Fallacies - 1

Fallacies are one of those critical thinking topics that could easily be discussed on this blog from now until Election Day.

Partly this is because there are so many different kinds of fallacies and, as mentioned previously, fallacies are one of the most fun topics to discuss in any class on logic, rhetoric or general critical thinking since they let you create all kinds of entertaining examples, from Groucho Marx wondering how an Elephant got into his pajamas, to Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat, Junior’s complicated doublespeak that led to my very favorite “If-by-Whiskey” fallacy.

There are a number of sites that exhaustively document these and other fallacies, and if you’re an audio-learner, I recommend the short audio lessons available here and here (which are a bit robotic in their delivery, but get the job done). 

But for purposes of preparing ourselves for the political argumentation that will be coming at us shortly from all directions, I’d like to focus on just a few specific fallacies that are commonplace during campaign season.

Before listing them, keep in mind that fallacies can be broken into two general categories, the first being Formal Fallacies that represent an error in the form of an argument (usually some sort of faulty logic) which can be flagged as fallacious regardless of content.  For example, the argument “All mermaids are female.  Gwen is a female.  Therefore Gwen is a mermaid.” is fallacious, regardless of whether mermaids exist.

A second category of informal fallacies actually cares about the content of the argument, not just its structure.  For example, the argument “Atoms are extremely small.  The universe is made of atoms.  Therefore the universe is extremely small.” is an informal Fallacy of Composition, assuming as it does that the qualities of a part of the whole (atoms) can be applied to the whole (the universe).

Typical fallacies you hear in political speech are Appeals to Authority, Appeals to Emotion, and Argument to Moderation.

Starting from the top, not all appeals to authority are fallacious.  For example, we prefer a surgeon take out our inflamed appendix and an auto mechanic fix our faulty brakes and would have a problem if those two specialists decided to trade jobs for the day.  And given the complexity of issues we have to deal with in an election cycle in areas such as the economy or war and peace, it’s appropriate that we look to professional economists, political scientists and historians to provide us information that would be hard to discover on our own.

But as we have seen in the past, every political candidate has their team of able economists (for example) ready to explain why their economic theories are correct (despite the fact that their opponent has an equally able economics team ready to support an opposite set of ideas).  Clearly, all of these experts cannot be right, which means we cannot rely solely on their authority to inform our choices over which economic vision to support.

So far, we have not identified the fallacious use of authority but simply pointed out that even the wisest and most talented group of experts cannot and should not be taken as the final word on any subject.

Appeals to authority reach the level of an informal fallacy when we are required to take the word of such authorities on faith (with politicians asking us to substitute their expertise for our own judgment or empirical evidence).   And they reach the level of a formal fallacy when the expert providing his or her opinion is speaking outside of his or her area of expertise, or in extreme opposition to a consensus in their field.

For example, a leader claiming that his or her team of PhDs in history and diplomacy provides them with enough expertise to make key decision on war and peace without further input would be committing an informal fallacy since there is every chance that this team, no matter how well informed, could be wrong.

But if a mathematics professor or linguist (no matter how brilliant in their field) starts making statements regarding international affairs, those opinions should be given no more (and certainly no less) weight than any other non-expert in the field, unless you want to be found guilty of committing a formal fallacious Appeal to Authority.  For people brilliant enough to see the world in ways we cannot are also brilliant enough to see the world in ways that are not true (an erect powerful defenses around why we should accept a picture of reality that we instinctively know isn’t right).

In our complicated world, we need experts and specialists to help us understand complex situations and inform and even make decisions we as individuals are not equipped to make on our own.  But that does not mean that levels of expertise alone should be used to sway our opinions on important matters. 

Next Up – Appeals to Emotion and Appeals to Moderation

Ethos

Aristotle, in his usual fashion, systematized the modes of persuasion we are already seeing in the run-up to the Presidential campaign into the categories of logos (logic), pathos (emotion) and ethos (the topic for today).

