Category Archives: Ad Hominem

Ad Hominem, Plain Bad Arguments

The incoherence of the incoherence

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The liberal media are at it again. Yesterday the New York Times published a hastily written and poorly reasoned op-ed from Ann Althouse, a blogger and law professor at the University of Wisconsin. For a substantial legal analysis of this piece, go see Glenn Greenwald. We’ll limit ourselves to a brief analysis of an otherwise embarrassingly incoherent piece.

Althouse writes:

>. . . [W]e ought to wonder why a court gets to decide what the law is and not the president. After all, the president has a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution; he has his advisers, and they’ve concluded that the program is legal. Why should the judicial view prevail over the president’s?

>This, of course, is the most basic question in constitutional law, the one addressed in Marbury v. Madison. The public may have become so used to the notion that a judge’s word is what counts that it forgets why this is true. The judges have this constitutional power only because they operate by a judicial method that restricts them to resolving concrete controversies and requires them to interpret the relevant constitutional and statutory texts and to reason within the tradition of the case law.

We’re not legal scholars, so it is doubly ironic that we find Professor Althouse’s argument ludicrous, for she has given the reader every argument *against* her position. It is, as any citizen ought to know, the job of the judiciary to interpret the law. And that is precisely what is at issue in this particular case. Judge Taylor–the one who decided *ACLU vs. NSA*–stands on solid constitutional ground. Althouse offers no argument that the law was not interepreted properly beyond the tired ad hominem cliche’ of “judicial activism”. (And in this case, as others have already noted, this cliche’ is irrelevant):

>But Judge Taylor breezed through two of the three elements of standing doctrine — this constitutional limit on her power — in what looks like a headlong rush through a whole series of difficult legal questions to get to an outcome *in her heart* she knew was right. [emphasis added]

The legal questions, as Althouse has pointed out, are blindingly simple. Now if somehow Taylor’s argument was inadequate vis a’ vis the government’s briefs in this case (see Greenwald again for this), then it is Althouse’s duty to show this. Simply screaming “judicial activism” won’t due.

Ad Hominem

Standards

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A few months ago I read an article in The New Yorker about Bill O’Reilly. It treated O’Reilly not as the cyst on the derriere of our political culture but rather as an entertaining character one might see at a county fair. He’s not a character. He’s a real guy whose misinformation many people take very seriously. More recently, someone over at The New Republic wrote a somewhat similar piece about Ann Coulter. Sure she’s nuts and all that, but she’s a part of the political cultural landscape and besides sometimes she says stuff that might be kinda sorta true. Naturally, this poorly reasoned argument garnered much fierce, sound but most of all deserved criticism.

In response, Jonathan Chait of TNR writes:

>DEFENDING IDEOLOGICAL INCORRECTNESS:

>Elspeth Reeve, our extremely talented reporter-researcher, penned a clever, interesting, very well-executed defense of despicable authoritarian pundit Ann Coulter. Now, *I found her ultimate point to be highly unpersuasive,* as I imagine most people did, but this was a piece less about the destination than the journey. What made her column interesting was not *the counterintuitive shock value* but the fact that she had thought-provoking observations about Coulter’s role in the political culture, however indefensible her conclusion may have been.

>Her piece attracted the ire of Atrios, someone named Charles P. Pierce, and other partisan hysterics. That, of course, is unsurprising. *They cannot imagine the notion of measuring a piece by any criteria other than ideological correctness.* There are a lots of smart and interesting liberal writers who aren’t ideologically “surprising”–Rick Perlstein, Thomas Frank, most of the American Prospect staff, to name but a few. The Atrioses and the Pierces, on the other hand, offer their readers nothing but the certainty that they will confirm their ideological predilections. A world in which there are non-ideological criteria for judging an article–where being thought-provoking or smart matters–is a world in which they have no place.

And so the ad hominem, Bill O’Reilly style. Let’s not bother, so says Chait, with what they said about the piece (they did offer serious criticisms of the piece, follow the links above and see for yourself). Rather, let’s attack what we take to be their motivations. This silly, shallow and shameful.

