He’s Burlusconi now. Ex Benedict.
Distance?
I mean, over here in the UK, we hear a lot more about Berlusconi than we do Chavez. He’s simply a more immediate figure; Italian politics also are more affecting of us than Venezuelan. I imagine if you asked a group of random average Europeans, they’d be more able to even just name European heads of state than they would American, and the opposite for Americans. I think really a good part of it is simply NIMBY-ness.
Yeah, but what usually happens on the boards is this:
A criticizes P done by Q
Some time, probably around 15 years ago, R did something to S which could remotely be related to the action surrounding P and A never responded.
So A’s a hypocrite, Clinton got a blowjob, and Bob’s your uncle.
I won’t trust anything A does, in part or in hole.
I find tu quoque to be a wonderful tool for highlighting the inconsistencies in an argument.
To use an example that I’ve employed before on these boards. People often argue that eating animals is wrong because killing animals for food production is wrong. I then point to various studies which show that eating plant food kills far more animals than eating free range animals. I then point out that since eating animal foods in fewer animals being killed for food production the argument doesn’t hold up.
This is technically a tu quoque. Pointing out that vegetarians also kill animals for their food doesn’t actually adress the argument that killing animals for food is wrong. All it does is point out that the opposition also engages in the same wrong bahviour. Classic tu quoque.
Nonethelss I find it to be both a valid and useful debating tool. And the reaosn I think it’s valid is because it demonstrates that the stated basis of the argument isn’t the actual basis of the argument. The actual basis is squeamishness or degree of removal from culpability or something similar. IOW people don’t object to animal deaths, they object to killing animals personally.
Once that fact is highlighted we can then begin to debate the merits of that true, underlying position. So to me the tu quoque serves a very important role as a method for determining whether the stated basic of an argumengt is the real basis of the argument. And this doesn’t assume any dishonesty on the part of the opposition. I’m sure all of us have inadvertentlky adopted positions where the true basis differs form the basis we would give is asked.
It’s important in an argument to highlight such inconsistencies if we are ever to arrive at the truth. To ignore the fact that an opponent (or ourselves) is engaging in behaviour that they have espoused as being wrong enables them to continue to build an argument upon the same flawed premise. A tu quoque is often the best way to highlight that the premise is flawed and to reveal the true premises of the argument.
Disqualifying tu quoques as invalid means we can never point out that a person’s behaviour is inconsistent with their stated beliefs, and that’s just silly.
So my 2c is that the tu quoque is a useful debating tool.
Well, that way about all you’re accomplishing is to demonstrate that someone else is as least as much a hypocrite as oneself. Which really has no bearing on the principles being argued. I am not an observant pantheist, I don’t see how that changes the truth of pantheism one way or the other.
You pay come across a truth that you lack the strength or faith to wholly embrace, I don’t see why that means you have to pretend you aren’t aware of it, or cannot speak of it.
I see it as demonstrating that someone else’s seasons for believing something are not as they state them to be. That may be due to hypocrisy, but more commonly it’s either due to people not fully understanding their own motivations or due to people holding mutually incompatible beliefs.
If we are ever going to resolve an issue by argument then it is essential that we acknowledge the true basis of our beliefs and acknowledge when our beliefs are mutually contradictory.
Such issues have a large bearing on the principles being argued.
That is the whole point. We are trying to get at the truth, and we can’t do that if people pretend that it doesn’t exist.
In the example above the truth may be “People feel squeamish about killing to eat” or it may be “People inevitably need to kill to eat”. But pretending that neither of those truths exist and that vegetarianism is preferable because it results in less killing is flawed.
And it is by utilising the tu quoque that we can demonstrate that the justification for the preference is flawed.
That makes the tu quoque a valuable debating tool.
Did anyone in this thread actually study debate?
No. Kinda the whole point of this thread. It’s not.
Ad hominem. 
And yes, I did.