While most people can spot when a speaker is delivering a logical or emotional argument, ethos is a more complex and subtle thing to determine. The Greek term translates to “character,” so in one sense ethos is the character of the person delivering a persuasive (political) speech.

But what do we mean by character? Is it the authority a speaker brings to the subject due to his or her level of expertise or experience? While such authority can be a component of ethos, an appeal to authority (including one’s own) can also be considered a fallacy, especially if the person claiming authority has not earned this right (or is trying to use his or her authority on one subject to establish credibility in another subject outside their domain of expertise).

A speaker can also establish credibility by speaking exceedingly well and convincingly. But if such skill is used to cover up a lack of actual knowledge (or obscure a poor argument), then rhetoric is not being used to clarify but to confuse or even deceive.

It helps if we think of ethos as an award given by an audience to a speaker which derives from a number of variables. Aristotle felt that ethos can only be awarded to someone based on what they say, not on any authority or moral character they have established outside of the arguments they are presenting. But he was living in an era when political campaigning consisted almost entirely of speeches given in person before live groups such as political assemblies or the courts.

In our modern world, we are forced to create a composite of a candidate based on inputs and information coming from all directions (the news media, breakdowns of a candidate’s personal and political history, campaign ads created by them as well as directed against them). In fact, even when we have celebrated a particular candidate’s rhetoric skill (as we did with the current President during the last election), our evaluation was based more on his ability to speak before and move extremely large audiences than it was on the particular contents of any given speech.

So how can we determine the ethos of a candidate, other than taking the easy way out and rewarding it automatically to the person we were planning on voting for anyway (and similarly denying it to his opponents) regardless of what either of them says?

Certainly (appropriate) authority and general rhetorical talent can be part of the equation. But a more important test was alluded to in the recent posting on pathos. There I noted that emotionally based arguments cannot be dismissed out of hand as manipulative and irrational, but they should be subject to scrutiny to ensure they are not being used inappropriately.

Within this context, pathos can be tested both quantitatively (is the speaker too dependent on emotional argument, sacrificing logos in the process?) and qualitatively (is he or she appealing to good emotion such as courage and generosity, or bad emotion such as fear and selfishness?).

If a speaker gets this combination right (regardless of whether they are speaking before one person or many, in person or over the airwaves), then we should be more inclined to award them that powerful intangible gift of ethos.

And if they don’t (or if no candidate does), we’ll need to live with the fact that we might be electing a President with high qualifications, great gifts or strong experience, who unfortunately lacks components of character required to earn the reward of ethos, a lack that will likely come back to bite him (and us) during his or her term in office.

Pathos

Because logic provides such a sound basis for making decisions, it follows that logos – the ability to present an argument based on logic – will have considerable rhetorical power. If we are presented with one argument based on sound premises linked to conclusions via a solid chain of reasoning, this is generally seen as superior to an argument which lacks these qualities (all other factors being equal).

But as appealing as it might be to base all of our decisions on cold, hard logos, logic alone suffers from two significant shortcomings. First off, the structure of logic works, regardless of the “facts” it is applied to. For example, IF all unicorns are magical creatures AND Gerry is a unicorn, then the statement “Gerry is a magical creature” is logically true, even if unicorns, magical creatures (or Gerry, for that matter) do not exist.

More significant for those looking for practical ways to apply critical thinking to important problems (such as choosing a President) logic cannot necessarily break a tie between two arguments of equal logical strength. Building on a simple example from last time, there might be a perfectly valid and logical argument why a school band should spend its money on new uniforms (because they will provide benefit for many years) and an equally sound argument why that same money should be spent to play at the Rose Bowl (since it raises the profile of the band and will help recruit new members).

Given that most of the political debates we have (or should have) are based on choosing between equally valid (and often equally good or bad) choices, something other than logic must be used to help us make a choice. Enter human emotion.

Now arguments based on emotion (i.e., pathos) tend to make us uneasy for two reasons. First off, we instinctively see emotion as non-rational. But we have already taken a look how at another seemingly non-rational attributes of the human condition (imagination) can help inspire and/or channel critical thinking.

