04/02/07
Bryan Caplan takes up a frequent Net debate tactic, the ad hominem argument:
The advocates of X are jerks; therefore, X is falseis the classic ad hominem argument. But most of what we usually call ad hominem attacks simply argue thatThe advocates of X are jerks.Only the former is a logically fallacy, but high-quality thinkers usually avoid both.
Is there a droll element here? The factual statement about high-quality thinkers
embeds a judgment about a person's character and links it to a kind of argument made. Which is why the whole issue is touchy anyway.
Now, my interest in the ad hominem is that we sometimes must attack individuals. To put it in Caplan's simple terminology, people are sometimes jerks, and it is important to call them on it.
To say that only arguments can be bad is to deny a central tenet of nearly every morality ever touted: that people are often quite bad.
In arguing with Hitler, do you merely dissect each and every one of his statements? Or do you dare to say: Sir, you have embraced totalitarianism and the very principles of injustice. You are becoming a moral monster.
The trouble with such an attack — and surely the reason why thinkers
as opposed to politicians and citizens so rarely use it — is that once you have identified another person's moral fault, that person will see you as enemy, and will likely not be convinced.
But you have to write some people off. It doesn't take long in some debates to see that the person has committed himself or herself to a dangerous and vile course.
My usual example is Ayn Rand. She used a false dichotomy in defining egoism as rational self-interest
and altruism, its opposite, as the obligation to sacrifice self for others.
An honest dialectician would have defined the terms by the same standard.
Now, one could ascribe this to error, but in looking at The Virtue of Selfishness (or was it Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal?) one can see that she was aware of this disjunction. She swept it under the rug. She would not confront it honestly, philosophically. She always had high dudgeon up on the subject of sacrificing others to self (the common definition of selfishness, after all), and did not carefully explore the possibility of rational other-interest (despite, at times, arguing that a person's willing sacrifice of his own self for a loved other was not altruistic!).
I have argued that Rand did these things for a reason. She was trying to shore up an extremist macho flash, and get attention, without accepting the consequences of that stance.
But some things cannot be repressed forever. The very schema she set up, in effect, amounted to the very low selfish gambit she officially rejected, and it should be no surprise that the repressed definition of selfishness became the actual guiding light in her dealing with others. She became the ugly egoist of common parlance; that is, she became, in her life, an example of her opponents' (obviously justifiable) fears.
For making this argument I have been cited with making an ad hominem.
I was certainly not guilty of logical fallacy. What I was saying is that bad arguments can have moral consequences, and that those consequences for Rand's character were dramatic, obvious, and helped make the very opposite point she was aiming to prove.
And I was doing nothing she herself had not done. She regularly showed how bad ideas lead to bad character. That was part of her schtick. So my analysis of her own arguments and character was a reciprocal volley in a very nasty and dangerous match. She deserved it.
I'm sure I haven't come up smelling like a rose. When you wrestle with pigs there are consequences.
But I have noticed that Objectivists don't like my doing this. They are deeply offended. They may practice this method all the time, but when that method is turned, successfully, upon their core ethical principle? Blankout.
So George Bernard Shaw was wrong. The pigs don't like it. Reciprocity in this game — the analysis of the close connection between bad ethical (and political) argument and vicious conduct — is not something they appreciate.
Is that the very reason to engage in it, though?
If those of selfish or particularist or even criminal mindset, hoping to put something over on us (and Rand, like many politicians, possessed precisely that instinct), are allowed to get away with it, allowed to mask their real agendas, what do we gain by foreswearing reciprocity?
Comments:
No Comments for this post yet...
Leave a comment:
Pingbacks:
No Pingbacks for this post yet...
RSS Feed