"I admit my hypocrisy, therefore your argument fails"
February 13, 2010 3:55 PM   Subscribe

Is there a name for the argumentative strategy where somebody claims moral high ground by declaring, for example, that "you are all hypocrites, but so am I, and at least I admit it", while then going on to use this as a platform for further criticisms? Is it simple self-righteousness, or something more?

Yes, I'm having an argument about homelessness on Facebook, god help me. I've run quickly through lists of rhetorical strategies and logical fallacies, but have found nothing that quite fits. Help?
posted by jokeefe to Writing & Language (17 answers total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
Can't you just admit that you, too are a hypocrite? Then the two parties are on a new baseline of equal "moral" ground.

A: "You are all hypocrites, but so am I, and at least I admit it"
B: "You're right, I too am a hypocrite, but that doesn't change the fact that..."

or B: "Yes, we are all hypocrites. What are we going to do about it? Is that something to be proud of?"

I don't know what the name of the strategy they are employing would be called, I just know how I would argue back. If you back yourself in a corner you can loose, but if you are willing to concede some points to the other side you can diminish the power of those arguments and then hit them with your own, more awesome points.
posted by smartypantz at 4:11 PM on February 13, 2010


It looks like a case of paromologia ("admitting a weaker point in order to make a stronger one").
posted by ourobouros at 4:19 PM on February 13, 2010 [1 favorite]


I think ourobouros is closer, but it also seems to be a form of the ad hominem argument: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
posted by a.steele at 4:37 PM on February 13, 2010


Best answer: I don't know what it's called, but it's merely rhetorical - it's not even a logical argumentative technique. Personal stake or character has absolutely nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of an argument.

If you're looking for the name for the fallacy that personal stake or character has something to do with the rightness or wrongness of one's arguments, it's the old standby: ad hominem, argument 'from the person.' You can't argue that someone is correct or incorrect on a particular point by arguing from their character - be it their hypocrisy, their unwillingness to admit hypocrisy, or any other character trait. If Adolph Hitler walked in and made a cogent argument that 2 + 2 = 4, would him being Hitler have anything to do with his being right or wrong? No. Nor does your imputed hypocrisy and your imputed inability to admit said hypocrisy. To argue as though those things matter to the truth or falsity of the argument is to argue ad hominem.
posted by koeselitz at 4:44 PM on February 13, 2010 [2 favorites]


Not every ad hominem argument is fallacious. There's an argument to be made that appeals to authority are both necessary and not necessarily fallacious. We need to rely on trusted sources to build our knowledge. A known liar is untrustworthy; therefore, showing that someone is a liar can be a valid argumentative strategy.

If Adolph Hitler walked in and made a cogent argument that 2 + 2 = 4, would him being Hitler have anything to do with his being right or wrong? No. Nor does your imputed hypocrisy and your imputed inability to admit said hypocrisy. To argue as though those things matter to the truth or falsity of the argument is to argue ad hominem.

If someone acts hypocritically, their hypocrisy is evidence either that their beliefs are inconsistent, which is to say fallacious, or that they don't believe their own argument. This is important because there are some propositions whose truth values depend on our believing that they're true. If you believe, for example, that agreements made in good faith place moral constraints upon those who agree to them, then whether or not they are entered into in good faith affects the truth values of moral propositions that result from them. Assessments of good faith are assessments of intentions. So, evidence of hypocrisy or dishonesty becomes important. Perhaps it's not conclusive evidence, but it's evidence nonetheless.
posted by smorange at 5:20 PM on February 13, 2010 [3 favorites]


I think of it a "Maud Syndrome", from one of my favorite old Bea Lillie songs...

"We're all of us just rotten to the core, Maud.
It's a fact of life you simply can't ignore..."

I wouldn't call it an argument, more of a rhetorical throw-away line, maybe a gambit..

Actually, it has a decent history, Socrates used to use a version of it, when he says;
"I only know one thing, and that is that I know nothing"
So I'm ahead of you, because you delude yourself into thinking that you know what you do not know.

