When is an appeal to hypocrisy fallacious?
Specifically, I’m talking about the claim, “If you argue that someone is
hypocritical, therefore their view is false, that is fallacious.”
And there is something about this that is
definitely right. Consider the pro-life movement. Suppose I support the
outlawing of abortion in most, or even all, circumstances. Suppose further that
I have never adopted any of these children whose abortions have been prevented.
Suppose finally that I have never even so much as helped someone in need.
“You’re a hypocrite!” the charge is levelled; and so I would be if I did
nothing for anyone, ever. But what is supposed to follow from this? Surely not
that abortions are permissible (the falsehood of my view). Something similar
follows when people accuse liberals of being hypocrites because of immigration
policies/executive order policies not opposed; nothing of relevance to the
issue at hand follows from this.
But perhaps people don’t always mean to
argue this way. Perhaps, instead, they mean something like the following: You
didn’t hold to principle X last week, and now you do. Thus, either you have to
admit that you were wrong last week, or wrong today—or else you’re being
logically inconsistent.
What follows from this line of reasoning is
that in cases where the opponent does not concede being wrong in the past—if
this is really such a case as outlined above, and not a mistake in fact—then it
follows they are wrong today. Thus, there is a kind of logical hypocrisy that,
when pressed, can result in the
establishment of the falsehood of a view. This is due to the law of
noncontradiction; no two contradicting propositions can be true of the same
thing at the same time and in the same sense.
So let’s apply this attempt at a correct
appeal to hypocrisy to both test cases above. In the case of the pro-life
movement, it might go like this: “You claim that God commands that life is
sacred, but you seem uninterested in the poor and destitute. Are you wrong to
be uninterested (since if life is sacred, one ought to be interested in the
well-being of the less fortunate) or is life not sacred?”
And this makes some sense to me. Either
life is or is not sacred, and unless I answer that I was wrong to be
uninterested, then I affirm that life is not sacred (unless, of course, I
challenge the facts of the matter). But this is not a particularly amazing
strategy, since, of course, I can simply admit the error of my ways and hold to
the sanctity of life. And while it’s true that if suddenly I were to claim that
life is not sacred, I would not be right about this (truth isn’t up to me), it
is true that if both of us in the debate agreed that life is not sacred, then
there would be no more debate. What about the second case?
“You didn’t seem worried about executive
orders when the last president was doing them. Either executive orders are
worrisome or they are not. Either you were wrong to be not worried, or you are
wrong to be critical of the current president merely for using them.”
This also strikes me as correct. Much of
the analysis is the same as above; I can get out of this by admitting I was
wrong. However, if I don’t challenge the facts of the matter, and I don’t admit
I was wrong, then it follows I cannot criticize the president on this matter
alone.
People don’t always mean this when they
have an appeal to hypocrisy. Sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, they
mean “X is a hypocrite; he’s wrong!” But sometimes they do—maybe—have this other
style of argumentation in mind.