But even worse than the inexcusable ad hominem (don’t they have editors?) is the assertion that simply being provocative–however wrong or dishonest–overrides editorial responsibility for truth and sound reasoning. Whatever happened to that?

Ad Hominem, Ad hominem tu quoque, John Tierney

Et tu quoque Al Gore

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John Tierney, no friend of the global warming camp, discusses “carbon footprints” this morning in his “Times Select” column (sorry, no free access). Al Gore he says:

He advises you to change your light bulbs, insulate your home, and cut back on driving and air travel. If you must make a trip, he notes helpfully, “buses provide the cheapest and most energy-efficient transportation for long distances.”

And yet,

Fine advice, and it would be even better if he journeyed to his lectures exclusively on Greyhound. But he seems to prefer cars and planes. When you tally up his international travel to inspect melting glaciers and the domestic trips between his homes — one in Washington and another in Nashville, not to mention the family farm in rural Tennessee featured in the movie — you’re looking at a Godzilla-sized carbon footprint.

Tierney doesn’t draw the fallacious conclusion–that Al Gore’s position (we should reduce our carbon footprints) is false. Instead he seems to be suggesting the conclusion, which is not necessarily fallacious, that “Al Gore is a hypocrite.”

We should note that although this is not necessarily fallacious, it isn’t obvious that the evidence above provides good reason to believe that Al Gore is in fact a hypocrite. In fact, Al Gore–much to the chagrin of many environmentalists–has always favored various market solutions to carbon emissions:

Gore and David say they offset their energy usage by sponsoring reductions in greenhouse gases through alternative forms of power and energy conservation (like building wind farms and paying farmers to turn methane into electricity).

But, how does Tierney argue that this isn’t sufficient? By invoking the judgment of a more radical environmentalist position:

Quoting Gandhi — “Be the change you want to see in the world” — Komanoff says his fellow environmentalists should stop offering “get out of purgatory free” cards [carbon offsets] to the rich and instead insist that everyone personally reduce energy use.

So apparently, Gore’s position is not internally hypocritical, though Komanoff disagrees with it. Nonetheless, Tierney thinks that if you want to work to reduce carbon emissions you must accept Komanoff’s positions:

I’m not such a purist myself — I’d let the average person salve his conscience with a carbon indulgence. But I’d hold environmentalist preachers like Gore to higher standards, especially when they’re engaging in unnecessary energy use.

The tu quoque fallacy is an interesting one. If one is too explicit with the fallacy, it isn’t very effective. But subtle forms of it–like Tierney’s here–which assert hypocrisy and therefore suggest that the messenger and the message are somehow compromised are very effective. Most readers of Tierney’s column will probably conclude that because Al Gore is a hypocrite his arguments and prescriptions do not need to be taken seriously.

Ad Hominem, Op-Eds and other opinions, Richard Cohen, Straw Man, V.D.Hanson

A game of pong

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In today’s Washington Post, Richard Cohen aligns himself with such bellicose pundits as Victor Davis Hanson as he argues for unhinged and indiscriminate violence against any and all associated (if only geographically) with Hezbollah terrorists. To suggest otherwise, as he *imagines* serious people have done, is pernicious anti-semitism:

>It also includes a whole bunch of European newspapers whose editorial pages call for Israel to respond, *it seems*, with only one missile for every one tossed its way. Such neat proportion is a recipe for doom.

>The dire consequences of proportionality are so clear that *it makes you wonder* if it is a fig leaf for anti-Israel sentiment in general. [emphasis mine]

Two points. First, those who have urged restraint have not suggested (and even Cohen admits as much with “it seems”) Israel engage in a game of missile pong–one for one. Proportionality is a principle of just war–of *jus in bello* to be exact. Those who urge it have rightly suggested that Israel not obliterate innocent civilians who are no more capable of controlling Hezbollah than Israel is. This argument is made on two independent grounds. First, it’s morally wrong to kill civilians. Second, as a matter of prudence, Israel cannot achieve its goal of eliminating Hezbollah by advertising for it’s most extravagant claims–that Israel engages in terrorism.

