treatment that newer research has since surpassed. Pharmaceutical companies know the difference between tradition and evidence. They use tradition when the evidence has turned against them.
The tell is whether somebody is explaining why the tradition works or just invoking its age.
“We’ve done it this way for a hundred years and here’s the mechanism by which it’s effective” is one thing. That’s an argument with actual content. “We’ve done it this way for a hundred years, therefore we should keep doing it” is the fallacy. The second version assumes the longevity did the work the argument is supposed to do. It didn’t.
Tradition can absolutely carry wisdom.
Practices that persist often do so because they solve real problems, coordinate groups, or encode lessons people learned the hard way. That’s worth taking seriously. But the tradition itself isn’t the evidence. The evidence is the evidence. If you can’t explain why the practice works, saying it’s old isn’t filling in the gap.
And there’s a sneaky version of this fallacy that cuts the other way.
Appeal to novelty – coming up in 15.14 – is the same mistake in reverse, where newness gets treated as a virtue. Neither age nor newness is evidence. Both are descriptions. Arguments have to come from somewhere else.
When somebody defends a practice by invoking its age, ask what the practice actually does.
If they can answer, the conversation just became an actual argument. If they can’t, you’ve just found out they were relying on the age to do the work.
Age can’t do that work.
It never could.