Failing to Engage: Ad hominem, strawmanning, and whataboutery

When someone gives an argument, the proper way to respond is to assess their argument. That is, you should listen to what they say, and consider whether their argument is sound or cogent. There are a number of common ways in which people can fail to engage in with an argument that someone else has given.

The section discusses the following:

• Ad Hominem Arguments
• Strawman Arguments
• Whataboutery

Ad hominem arguments

​Here is a (slightly adapted) argument which appeared in the NZ Herald.

Don’t terrorise legal drinkers

by Mike Douglas [Mike Douglas is the CEO of a major brewing company. ]

​The current campaign against combining drinking with driving is terrorising law-abiding people. Many law-abiding people are cutting their alcohol consumption because they are afraid of being caught by random breath testing. A 2014 study of more than 4000 people showed that more than a third were drinking less or had stopped altogether compared to the previous year. The prime reason they gave was the risk of being caught by random breath testing. 

But research shows that the average drink-driver in a fatal accident has an average blood alcohol level of more than twice the legal limit. The current campaign against drinking and driving is failing to achieve what should be our top priority; getting the heavy and hardened drinkers off the road.

Now suppose I say, in response to this:

Douglas has a vested interest in getting people to believe this conclusion, since he is the CEO of a major brewing company. He is biased, so I reject his argument.

I am committing the ad hominem fallacy: trying to discredit an argument by attacking the source of the argument. Why is this a fallacy? Well, if an argument is a good argument, it doesn’t become less good because of any facts about the arguer. If we’re given a valid argument with plausible premises which causes us to believe its conclusion, and then we discover that the arguer is evil, we shouldn’t change our opinion of the argument. Likewise if we discover that the arguer is incredibly stupid. An argument is an argument, and it should be assessed on its merits. Douglas has provided reasons in support of his conclusion, and I should evaluate those reasons. Are his premises true? If true, do they support his conclusion? I can’t (or at least, I shouldn’t) get out of considering these questions by writing off the argument because of facts about Douglas.

Ad hominem fallacy: when someone tries to discredit an argument by attacking the source of the argument.

However, attempting to discredit someone’s testimony by attacking the person testifying can be legitimate. If I testify that I saw one of my colleagues stealing stationery from the philosophy secretary’s office, then facts about my reliability as a witness may be highly relevant. If I’m a compulsive liar, that gives you reason to doubt my testimony. If I’m known to have stolen stationery myself in the past and tried to pin the blame on others, that’s relevant too.

But now suppose I give an argument:

The stationery was stolen between the hours of 5pm on Monday and 8am on Tuesday. The security system records that the only person to enter the building during those hours used Tracy’s pin number when he or she turned off the alarm system. No-one else knew Tracy’s pin number. So it is extremely likely that Tracy was the thief. 

Attacking my character was legitimate as a way of undermining my testimony, but it doesn’t undermine my argument. Now that I’ve given an argument, the argument should be evaluated on its merits. We know how to evaluate an argument on its merits from earlier chapters: you have to  think about whether the premises are true, and you have to think about how well they are connected to the conclusion. Writing my argument off because I’m known to be a dishonest person fails to do either of those things.

Of course, some ad hominem attacks are bad arguments even if they’re not ad hominem fallacies as such. Claims made about a person may be irrelevant to whatever is the point at issue, or they may be false. For example, if a jury member argues that the defendant must be guilty because they have beady eyes and a weak chin, this is not a good argument, because these sort of facts about a person’s appearance are irrelevant to the question of whether or not the person is guilty of some crime.

Strawman arguments

​A strawman argument is when someone distorts or caricatures an opponent’s arguments or views, and then attacks the weakened version rather than the real argument.

Here’s an example. In the previous section we saw an argument by Mark Douglas about a campaign to reduce drinking and driving. Now suppose someone responds to that argument as follows:

Mark Douglas argues that we shouldn’t have laws against driving while intoxicated. But that’s absurd. It’s well-known that alcohol impairs judgement and affects coordination. We need to keep drunk people off the roads.

The arguer is “strawmanning” Mark Douglas. If you look back at Douglas’s argument, he was not arguing that we shouldn’t have laws against driving while intoxicated – merely that the current campaign isn’t a good way of responding to the problem of people driving while intoxicated. So the arguer here is caricaturing Douglas’s argument and then attacking the caricatured version, rather than addressing Douglas’s actual argument on its merits.

Whataboutery

Also known as “whataboutism”, whataboutery is a common technique in internet discussions and social media.

The basic technique of whataboutery is to respond to someone’s point or argument about X by saying “What about Y?”, where Y is not currently being directly discussed. The basic function of whataboutery is to derail the current discussion. The person who gave the original argument finds themselves defending their choice of topic (rather than the argument they gave within the topic), or dealing with a matter quite different from the one they wanted to discuss. The person who has performed the whataboutery move has deflected or misdirected the discussion. Whataboutery can thus take the form of the more specific techniques above: sometimes it turns into an attack on the original arguer, by accusing them of not caring about some other (important) thing.  Sometimes it accuses the original arguer of hypocrisy: if they had a consistent position, they would care about this other thing. Sometimes it misrepresents the original arguer’s position, and so they find themselves scrambling to explain their true position instead of their original argument being addressed. Whataboutery is always a poor argument move, because it always fails to respond to the the argument which is in fact given.

Consider the way that the “Black lives matter” campaign was responded to by people saying “All lives matter”. This is a whataboutery response: it’s the equivalent of saying “What about non-black lives?”.

Such a response is a good example of two types of moves at once. First, this is strawmanning the original position. Someone who says “Black lives matter” is not claiming that “Only black lives matter”. Someone who responds “All lives matter” is understanding “Black lives matter” as “If a life matters, then it’s a black life” when the correct position is “If a life is black, then that life matters”. Misrepresentation of a position is attacking a straw man. Second, there’s an ad hominem move involved. The whataboutery move here was often accompanied by saying that the “Black lives matters” campaigners were themselves racist, and so inconsistent, and therefore shouldn’t be listened to.

Whataboutery is thus not only a failure to engage in the argument, it is also often an aggressive or abusive move. It is a practice which should be avoided.