Appeal to poverty (argumentum ad Lazarum)

Biological Parallel

Naked mole rats live in eusocial colonies where non-reproducing workers exhibit extreme altruism, sacrificing personal resources for colony survival. This resource scarcity signals group-level selection pressure and kin altruism, not individual virtue. The appeal to poverty exploits our social instincts that equate resource scarcity with self-sacrifice and cooperation—patterns that were genuinely correlated in small kin groups. Modern economies broke this link, but we still intuit that poverty signals moral purity because, ancestrally, sharing despite scarcity was a costly signal of commitment.