It’s no accident that Aristotle built his Golden Mean ethical theory around emotion (and action) since these are the primary drivers of human existence. Within this context, reason plays the role of informing and training us how to make choices in these two non-reasoning realms. And even if we could turn ourselves into Vulcans, dedicated to making all decisions by logic alone, we’ve just noted that logic runs into a wall when we are faced with a choice between arguments over competing goods of equal logical strength.

The other (stronger) argument against pathos is that it is manipulative. By appealing to our gut or animal instincts, rather than our higher human facilities of reason (it is argued) pathos-driven rhetoric asks us to short-circuit thought and come to a speaker’s desired conclusion based on how it makes us feel (regardless of the argument’s logical worth).

There’s no question that pathos can and has been used in this way throughout history. Demagogues were whipping up the crowds to make irrational decisions back in the day when the rules of rhetoric were first canonized, and we only need to turn on cable TV to see manipulative, emotion-laden arguments presented on an hourly basis.

But the criticism of pathos being destructive assumes that all emotions are equal, which they clearly are not. Appealing to fear, greed, hate, and guilt for example, represent an appeal to bad emotions (or, as I like to think of them, “emotions of the gut”) while an appeal to courage, generosity, love and sympathy appeal to good emotions (or “emotions of the heart”).

So one way to determine if pathos is being used cynically or constructively is to analyze whether the emotions we are being asked to take into account when evaluating an argument (such as a campaign speech) are reaching to our gut vs. our heart.

The other factor to keep in mind is that strong arguments that leverage emotion (good or bad) should not rely exclusively on emotional appeals. In fact, one sure sign of demagoguery is the demagogue’s exclusive or over-reliance on pathos vs. finding just the right combination of logos and pathos to drive the argument forward.

Given that every political debate has an emotional component, we should not become cynical if a political speaker makes use of powerful pathos-based rhetorical techniques. And we should be particularly careful not to fall into the trap of deciding that the emotional content of speeches made by candidates we support are inspiring while those made by their opponents are creepy and manipulative.

Rather, we should judge political speech (made at a campaign stop or TV ad) based on whether the speaker is appealing to the gut vs. the heart, and how well they get the balance right between logos and pathos. And if they get this tricky combination right, they will be rewarded with the highly valuable third component of rhetoric: ethos, the subject of the next posting.

Logos

Regardless of how heated our political conversations have become, they remain conversations (i.e., we still settle our political differences largely through dialog vs. some other method such as violence or coercion). Which means the ability to create and analyze persuasive speech, writing and other forms of communication (otherwise known as rhetoric) is as important today as it was 2500 years ago when the ability to persuade others was the key to power (and self-reliance) within the first democratic societies.

Today, the term “rhetoric” is largely dismissive (as in “mere rhetoric”), stressing the fact that persuasive speech can often used be to mask, rather than reveal, the truth. But for millennia, the ability to master rhetorical skill was one of the cornerstones of being an educated person. And I suspect it is no accident that as opportunities to study rhetorical techniques have waned, so has the quality of our political discourse.

This is particularly unfortunate since rhetorical skills are not that difficult to understand or master (at least to a point where we can use them to analyze the persuasive communication of others – such as campaign speeches or television ads). For example, Aristotle posited three modes of appealing to an audience that are as relevant today as they were in ancient Athens. These include:

Logos – The use of logic to frame an argument

Pathos – The appeal to emotions of the audience

Ethos – A somewhat more complex concept relating to the authority and credibility of the speaker

Today, we’ll take a look at logos and see how it can be use by political candidates trying to get our attention and persuade us to do this or that, and by voters to determine the quality of those political arguments.

Despite the fact that classical logic is not automatically part of everyone’s high school or college education any longer, logic is still an enormously popular and ingrained subject in scientific and technical areas. Anyone performing computer programming (from kids playing Scratch to skilled developers working with advanced programming languages) are essentially wrestling with logical problems built on the premise that thought and action can be boiled down to symbols that can be manipulated and tested for accuracy.