Second, to criticize Isreal’s reaction to the kidnapping of two soldiers (remember that) is not anti-semitic:

>These calls for proportionality rankle. They fall on my ears not as genteel expressions of fairness, some ditsy Marquess of Queensberry idea of war, *but as ugly sentiments pregnant with antipathy toward the only democratic state in the Middle East.* After the Holocaust, after 1,000 years of mayhem and murder, the only proportionality that counts is zero for zero. If Israel’s enemies want that, they can have it in a moment. [emphasis mine].

First, no one seriously urges the kind of silly military policy Cohen suggests; second, sometimes, believe it or not, Israel can be in the wrong–not because it’s *Israel*, but just because, like anyone or anything human, it errs.

So, Cohen, show how Israel is not wrong this time, not how anyone who criticizes them secretly wishes its annihilation.

***UPDATE***

It’s hard to say the author of the following in today’s Washington Post has in mind a straw man: we have seen in recent days on this site various iterations of the argument he attacks. Read the whole thing, but especially:

>Unfortunately — as the United States itself discovered during World War II and Vietnam, to cite just two examples — strategic bombing has almost never worked. Far from bringing about the intended softening of the opposition, bombing tends to rally people behind their own leaders and cause them to dig in against outsiders who, whatever the justification, are destroying their homeland.

While this point had already been made by Mr.Grey in a comment a few days ago, it’s worth repeating.

Ad Hominem, Ad hominem circumstantial

The last refuge

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We’ve been debating this for a while, but it’s time we took another turn through the internet tubes.

This from Instapundit, a right wing blogger, on 11/11/2005:

>The White House needs to go on the offensive here in a big way — and Bush needs to be very plain that this is all about Democratic politicans pandering to the antiwar base, that it’s deeply dishonest, and that it hurts our troops abroad.

>And yes, he should question their patriotism. Because they’re acting unpatriotically.

>

>UPDATE: Reader Kathleen Boerger emails: “Could you do me a favor and define ‘patriotism’ please?”

>I think it starts with not uttering falsehoods that damage the country in time of war, simply because your donor base wants to hear them.

>Patriotic people could — and did — oppose the war. But so did a lot of scoundrels. And some who supported the war were not patriotic, if they did it out of opportunism or political calculation rather than honest belief. Those who are now trying to recast their prior positions through dishonest rewriting of history are not patriotic now, nor were they when they supported the war, if they did so then out of opportunism –which today’s revisionist history suggests.

We’re intrigued that patriotism asks so little of the patriot: simply believe the irresponsible tripe you say. So, one might wonder, how does patriotism differ from just plain honesty?

And this underscores the general pointlessness of questioning others’ motives–the you’re just saying that because (you want to be on TV, you want sympathy, you want money, you want votes, girls, attention and so on): motives are private, often even to ourselves. The only things we can fairly and responsibly judge are *reasons*–yes, the things that compose *arguments*.

If we confined ourselves to arguments, we’d all be better off.

Ad Hominem, George Will, Plain Bad Arguments

Bottomless Chum Bucket

While one would certainly expect to encounter stench in the gutter discourse of the likes of Limbaugh and O’Reilly (as well as Hannity, Krauthammer, Liddy, Coulter and Malkin–to name a few), we were somewhat–but mind you only somewhat–surprised to see that George Will has stuck his arm full to the shoulder in the bottomless chum bucket that constitutes much of the conservative discussion of Cindy Sheehan’s request for a meeting with the President:

>Since her first meeting with the president, she has called him a “lying bastard,” “filth spewer,” “evil maniac,” “fuehrer” and the world’s “biggest terrorist” who is committing “blatant genocide” and “waging a nuclear war” in Iraq. Even leaving aside her not entirely persuasive contention that someone else concocted the obviously anti-Israel and inferentially anti-Semitic elements of one of her recent e-mails — elements of a sort nowadays often found woven into ferocious left-wing rhetoric — it is difficult to imagine how the dialogue would get going.