Or, again, a "there but for the grace of God go I ", which Ogden Nash called a notable feat, of one-way thinking on a two-way street, There but for the grace of God go I, there but for the grace of God go you, there but for the Grace of God go Aimee Semple MacPherson and Dr.Wellington Koo, I cannot hear one of these people speaking without thinking, Oh MY, There but for the grace of God speak I.
posted by greatferm at 5:23 PM on February 13, 2010


By the way, the answer to your question is tu quoque, a kind of ad hominem.
posted by smorange at 5:23 PM on February 13, 2010 [2 favorites]


No, the "tu quoque" fallacy is: "You're wrong because you're a hypocrite." The OP is asking about "You're wrong because we're all hypocrites and only I admit it." I'd actually be surprised if there's a name for that specific, elaborate fallacy.
posted by Jaltcoh at 5:29 PM on February 13, 2010


Also, if you're asking about this because you want to inject it into that homelessness debate you're having, I would advice against that. Explicitly labeling the other person's fallacies isn't generally a very persuasive style of arguing.
posted by Jaltcoh at 5:31 PM on February 13, 2010


Best answer: I don't know what it's called, but it's merely rhetorical - it's not even a logical argumentative technique. Personal stake or character has absolutely nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of an argument.

If you're looking for the name for the fallacy that personal stake or character has something to do with the rightness or wrongness of one's arguments, it's the old standby: ad hominem, argument 'from the person.' You can't argue that someone is correct or incorrect on a particular point by arguing from their character


Umm, since this one got marked as a best answer, let's clarify:

"Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided. . . his character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses." Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.2.1356a.4‑12

What we're discussing here is an appeal to ethos (the speaker/writer's character or credibility), as part of a broader goal of persuasion. The field of rhetoric, going back to Aristotle an before, distinguished three modes of persuasion, logos (reasoning, of which strict logic was but one part), pathos (appeals to emotions; that is, the audience's hopes & fears related to the subject matter), as well as ethos.

The rhetorical tradition, which was the tradition of language/literacy education in the West for over 2000 years, is, rightly understood, anything but "mere." Since the rise of modernism, however, Western society has lost sight of the connections between the three modes, making us skeptical of discourse that appeals to anything other than the narrowest versions of logic, with predictable results:

Personal stake or character has absolutely nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of an argument.

True, but that's not quite what the OP's asking about. She's interested in persuading her Facebook audience, so appeals to ethos certainly deserve attention. A bit of rummaging around hasn't turned up the specific rhetorical scheme or trope (there are several thousand that rhetoricians have catalogued through the ages), but it's not really an ad hominem appeal, since the effect is less about putting down her opponents as much as demonstrating her own arete, Aristotle's term for goodness/virtue (one of three aspects of ethos), in this case being humble about her own certainty.

An alternative way of identifying the effect the OP describes would be through the sort of rhetorical move that Plato's Socrates frequently uses in his dialogues. While not a rhetorical scheme or trope per se, it's come to be called "I know that I know nothing" in English translation. Socrates uses this move often to show that even though he is (always) the smartest one in the conversation, he's savvy enough to realize the limits of his own ideas, unlike many of his fellow characters in Plato's dialogues. That seems like the rhetorical effect the OP is aiming for.

Finally, not to beat a dead horse much more, but it's worth considering the specific rhetorical constraints at play on Facebook. That is, most of the rhetorical tradition as well as much contemporary scholarship on argument assumes a triad of participants: 1) the advocate making a case, 2) her opponents (one or many), and 3) a separate audience that sits in judgment of the case, whether this audience appears as the judge or jury in a court trial, the viewers of political debate, or we as readers of written disputes such as Plato's dialogues.