In political discourse, our innate passion for consistency can be seen as our natural desire to reject any argument that boils down to the simple logical statement: “A equals NOT A” (a contradiction that automatically disqualifies an argument as having insufficient logos).

Now when we deal with complex issues (such as budget priorities, national defense, social issues and the like), it can sometimes seem like these matters are far too complicated to transform into simple IF-THEN statements and the like. In fact, one of the great frustrations of technically minded men and women (such as scientists and engineers) with politics is that political discourse seems to defy the type of neat categorization they see in their professional life.

But all arguments – even the most complex – can be translated into smaller units, each of which can be tested for logical soundness. For example, a particular spending program (whether designed to help the poor or defend the nation) implies premises (that there exists a category of people needing a certain service or a threat that needs countering by a specific weapon system), which can be identified, quantified and analyzed. And once those premises have been identified and studied, we can review the chain of logic between those premises and the conclusions drawn from them.

These logical chains can go in more than one direction. For example, there may be a compelling logic that a spending program will be effective, but an equally compelling logic that demonstrates it will not be cost-effective (which would imply the need to search for other alternatives).

In fact, the greatest problem associated with basing our political discourse and analysis on logos has nothing to do with the inability of logic to help us separate good from bad policies. Rather, it is the fact that logic does not provide us with enough information to decide between competing goods.

Even if we look at a simple, localized political issue (such as whether or not to buy school band uniforms this year vs. use that money to pay for a trip to perform in the Rose Bowl), we are likely to end up with equally compelling arguments on either side of equivalent logical soundness. In fact, most (if not all) of the political arguments worth having are not between the bad and illogical vs. the good and logical, but between two equally good and equally logical alternatives.

For those decisions, we need some additional information (or persuasion) to make a decision. And one of the things we can turn to are our emotions. So tune in next time for a discussion of pathos.

Risk

Before returning to some of the nuts and bolts of critical thinking as it applies to the upcoming US election, some final thoughts as to why this exercise might be relevant even to those most certain of how they will vote next year.

If you think back at the last few elections, you might have perceived a certain sameness creeping into your experience. Some of this derives from the consistent rules of the game in which candidates are winnowed down in one or two primaries, only to face one another in a national election featuring standardized elements such as party conventions and debates. And aspects of media coverage have also become canonized, from endless horse-race polls published by newspapers or broadcast on radio and television (coupled with self-flagellation by these same media sources for relying on such polls) to computer-animated state-by-state coverage on election night.

But similarity with regard to the last several election cycles goes beyond simple mechanics. TV campaign ads, for example, may have become more numerous (choking off all other commercials in contested states), but the imagery, tone, even narrator voices used in such ads varies remarkably little. Commentators have noted for years that debates have devolved into joint press conferences in which candidates skillfully talk past each other and attempt to avoid mistakes, with moderators trying desperately to catch a candidate in a gotcha moment (or, at least elicit something spontaneous from the debaters – usually unsuccessfully).

This is no accident but instead represents the professionalizing of political campaigns as statisticians, debate coaches, media advisers and strategists work tirelessly to ensure that their candidate does not succumb – even briefly – to an unpredictable moment. This is why presidential campaigns, for all intents and purposes, only take place in one third of the country (since statisticians and strategists know which states are already “in the bag” for each party and allocate their campaign resources accordingly). This is why most campaign events take place in front of pre-selected audiences (since media advisers know the perils associated with unscripted moments). And even when something spontaneous does manager to occur (such as Obama’s “Joe the Plumber” moment), this quickly becomes co-opted into familiar memes and storylines.

This phenomenon is not paranoia or conspiracy theory, but simply the observation that political campaigners (like military campaigners or business planers) want to be able to select a strategy and stick with it, leaving it to opponents/competitors to deal with the unexpected. And we voters find similar solace in stability, which is why we gravitate towards things such as party identity and charismatic leadership to help us navigate (or avoid) complex decisions.