Never mind also the implication that the President of the United States is too thin-skinned to meet with someone who has called him names, or has, God forbid, expressed disatisfaction with his protean justifications for the war in Iraq. What’s interesting about Will’s remark is the claim that Sheehan is “*inferentially*” anti-Semitic apparently for (unquoted here) anti-Israel remarks. What, however, does “*inferentially* anti-Semitic” mean? Who draws the inference? On what grounds? Is the inference correctly drawn–or is it, as is more likely the case, drawn fallaciously in the service of character assassination? Anti-Semitism, a form of racism, is too serious a charge to be drawn “inferentially.”

Had Will stopped at “inferential” racism, he would only have been guilty of wallowing neck-deep in the rancid tripe of irrelevant character assassination. Whatever your position on the personal political views of Mrs. Sheehan, she continues (despite Will’s claim that she has “has already been largely erased from the national memory by new waves of media fickleness in the service of the public’s summer ennui”) to occupy the front pages of newspapers. Not to mention the fact that George Will favors her with a column in the *Washington Post*. Beyond that, he promotes her to Michael Moore:

>Do Democrats really want to embrace her variation of the Michael Moore and “Fahrenheit 9/11” school of political discourse? Evidently, yes, judging by the attendance of 12 Democratic senators at that movie’s D.C. premiere in June 2004, and by the lionizing of Moore at the Democratic Convention — the ovation, the seating of him with Jimmy Carter.

This just doesn’t make any sense. That 12 Democratic senators attended the opening of a documentary (one milder in tone, more solidly based in fact, and more cogently argued than many of the accuser’s columns) in 2004 (among other things) can have nothing to do with whether they will embrace *Sheehan’s* variation on it (which shows up in 2005–a year after 2004 by our count).

The logically and temporally impossible connection between Moore and Sheehan is only a set-up for Will’s sneering dismissal of the Democrats’ political position:

>It is showing signs of becoming an exhausted volcano. Regarding Iraq, it is mistaking truculent asperity and tiresome repetition for Churchillian wartime eloquence. Regarding domestic policy, intellectual anemia has given rise to behavioral patterns not easily distinguished from corruption, as with the energy and transportation bills. Yet the Democratic Party, which by now can hardly remember the far-distant past when it was a volcano not of molten rhetoric but of serious thought, seems preoccupied with the chafing around its neck. The chafing is caused by the leashes firmly gripped and impudently jerked by various groups such as MoveOn.org that insist the party adopt hysteria as a policy by treating the Supreme Court nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. as a dire threat to liberty.

As is usually the case with the ever clever Will, some of these phrases have a nice lilt (however irrelevant, Churchillian [the analogy fails here–the one who should sound Churchillian is the current war leader, Mr.Bush] always sounds nice)–but they would be more interesting if they were arguments (or at least parts of arguments) rather than simply hyperbolic–and therefore likely to be false or at best (“inferentially”) misleading–*assertions*, more appropriate (therefore not appropriate at all) for “TV’s bottomless chum bucket” than the op-ed page of even of the *Washington Post*.

Ad Hominem, Appeal to the People, Charles Krauthammer, Plain Bad Arguments

Give me that old time religion

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Over the year we’ve been in business we’ve seen plenty of ironic fallacies–these are the fallacies people commit by accusing others of committing fallacies. During the election the favorite was the reverse ad hominem–accuse someone else of attacking (thereby ignoring their justified attack and attacking them in turn). Here’s another variation on that theme–the reverse ad populum:

>These things come in waves, of course, but waves need to be resisted, even if the exercise leaves you feeling like King Canute. The new wave is fashionable doubt. Doubt is in. Certainty is out.

