I’ve seen this a lot in various fora and such lately, and it is increasingly starting to bug me. Someone (who could, say, be identified with group Y) will point out some henious behavior on the part of members of group X; someone, who could be said to strongly identify with group X, will then come and chime in, “But look at all those assholes who belong to group Y! They did this, this and that horrible thing!” Those making such counterarguments may not even acknowledge the truth of the original claims; often they don’t even attempt to spin said events into something more favorable to their in-group, and typically they don’t even acknowledge them at all.
The specific examples I am thinking of, of course, are the whole vitroil and shoutdowns and such by ostensible Republicans at the Town Hall meetings taking place across the country. Attempts to point out the racist signs, the confrontational tactics, and overall crappy level of discourse (term used very loosely) being practiced by said individuals will typically result in a reply which will describe similar tactics that were used by some liberal organization 6 months ago, where left-identifying people shouted down some right-leaning speaker at a campus event or such.
Of course the answer to my question is that this is a completely bogus arguing tactic. The sins of someone else (who you may not like a priori) must not deflect the original discussion-two wrongs don’t equal a right and so on, nor does it necessarily make both “sides” morally equivalent when you do this.
It’s an often clumsy attempt to use a rhetorical argument called tu quoque.
The model they’re trying for is:
Person 1: I think it’s wrong that group A is doing action X.
Person 2: But, when group B did action X, you said they were right to do so. Why are you complaining about group B doing so? (with the implication that person 1 doesn’t really have a problem with action X, only with group B)
It’s an attempt to undermine the person’s argument by pointing out that the person who’s making the argument is being hypocritical.
And it can work IF the person was really someone who defended it when it was their side and IF the situations are similar enough. Too often, it’s the Clinton got a blow job school of lame equivalence.
This sort of argument was VERY liberally used by Irish Republican supporters.
When asked to justify a bomb that had left innocent shoppers smeared over the surroundings as human paste they would ignore the question and say “Ah but four hundred years ago the British did such and such to the Irish people…”
Quite often they’d even make up THAT part of the answer.
If people were angry because Bush had grilled baby for Sunday dinner, but were silent about Obama’s love for smoked infant hocks it seems like it would perfectly fair to point out the hypocrisy. My thoughts are
Humans are naturally hypocritical. Partisan’s doubly so.
We don’t like to believe that we are hypocrites.
We have these large brains that in a nanosecond can create a rationalization for why our behavior is not hypocritical.
That’s why those hippies that create traffic jams and make us late for work are a-holes and people that interrupt town hall meetings are conservative crusaders.
Or why warrantless wiretapping was the coming apocalypse, until it wasn’t.
I guess for that reason I think a you to argument is worthless. It spins off into an argument about which method of cooking a baby is more cruel with both sides triumphant in their own minds.
Yes, despite the wishes of some SDMB members who love to prefer Latin charges, this argument is sometimes meritorious.
Several things need to be said. First, to mollify our Latinists, yes, it is called tu quoque. And yes, it is classified as an “informal fallacy.” But yes, there is a great gulf fixed between the formal fallacies, which vitiate the logical structure of the argument, and the informal fallacies, which are merely occasionally misleading modes of argumentation. Technicians apply them mechanistically, but informal fallacies are much more slippery creatures.
It is easy to see how tu quoque might be rehabilitated. Principally, what it endeavors to show is that the rule of conduct proposed by X (you shouldn’t disrupt town hall meetings, say) is being proposed disingenuously. If person X really believes that there is some rule of conduct R, we would expect that X’s behavior would conform to R. That X’s behavior does not so conform suggests that X does not believe there is any such rule or that the rule admits of exceptions that he is hiding for rhetorical advantage.
What tu quoque is then, is the recognition that our private beliefs, although directly inaccessible to others, still are thought to be indirectly revealed through our behaviors. Actions speak louder than words.
Now there is a counterargument that instead of saying, in effect, “You don’t really believe in this rule you are now advocating,” we should respond with some sort of theoretical account for the falsehood of the rule (something like “It is sometimes OK to disrupt a town hall meeting because town hall meetings are designed to give only the illusion of open debate, beliefs that actually challenge the dominant narrative of the town hall organizers will only be aired via subterfuge”). I think this turns on a naïve view of how we do ethics, but it’s not completely without value. However, I think my explanation has scotched the notion that the tu quoque tag can be applied to arguments and dispensed with in the absence of any further dealings with them.
IMHO, most of the above misses the real issue. A lot depends on what the argument - or underlying argument - is.
If the entire argument is “such-and-such behaviour is wrong” then much of the above applies. But generally, the real argument - either spoken or unspoken - is actually “such-and-such behaviour is wrong and therefore Group X which engages in it are a bunch of jerks so we should all repudiate them and support Group Y”. And in this context it’s perfectly valid and logical to point out that Group Y also engages in the exact same behaviour.
Heh. It is pretty weird how often I see tu quoque on the SDMB considering I have never once heard it in real life. And say it outloud if you’re wondering why. It’s a dumb, pretentious-sounding term.