But the stability both the campaigns and the voters desire is illusionary, or at least only holds within highly limited boundaries. This was brought home to me several years ago when reading an extremely interesting piece in a now-defunct blog (read the entry entitled “Yeah, but can he hit” located about a quarter way down the page) in which the writer compares our fetish for political stability with a similar desire to remove all risk from the world of finance.

In economics, sophisticated tools are used to keep economic growth within a beneficial but predictable range, meaning that with regard to stability too much growth is just as bad as too little. But as we learned in the 2008-2009 economic meltdown, once you leave this narrow range that’s been defined as “stable,” there are no guardrails, just “sheer cliff.” In fact, it’s no accident that the sophisticated devices that brought the economy down were supposed to be “risk mitigation” products, tools that allegedly commoditized (and supposedly reduced to near zero) risk itself.

Similarly, our politics is being managed (both by professionals and by voters themselves) to stay within comfortable boundaries, to the point where something truly unpredictable emerging (such as a Ross Perot or large numbers of undecided voters) leaves us bewildered, and often hostile.

Such unpredictability forces us to confront the fact that the world is a complicated place, containing many things we’d rather not think about. And so our choices are to either make ourselves think about them (even if this causes psychic discomfort) or, alternatively, simply deciding “where to stick our finger” by cheering on those virtuous political forces we support while sneering at the savage ignoramuses running against them.

Vote Reason!

The last post alluded to what might happen to a Presidential candidate who decided to demonstrate his or her critical thinking activity in public, and noted the irony of how the voters might react negatively to such a demonstration, given that most of us hope our leaders will think and act deliberately once in office. But if “I reason well!” is tough to pull off as a Presidential campaign tagline, could reason become a campaign slogan in some other context?

This issue was brought home recently when looking at two authors (well, three actually) who appeal to reason in the context of political decision making.

The first is former US Vice President Al Gore whose 2007 book The Assault on Reason was a political broadside published during the last years of the Bush administration.

While much of the book is dedicated to listing what Gore perceives to be the many failings of the man to whom the author lost the 2000 US elections, undergirding these criticisms is an argument that “reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions.”

According to Gore, a combination of political corruption and dumbed-down public dialog (created by saturation media distorted by partisan and corporate interests) has reduced the country’s ability to think clearly, to base important decision on reason and logic, rather than ideology and superstition.

No doubt skepticism over global warming (the subject of Gore’s best-selling An Inconvenient Truth) was playing a role in the author’s analysis that both the public and its leaders were failing to act logically and reasonably. And without getting into the substance of the global warming debate, the relevant point for readers of this blog is that a skilled politician and celebrated political author felt that the public (or at least a large segment of it) would sympathize with the argument that reason should prevail in politics and public policy.

If your position on one of Gore’s issues (or Gore himself) prevents you from looking at his work from a non-partisan perspective, a second book that makes a similar argument (albeit from a completely opposite political perspective) might provide some distance.

The World Turned Upside Down by British journalist and author Melanie Phillips makes the same argument as Gore (that the world is rapidly losing its ability to reason and think critically about important political subjects). But in her case, the issues we debate irrationally are the very ones Gore sees reason providing settled answers to (such as global warming and how the US got into a war with Iraq).

Now Phillips ties her observations into what she perceives as a growth in superstitions belief, lumping together New Age cults, 9/11 conspiracy theories and unquestioned faith in subjects such as man-made global warming and even human evolution into a single phenomena which she traces to people desperately searching for meaning in a post-religious age.

And while her choice of targets may not fit together as well as the author thinks, again we should note that she is not calling for a return to decision-making based on religious belief. Rather, she is claiming that in our post-religious age, reason does not take the lead but instead morphs into its own cult of irrationality.

Again, separating out the writer’s particular politics (as we did with Gore’s), we are left with a political writer (this one from the opposite end of the political spectrum to the former Vice President’s) who feels that her audience will respond positively to the argument that our polity should be informed by logic and reason, even if she feels that logic and reason lead to a very different place than where Al Gore had ended up.