So Charles Krauthammer (famous for his use of the reverse ad hominem) would have us believe that since doubt is fashionable, people who believe it must do so simply because others do, not because perhaps they have a reason to doubt. This is a nice way of abdicating your responsibility for an argument against their view. That doesn’t make it right. And worse, I’m not sure if Krauthhammer knows this, but just because your belief is deeply held or profoundly felt doesn’t mean it’s *true.*

Of course, Krauthammer’s jeremiad (he used that word) on belief is really just a set up for his main argument.

>The Op-Ed pages are filled with jeremiads about believers–principally evangelical Christians and traditional Catholics–bent on turning the U.S. into a theocracy. Now I am not much of a believer, but there is something deeply wrong–indeed, deeply un-American–about fearing people simply because they believe. *It seems perfectly O.K. for secularists to impose their secular views on America, such as, say, legalized abortion or gay marriage. But when someone takes the contrary view, all of a sudden he is trying to impose his view on you.* And if that contrary view happens to be rooted in Scripture or some kind of religious belief system, the very public advocacy of that view becomes a violation of the U.S. constitutional order.

Now let’s look at this a little more closely. Embedded in the usual tripe about anti-religious feeling in the liberal media, is a familiar argumentative trope: religious [think Christian Evangelical not Muslim] versus secular. These two things do not rightly belong in the same category (at least in the way Krauthammer arranges them), so any attempt to compare them is bound to mislead. Besides, *legalized* abortion is not imposed on anyone the law recognizes; gay marriage (wherever it is legal) is not imposed on anyone either (barring probably unlikely shotgun weddings). These are activities, not views. Views cannot be imposed on anyone; activities can, but these activities can’t–unless your parents force the gay lifestyle on you; or force you to get an abortion. To avoid gay marriage, don’t go to gay weddings, or don’t be gay; to avoid abortion, give birth to any children you conceive.

Ad Hominem, David Brooks, False Cause, Informal Fallacies, Op-Eds and other opinions, Straw Man

Argumentum pro homine

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Just about everyone who has had Intro to Logic knows about the fallacy of the attack against the person, or ad hominem. It's a question of relevance, they are told, in that the negative features of a person's character have nothing to do with the argument she is making. That's why it's called an "attack" or "against" or in Latin, "ad." Even George Bush, Michael Moore, or why not, even Paul Wolfowitz deserves to have his argument assessed on its own merits. Rarely if ever, however, does one hear of the negative counterpart, the obverse, of the argumentum ad hominem, the argumentum pro homine. Despite its rarity and notwithstanding the absence of cruel or mean-spirited irrelevance, it's fallacious for the same reasons. And we have a fine example of this in David Brooks March 8, 2005 opinion piece in The New York Times. Take a look at this:

Let us look again at the man who's been vilified by Michael Moore and the rest of the infantile left, who's been condescended to by the people who consider themselves foreign policy grown-ups, and who has become the focus of much anti-Semitism in the world today – the center of a zillion Zionist conspiracy theories, and a hundred zillion clever-Jew-behind-the-scenes calumnies.

It's not necessary to absolve Wolfowitz of all sin or to neglect the postwar screw-ups in Iraq. Historians will figure out who was responsible for what, and Wolfowitz will probably come in for his share of the blame. But with political earthquakes now shaking the Arab world, it's time to step back and observe that over the course of his long career – in the Philippines, in Indonesia, in Central and Eastern Europe, and now in the Middle East – Wolfowitz has always been an ardent champion of freedom. And he has usually played a useful supporting role in making sure that pragmatic, democracy-promoting policies were put in place.

If the trends of the last few months continue, Wolfowitz will be the subject of fascinating biographies decades from now, while many of his smuggest critics will be forgotten. Those biographies will mention not only his intellectual commitment but also his personal commitment, his years spent learning the languages of the places that concerned him, and the thousands of hours spent listening deferentially to the local heroes who led the causes he supported.

To praise Wolfowitz is not triumphalism. The difficulties ahead are obvious. It's simple justice. It's a recognition that amid all the legitimate criticism, this guy has been the subject of a vicious piling-on campaign by people who know less than nothing about what is actually going on in the government, while he, in the core belief that has energized his work, may turn out to be right.

