Or, “the appeal to hypocrisy”
tu quoque is a debate tactic that attempts to nullify the point a person is making by accusing them of hypocrisy on that point. E.g.,
“Taxes are too high!”
“Really? You didn’t pay any taxes at all last year, so how can you claim that?”
It’s a classic. And used everywhere on the internet:
Note here that the “hypocrisy” being pointed at by the person in the well (?) isn’t REALLY hypocrisy at all – it’s hardly likely that the serf carrying the bale of straw has any realistic option of living their life other than they are. In other words, the tu quoque argument is being made in bad faith, as opposed to just being an attempt to refute a point being brought up by using fallacious reasoning/redirecting/dissimulating. (I admit, I’m not sure where the line here is, but my gut tells me something in the comic is worse than the example on the card above.)
Basically, tu quoque replaces genuine discussion of the point being raised with a discussion about the person making the point. The emotional appeal that that second discussion has often supersedes the emotional appeal of the original point being made in the listeners to the debate – which is what makes it so powerful as a rhetorical tool, and one that is challenging for a listener to the debate to identify and overcome.
If I were a philosopher, I think I’d be a philosopher researching the history of hypocrisy. That’d be enough to keep me beavering about for decades.
Comments are closed.