The third author I alluded to earlier is Lee Harris, author of such books as Civilization and Its Enemies and The Suicide of Reason. While his political point of view (notably as a critique of radical Islam) makes him controversial as well, his arguments regarding politics and reason takes aim at reason itself.

His main thesis is that the culture of reason that many in the West live under (and both Gore and Phillips are playing to) is not the result of mankind taking the next evolutionary step towards progress (leading to an end of history, with all societies eventually being run by rational actors). Rather, he sees the reasoning society as itself a sub-culture, a sub-culture that could never have been created by reason alone.

I will leave the details of his arguments for another time, but suffice to say that whenever we are trying to apply the principles of critical thinking (logic, reason, analytical weighing of evidence) to political debate we are embarking on a highly artificial project, a project that would confuse (and possibly appall) most people throughout history, as well as a fair number of people living today.

Primaries

“Gaffes” and “Brainfarts” seem to have become the watchwords of recent weeks in this primary season as Republican hopefuls like Herman Cain fumbled questions on current foreign policy issues and Rick Perry “locked up” during nationally televised debate.

Within the context of the ongoing primary, critical thinking tools can be trained on any of the individual candidates, subjecting various tax plans (for example) to a review to see if premises lead to conclusions, unpacking the rhetoric of individual candidate’s opening and closing debate speeches (or, perhaps, applying the Principle of Charity to even those candidates who embarrass themselves on national television).

Alternatively, one could look beyond the rhetoric, clashes and slip-ups that have gone on over the last several months and realize that the Primary itself has an ultimate essence: to winnow a large group of candidates down to just one. In which case (and regardless of the details) the institution of the Primary is (so far, anyway) adhering perfectly to its nature.

Given non-stop coverage of the campaign, it’s particularly tempting to focus attention on the sources of our premises: the media which today consists of partisan and non-partisan newspapers, radio stations, television and cable news networks, some of whom make attempts at objectivity while others proudly proclaim their biases (or hide them behind claims of balance and fairness). With the advent of the Internet, pocket video cameras and stalkers hoping to create media events by capturing a candidate in a blunder (such as a “makaka moment,”) the media becoming the message will certainly occupy an important place in this discussion over the coming year.

But for now, I’d like to focus on one player in the Primary equation that may not be getting the media exposure of the candidates: ourselves.

After all, it is we who react to this or that Primary gaffe or misstatement, often through the partisan lens of forgiveness if we lean Republican or ridicule if we lean Democrat. But stop and consider for a moment how any of us might react if one of the candidates (in either party) took a long pause after being asked a question about a particularly complex matter, looked up and said “You know, that’s a very good question about a very difficult and fast-changing subject. And I would be doing everyone a disservice if I spoke about it without having learned enough to speak intelligently. Let me spend some time reading up on the matter and consulting with those who know more than I do, after which I’ll give it some careful thought and present you an answer worthy of that name (with appropriate qualification of what I and any of us still might not know).”

Such a response (which is what we hope to hear from someone who may not have all the answers on any conceivable subject, which is all of us) would immediately end a Presidential candidate’s career, branding him with such death-dealing epitaphs of wishy-washy, egg-heady or the dreaded indecisive.

But the alternative to such a public demonstration of critical thinking is not becoming omniscient and immediately decisive on all matters (including issues with unfolding unknowns). Rather, it is to give the appearance of knowing enough to have a say on any issue of the day, an appearance often gained not by careful thought and study, but mastery of certain rhetorical techniques, frequently achieved through professional training on skills such as how to perform on television, how to interact with (and play to) audiences during debates and interviews, and so on.

And remember that the audience these speakers are playing to is us, a public that would react with hostility to someone admitting that they may not know something (or may not know enough to make an immediate decision), preferring the appearance of knowledge and wisdom that we simultaneously know most likely lacks substance. And to highlight one last irony, we actually want our leaders to be careful and thoughtful after they are elected; to surround themselves with experts and perform considered analysis before making hard decisions. It is only before they are elected that we demand immediate answers and demonstrations of on-the-spot decision-making (often on murky or even trivial matters).

