I don’t know a standard name. I call it “fallacy of the revealed preferences”, because these situations have in common “you do X, someone concludes that X is what you actually wanted because that’s what you did, duh”.
More precisely, the entire concept of “revealed preferences” is prone to the motte-and-bailey game, where the correct conclusion is “given the options and constraints that you had at the moment, you chose X”, but it gets interpreted as “X is what you would freely choose even if you had no constraints”. (People usually don’t state it explicitly like this, they just… don’t mention the constraints, or even the possibility of having constraints.)
I don’t know a standard name. I call it “fallacy of the revealed preferences”, because these situations have in common “you do X, someone concludes that X is what you actually wanted because that’s what you did, duh”.
More precisely, the entire concept of “revealed preferences” is prone to the motte-and-bailey game, where the correct conclusion is “given the options and constraints that you had at the moment, you chose X”, but it gets interpreted as “X is what you would freely choose even if you had no constraints”. (People usually don’t state it explicitly like this, they just… don’t mention the constraints, or even the possibility of having constraints.)