Yes, it is, and the point of the thread is that you’re wrong, Bricker. “But animals die too and in greater numbers from standard agricultural processes involved in cultivating plants.” is not, in fact, an argument about why killing animals for food is or is not wrong. It’s an argument that farming is not less damaging to local fauna than meat farming is to the animals that are slaughtered for our consumption. If someone’s argument is “we should be vegetarians because it’s wrong to kill animals for our food and our current system of factory farming accomplishes the goal of feeding us without harming animals” then yah, it’s a rebuttal. If it’s not, then no, it’s not. And it’s not because you have not, in fact, addressed their argument. You have addressed a second, tangentially related factoid and attempted to substitute it for the actual issue under discussion.
It doesn’t address the issue, it sidesteps it.
That’s the whole point.
You cannot disprove a claim by ignoring it in favor of something else that you’d like to discuss instead, Bricker.
This is elementary.
Precisely correct. Why the contrasting behavior is offered is key to determining if the fallacy exists.
Maybe I should have said in my OP, “Why the contrasting behavior is offered is key to determining if the fallacy exists.”
Well, yeah, but in the example you were responding to it was not a rebuttal. 
The problem is that “Well, an other group does thus and such” is very rarely an actual rebuttal and much more often a rhetorical fallacy. In 99% of the cases if you respond to “Action X is wrong because of Y” with anything other than “Action X is not wrong because of Z”, you’re essentially using a red herring. “Well, group B also does thus and such” is only a rebuttal to “Group A and only group A does thus and such.”
But often, that’s the implied argument. “The Republicans have done it again! Senator So-and-so has just been caught taking bribes from developers.”
Is the argument here, “Resolved: taking bribes from developers is wrong?” Of course not – who would defend the contrary position? And contrasted with the prominent mention of the political party of the errant senator, it’s clearly an implication that bribes, or corruption, is the province of one party. Rebutting that argument with an illustration of Democratic Congressman Such-and-such who was also found to have accepted bribes is proper, and not a tu quoque.
It’s clear we have different views on how “often” one or the other is done, and all I’ll say now is I don’t accept your 99% figure as literally accurate. But my real message is: there’s a reflexive cry of “tu quoque!” when it doesn’t always apply, and the purpose of this thread is to illustrate the actual meaning of the fallacy.
Even if that’s the implied argument, you don’t rebut it with “But the Dems did it too!” All that says it that both parties have done some shitty shit. That’s not a rebuttal, it’s a confirmation.
Even showing that corruption isn’t the province of only one party doesn’t show that someone isn’t perfectly entitled to slam that particular party. The counter argument also tacitly commits the fallacy of the excluded middle. If both the Dems and the Republicans are worthless, scumfuck bastards as political parties, then the answer is C, not A or B.
Just like if someone told you “Cancer is horrible!” the response isn’t “Well, AIDS also sucks!”
That’s the same problem with the farming/vegetarianism dodge above. If “meat is murder!” is met with “plowing kills animals too!” the response is “well then, we grow hydroponically!” rather than “gee, I guess you’re right.”
But, again, only if you’re attacking their actual argument. If you’re attacking an implication that hasn’t actually been made (eg. you respond to someone saying “politician X did thus and such, and is a bastard” with “well, politician Y did too!”) then you’re changing the subject and trying to rebut an argument that nobody made.
The problem is, it hasn’t done that yet. It is only not a fallacy when it actually addresses someone’s claim. So unless the claim is “Republicans and only republicans are corrupt!” then 'Democrats are corrupt too!" is mere tu quoque.
Addressing what you see as the tactic implications of an argument does not rebut the argument. What you have described is mere political gotchaism designed to rebut a tacit implication that you may very well have imagined. And it’s political gotchaism that tends to derail a thread into petty sniping especially if the person making the claim wasn’t, in fact, implying what you’d like to claim they were.
Can we stop with the symbolic logic (which has been so full of typos and lacking in clarifiers in the early part of this thread anyway) and hypotheticals and get to some actual examples?
Bricker is clearly fed up with some specific recent posts. Bricker: copy out two or three examples of postings that contain things that are or are not tu quoques, and label them as such. Then we can debate whether or not we agree with your analysis.