So the next time we feel the urge to react smugly to a gaffe by a politician we oppose, or excuse an onscreen error by someone we support, it might be worth considering what role we play in a system that rewards those who can convince us that they are someone they are not, able to deliver something we may not necessarily even want once the election is over.

Consistency

As the contours of the upcoming US election begins to take shape, we will be visiting the subjects of rhetoric and argumentation again and again in the context of analyzing candidate speeches, debates, ad campaigns and other forms of written, oral and even visual communications.

Even those not involved with the study of critical thinking tend to enjoy these subjects, especially since they involve verbal jousting (like what you might find in a courtroom drama) as well as the fun related to finding examples to illustrate various fallacies, my favorites being Woody Allen’s “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Thus, all men are Socrates” (a Syllogistic fallacy) and Grocho Marx’s “I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know” (an example of Amphiboly).

But before we start down that road, we should note an underlying human characteristic that informs our response to rhetoric and many other stimuli we are exposed to in our daily lives: an overwhelming desire for consistency.

Like cognitive biases, the desire for consistency (or, at the very least, a discomfort with inconsistency) seems to be hard wired into the human brain. Many logical arguments (from mathematical proofs to philosophical debates) satisfactorily terminate when it can be demonstrated that they end or lead to an inconsistency (such as A equals not A). Indeed, the Law of Non-Contradition is one of the foundational principles of all logic. And even our sense of humor seems to be built around the surprise associated with inconsistent behavior (such as the actions taken by a third man walking into a bar which does not jibe with the behavior of the first two).

In politics, this drive for consistency underlies the most powerful accusation one can hurl at an opponent or their supporters: that of hypocrisy. For while accusing an opponent of being a liar is considered poor form (and often rebounds on the accuser, making them come off as ill tempered and nasty), accusations of hypocrisy almost always leave the accused on the defensive and are thus powerful tools in the politicians rhetorical arsenal.

The foundations for an accusation of hypocrisy can take many forms, such as the politician who votes against school choice programs while sending his or her own children to expensive private schools or a finger-wagging moralist legislator (or preacher) caught in a extra-marital affair. But inconsistencies can also be subtler or exist in the “eye of the beholder” of just one person or group.

For example, an elected official’s failure to “live up to their campaign rhetoric” (by voting for something they vowed to vote against during the campaign season, for example) often underlies accusations of dread hypocrisy during the next campaign season which resonate with votes who tend to look for consistent behavior as a sign of strong character. But now we get into more complicated territory since campaign promises can be vague and open to interpretation, and legislation is often the result of compromise between competing goods, meaning a perceived inconsistency may be the result of incomplete information or an oversimplified (and sometimes self-serving) interpretation of events (i.e., “spin”).

The drive to see consistency in leaders (especially those whom we support) and inconsistency/hypocricy in others (especially those we do not support) also taps into discomfort with our own inconsistent behavior. This can include anything from ignoring the homeless person asking for a handout (despite our self-identification as being generous and caring) to cutting corners at work (despite our belief in our own dedication and commitment) to thinking inappropriate thoughts about a stranger’s attractive appearance (despite our self-awareness of being a happily married and committed spouse).

In other words, we seem to be looking for a political leader to demonstrate a level of consistency that we instinctively know first-hand is not possible by a member of the human species. This inconsistency in our own desire for consistency is even more complicated since anyone who has risen to the level of being able to run for President has no doubt had to make compromises along the way that the rest of us never have to confront.

Now a partisan voter has a simple solution to this problem: ignoring inconsistencies that can lead to accusations of hypocrisy on the part of candidates they like, but highlighting and dwelling on similar inconsistency/hypocrisy on the part of those they dislike.