In contrast, a separate category of argument deals with dyads, where the only participants are 1) the advocate making a case, and 2) her opponents, with the goal being to persuade those opponents to change their minds about the question at issue. While triadic and dyadic persuasion have a similar goal, they call for very different approaches. With a triadic argument, success comes with simply making your opponent's case look less believable in the eyes of the audience than your own (as the sorts of rhetorical moves used by Plato's Socrates often do). But with dyadic persuasion, success means not just making a stronger case but also getting your opponents to recognize and acknowledge this as well, and hence change their minds. Here the sort of "I know that I know nothing" move doesn't work as well, since the advocate using it risks alienating her opponents, as most of us would feel if we encountered Plato's Socrates in a conversation today.

What I'm getting at is that, depending on how you've set up access to your page, with Facebook it's complicated figuring out whether the arguments that arise are actually triadic or dyadic in nature, which is part of why Facebook debates can so often feel frustrating, as the OP acknowledges.
posted by 5Q7 at 7:26 PM on February 13, 2010 [5 favorites]


Socrates was basically a troll, wasn't he? :)

It sounds like he's saying "see, I'm better than you," to which the best answer might be, "Well, that's nice." The trouble is, I can't tell from your post whether you are arguing in a general way about morality and whose behavior is morally correct, or arguing about specific facts..
posted by citron at 7:27 PM on February 13, 2010


I doubt there's any name for this sort of logical fallacy as it's not really arguing anything except layers of ad hominem. It's sort of sub-ad hominem (tu quoque + appeal to hypocritical forthrightness?), but really it's past the point of validating whether the statement is true and just arguing personality flaws.

1. Person 1 states A
2. Person 2 agrees with Person 1 but accuses them of hypocrisy (tu quoque ad hominem).
3. Person 1 accuses Person 2 of hypocrisy (tu quoque again?)
4. Person 2 admits hypocrisy and lauds it over Person 1 (any pretense of logic is abandoned)
posted by destro at 9:26 PM on February 13, 2010


It's almost like saying "all cretan's are liars". The admission of hypocrisy somehow paradoxically creates a virtue. Honesty about ones faults is supposed to seem more credible or perhaps gain the sympathy of other hypocrites (appeal to vulgarity?). Perhaps it's bait to get you admit your faults so your opponent may use them against you.
posted by wobh at 10:04 PM on February 13, 2010


I've read a fair amount about logical fallacies and never seen this one named. I'd love to know what it's called; I just think of it as "mea culpa -- tu quoque." It seems to be used a lot, in a slightly varied form, by assorted conspiracy theorists across the Web, using the phrase "You don't know that, and neither do I." There seems to be a belief that it's an effective rebuttal to an inarguable statement of fact.

"Vaccines might cause autism, as you say, but not in every child who receives them -- I mean, millions of kids have had the MMR vaccine, but not all of them instantly became autistic."

"You don't know that and neither do I."
posted by ROTFL at 4:48 AM on February 14, 2010


Response by poster: Thank you, everyone. My argument may have dwindled away (I'm sure there's a name for the subsequent maneuver that took place, on the order of "Yes I started this argument by being provocative, but now I'm tired of it so I'm going to ignore it from now on", but never mind). I've really enjoyed the answers and I've bookmarked a few sites about formal logic and rhetoric, so in some way I suppose it's a winning situation.
posted by jokeefe at 2:55 PM on February 14, 2010


Koeselitz and 5Q made great answers but I think something may be missing. When Socrates says "I know that I know nothing" what he is doing is not arguing logically, but he is moving up one level of abstraction to diminish the validity of the issues being argued at a lower level of abstraction. He is not committing a logical fallacy, but trumping the whole process of keeping logical order at the lower levels of abstraction.

This is not what the person who says we are all hypocrites is doing, exactly. They are moving up one level to trump you. But Socrates was using agnosticism as the trump which I think is usually a fair play. Your interlocutor is using nihilism as the trump, which is fowl. You can't really call Socrates on his move. Your nihilist has admitted defeat.

I call this style of argument pulling a Clemence. Camus' charater Clemence, in his novel The Fall, used it as his default modus operandi. Clemence is a despicable character.
posted by bukvich at 5:34 PM on February 14, 2010


I think of it as a "She stoops to conquer".

Never read it.
posted by ersatz at 12:59 PM on February 15, 2010


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