Why? Because, frankly, after reading this confusing thread and then the clearer wiki article, I don’t think I’ve ever come across an actual to quoque fallacy in a real debate. It’s almost always the legitimate use.
The wiki article sucks.
Zing! Now there’s a debate-team captain!
Anyway, my point is that
(a) the Wiki article at least makes something clear
(b) I have no idea what the fuck Bricker is going on about. I can glean that he’s irritated about some recent activity on the boards, that it has something to do with the tu quoque fallacy (I’m not sure whether it’s because someone committed a TQF or if someone who did not was accused of committing one) but he’s being all passive-aggressive instructional and generic in his explanations rather than saying, “You five posters: You accuse me of using the TQF; I do not; these situations (cite, cite, cite) are not TQFs, they are legitimate uses. Furthermore, to illustrate the difference, here is a genuine TQF (cite). See the difference?”
In short:
Wiki = clear.
Bricker = not clear.
You debating with Bricker = amusing but not really helping clarify wtf a tu quoque fallacy actually is, if they ever occur in real life or are only theoretical, and why in the name of god is this thread even taking place
Plus, it’s a side issue. An argument can be compliant with all debate-team definitions of formal logic including to quoque, and *still *be hypocritical nonsense.
Precisely. In a formal debate, there is “Winning”, which is being judged to have the better argument by a panel of judges. On the SDMB, “winning” is very rare, but it presumably involves convincing someone to actually change their position, or at least to think about it from a new angle. And short of winning, I think a reasonable goal is at least to have a reasonable, polite, free-flowing exchange of ideas. And bringing up “well, this other guy did it too” will almost never do so, regardless of whether it’s presented in a way which technically does or does not fit some latin word.
There are certain situations where the debate CAN be made more interesting by bringing up past examples and contrasting them with the present. Left Hand of Dorkness brings up the interesting example of FDR lying to get us involved in WW2. The problem on the SDMB, however, is that even when it’s really an interesting legitimate example, it’s usually brought up as an attack and an accusation, rather than as an invitation for discussion. I don’t know whether either of these examples is technically a Tu Quoque, but I’d call this one bad:
A: Bush lied to get us into a war in Iraq. That’s bad. Bush is bad.
B: But FDR lied to get us into WW2. You don’t complain about that. Therefore you’re a lying hypocrite and Bush did nothing wrong
And this one good:
A: Bush lied to get us into a war in Iraq. That’s bad. Bush is bad.
B: Sure, lying to get us into a war sounds like a bad thing, prima facie. But is it possible that doing so could actually be the right action in the long run? Or that Bush could at least have honestly believed so? For instance, FDR sure seems to have lied to get us more deeply involved in WW2, and most people think that was a good cause. Are those two situations not comparable?
That’s fine.
But let’s call a spade a spade. My point here is that tu quoque has a specific meaning, and it’s incorrect to call it a fallacy where it isn’t. Your point is also correct: from the point of view of persuasion, there’s a good way and a not-so-good way of offering up counter-examples, and one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar. I agree completely with this observation.
But if it doesn’t fit “some latin word,” then let’s stop calling it that Latin word.
Yes, and that usually hinges on judgments of morality and justice, or at least of what a human society needs to function properly. Such matters are outside the purview of debate teams or trial lawyers, and in fact are actively scorned as irrelevant in favor of narrow focus on technicalities. The type of mindset that can think the definition of a particular kind of fallacy is important while the propriety of investigating war crimes is less so is at a severe handicap here when trying to “win” according to the standards of this board. And out in the real world too, it may need to be said.
Yes, but “well, you yourself supported the very thing you’re now deploring when the names were reversed” is entirely valid, and even gets to the point more quickly than most any other argument.
That argument requires the person making it to first admit that Bush did lie to get us into a war in Iraq. But, since that concedes the moral center right from the get-go, it doesn’t get stipulated here. All we get is the first kind of argument, “Yeah, well, a Democrat once did it too! So there!”.