The occasion for the reconsideration of Paul Wolfowitz's character is the irresponsible–and to judge by the headline of the March 8, 2005 New York Times–incorrect belief that the "political earthquakes now shaking the Arab world" are unremittingly positive. More Lebanese have descended into the streets in favor of Syria than those who a week earlier showed up against it.  And besides, even those who came out against Syria wanted to be rid of a foreign occupier (never mind, as everyone hask the reasons for the occupation) as we Americans ourselves happen to be (in Iraq, another Arab country).

My colleague at the Thenonsequitur.com has been closely following these arguments as they appear in various op-ed pages and has promised to discuss them soon. The problem with Brooks' argument lies elsewhere. In particular, it consists in his logically clueless response-in-kind to perceived attacks on Paul Wolfowitz the person. We've discussed this sort of argument, the reverse ad hominem before.

In logical strategy it very much resembles the straw man: falsely accuse your opponent of not making an argument but of attacking the person, and in so doing you attack her rather than her argument (since you've accused her of not having an argument). This time, however, in addition to attacking the attacker (note the rhetorical juxtaposition of the "the infantile left" with the lunatic antisemitism on the order of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), Brooks responds to those attacks by pointing out what a patient listener and marvelous student of foreign languages Wolfowitz is, among other achievements and personal virtues.

No question Wolfowitz has all sorts of personal virtues and has accomplished something in his life. That's not the issue, however, in the serious critiques of his political positions and arguments. And besides that, and more to the point actually, Wolfowitz may be motivated by the purest desire to improve the lot of humankind in general, but many serious questions have been raised about the means he has chosen to these ends. Some have argued, so we have heard, that those means have been disastrous for those asked to carry them out in reality, as well as those who never asked Wolfowitz for his help.

Ad Hominem, Equivocation, False Dichotomy, George Will, Ignoratio Elenchi, Informal Fallacies, Op-Eds and other opinions, Plain Bad Arguments, Unqualified Authority

Nature Wrecked

In the previous post we discussed George Will’s violent reaction to the violent reaction to Larry Summers’–President of Harvard University–foray into *a priori* genetics. On the basis of all of the scientific auctoritas as his armchair will provide, Will continues here and in the following op-ed piece (which we will discuss some time in the near future) to pontificate about the philosophical realities of human nature. Not only did it gall him that academic liberals would dare question the unjustified assertions of the president of Harvard University, but some in the left-wing political media had the temerity to challenge similar claims in the inaugural address of the President of the United States:

>This criticism went beyond doubts about his grandiose aspirations, to rejection of the philosophy that he might think entails such aspirations but actually does not. The philosophy of natural right — the Founders’ philosophy — rests on a single proposition: There is a universal human nature.

Continue reading Nature Wrecked →

Ad Hominem, False Dichotomy, George Will, Hasty Generalization, Op-Eds and other opinions, Straw Man, Unqualified Authority

Ad Feminam

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Only just recently George Will argued that Michael Crichton’s appendixed and footnoted science-fiction thriller about global warming–sorry, climate change–merited unironic juxtaposition with the body of unthrilling and nonfictional scientific research from the majority of the world’s qualified scientists. Now this past week in The Washington Post
he argues that Larry Summers’ off the cuff and argumentless remarks about the genetic basis of gender differences in cognitive ability warrant the same kind of careful attention and consideration. The failure of academia to take them seriously, and its quick, negative reaction to them constitutes to Will’s mind evidence of academia’s not so latent hypocrisy:

>Forgive Larry Summers. He did not know where he was.

>Addressing a conference on the supposedly insufficient numbers of women in tenured positions in university science departments, he suggested that perhaps part of the explanation might be innate — genetically based — gender differences in cognition. He thought he was speaking in a place that encourages uncircumscribed intellectual explorations. He was not. He was on a university campus.

Continue reading Ad Feminam →