{"id":1713,"date":"2009-12-01T07:16:15","date_gmt":"2009-12-01T12:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=1713"},"modified":"2009-12-01T07:16:15","modified_gmt":"2009-12-01T12:16:15","slug":"subjunctive-tu-quoque","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=1713","title":{"rendered":"Subjunctive tu quoque"},"content":{"rendered":"

I'm looking for examples of this in the media, but I wanted to distinguish a form of tu quoque I've come across in conversations, the subjunctive tu quoque.<\/em> I haven't checked any literature to see whether this is a well known variant.<\/p>\n

In the subjunctive tu quoque, <\/em>someone argues that a criticism of a policy or practice is unreasonable, because the critic would do the same in similar circumstances. So, for example:<\/p>\n

"You say that it is wrong to detain without warrant suspected terrorists, but you would do the same if you had to confront the problem of terrorism that we confront."<\/p>\n

\n\t"You say that it is wrong to ban minarets on mosques, but if you had the immigration problem we have, you would do the same."<\/p>\n

Neither of these are actual arguments, but composites from conversations. They seem interesting to me for a number of reasons:  they're often entangled with a claim of epistemic privilege and an explanatory claim.<\/p>\n

First, the epistemic privilege. Unlike a standard tu quoque, <\/em>they involve an interesting dismissal of the critique that claims that the critic is not really in a position to judge because they haven't dealt with the reality of the difficult situation. This carries the strong whiff of the "ivory tower fallacy" (a version of the circumstantial ad hominem,<\/em> though in some newspapers its really a abusive ad hominem). <\/em><\/p>\n

Second, the explanatory claim. The subjunctive tu quoque<\/em> seems to develop naturally from the reasonable attempt to explain some phenomena to a critic. The line between explanation and justification is often difficult to mark and in trying to explain e.g.,<\/em> how it came to pass that the swiss population would vote to ban minarets on mosques, it is easy to move from a causal explanation or an attempt to show how such a vote would appear rational to the population, to a justification of it, at least from the critique of its rationality.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I'm looking for examples of this in the media, but I wanted to distinguish a form of tu quoque I've come across in conversations, the subjunctive tu quoque. I haven't checked any literature to see whether this is a well known variant. In the subjunctive tu quoque, someone argues that a criticism of a policy … Continue reading Subjunctive tu quoque<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}