But as critical thinkers, we are obliged to recognize (from first-hand experience) that any human being is made up of multiple interests, desires and motivations which can legitimately be in conflict without rising to a level of hypocrisy that would imply a significant character flaw. And we must also recognize that the political process (which is ultimately about compromise between different opinions, many of which represent competing goods) means that absolute consistency is not possible and may not even desirable for a candidate who must lead a nation of 300,000,000+ people who neither individually or collectively represent a single (or consistent) set of beliefs.

Principle of Charity

The last two posts highlighted the two-edged problems associated with bias. On the one hand, bias is within us and all around us (in various forms) and we must always be careful to be aware of it, account for it and not succumb to it when analyzing information and making decisions. At the same time, dwelling on our own or other people’s biases can lead to endless navel gazing, paralysis and (most important for the issue being discussed on this blog) an argumentative dead end about the most important issues we should be discussing and debating.

Complex challenges such as this can often be mitigated through the application of a bit of “folk wisdom,” vs. ruthlessly logical proofs. And philosophy offers us something that can serve this role in the “Principle of Charity.”

This “Principle of Charity” requires participants in debate to extend certain “benefits of the doubt” to one another. One manifestation of this principle would be to consider and engage with the strongest interpretation of an opponent’s arguments. In a detailed discussion of this principle, the philosopher Nigel Warburton uses this example to illustrate the concept:

“… in a debate about animal welfare, a speaker might state that all animals should be given equal rights. One response to this would be that that would be absurd, because it would be nonsensical, for example, to give giraffes the right to vote and own property since they would not understand either concept. A more charitable approach would be to interpret the claim ‘All animals should have equal rights’ as being a shorthand for ‘All animals should have equal rights of protection from harm’ and then to address that.”

Of course, the Principle of Charity does not (and should not) be automatically applied to every argument and every debater. Assuming the best of a proponent of perpetual motion machines or conspiracy theories, for example, could lend legitimacy to arguments which are, on their face, simply bad or mendacious, requiring no further interpretation generous or otherwise. At the same time, much of our political debate could be made much calmer and more illuminating with a healthy dose of this Principle.

For example, if we were to apply the Principle of Charity to next year’s presidential contest, the first thing we would have to do would be to take the candidates at their word that their primary motivation for running for President is their love for America and their desire to contribute to improving it. While it is possible that one or both of next year’s Presidential candidates are Manchurian in nature, secretly planning to turn the country over to its enemies or transform us into a plutocracy, we are likely to get a better understanding of the candidates and the issues if we start with the charitable (and, likely, more accurate) position that the primary motivations for these candidates are positive.

This principle is similar to other concepts, such as Christ’s Golden Rule or Aristotle’s Golden Mean in preventing our own biases from overwhelming our judgment through a healthy application of balance and open mindedness.

To take one small example, we recently had a brief political dustup in my home state between the two likely candidates for Senator next year: one male, one female. In this instance, one of the candidates had posed for fashion photos in their youth which led the other candidate to joke that they “didn’t need to take [their] cloths off to get through college,” to which the other candidate replied “Thank God.”

Now this could have been interpreted as light political banter between rivals (hardly Churchillian in its wit, but still humorous). But instead it became the subject of accusation and counter-accusation of sexism vs. snobbery. And if you knew which candidate belonged to which gender and party, you can pretty much guess on which side most partisans landed in this debate.

But what if you didn’t know who was who? If you find yourself withholding your outrage until you find out which party each quipper belonged to, more than likely this is not a genuine issue but rather a matter of political theatrics which provides little insight into anything other than our own biases. How much simpler to just apply the Principle of Charity and assume this exchange to be nothing more than some light hearted back-and-forthing between rivals that pretty much means nothing, then moving onto matters more worthy of discussion and debate.

In addition to the benefits this principle brings to prioritization (a key requirement for critical thinking), it also has an emotional upside. For unlike the partisan thinker who spends an entire election cycle in a perpetual rage against the behavior of their political foes, those that subscribe to the Principle of Charity can ride out an election cycle feeling pretty good about themselves and their country, even as they grapple with the difficult matter of how to make it better.