The bribe.

Picture it, you are offered two doors to choose from, behind one door is all the wealth you could ever desire, an operation that will make your body & mind perfectly well & whole, things to do that will fill you with purpose, music of all kinds, DNA splicing that will make you young again, the romance of your dreams. Everything you could ever want and more. The other door is simply a room with a wooden chair to sit on, a wooden slab to lay upon, some water to drink, and some dry bread to consume.

What door would you choose?

In fact - at this moment do you really have a choice anymore?

The bribe an appeal to motive - appeal to bribery. This logical fallacy seeks to overwhelm your logical motive with an emotional one.

So, do you really  have a choice at this point?

The flip side of this is much easier to understand, intuitively. Argumentum ad baculum.

We understand that a threat to our life, safety, or lives / safety of those we care about forces us to do what the person making the threat (or implied threat) wants to do, but a bribe seems less harsh - more alluring.

The positive seeming bribe is appealing to our carnal tastes, its good smell drags us forward towards the pie that we know we should not eat. Its overwhelms our intellect with desires.

Its just as sinister as its flip side, perhaps more so because we do not necessary see the bribe as a bad thing in this case - "bribe" seems like it should only be used in the context of paying off someone to get away with something - that sort of bribe we see as wrong or illegal, we can picture easily a person offering a police officer money to not write a ticket for example, to "look the other way" - we can understand that it is bad when a judge takes a bribe because justice is then tainted.

However if someone offered us such a "choice" of two rooms with "no strings attached" we might be hard pressed to see the evil of it, or the harm of it, there is no reason to NOT take the thing I most desire is there?

One might argue, of course that getting everything you ever wanted would not feel good - but that is overridden by the thought experiment in that you would in fact feel fulfilled as that is part of the thing you are getting. The point of course is not to try to dismantle the thought experiment but to flow with it, to answer the question of "Do I REALLY have a choice?"

We can understand we do not REALLY have a choice when someone threatens us - then why does it seem hard to see we do not REALLY have a choice when someone bribes us? Perhaps it is just me.

Regardless if the bribe is there, then it is a logical fallacy. 

Yet one could make excuses for taking the room filled with your hearts desires, and a logical process to take that room - of course, yet this does not, and can not negate the fact that it is still not an argument being made by the person/group that is offering the "choice" of the rooms in the first place.

So, a boring dull room behind door number one, or everything you ever could want behind door number two.

Do you really have a choice?

Or is it that choice in this case, is pure illusion?

I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide.