The tu quoque fallacy is a sneaky one. It can come and go before you know it. Strictly speaking, tu quoque means “you too.” It’s a lot like accusing someone of hypocrisy. The fallacious part comes a step a down the line when, through an accusation of hypocrisy, doubt is cast on the content of the claim. We ought to be able to separate two things: one, an accusation of hypocritical behavior, and two, whether a claim is right or wrong, regardless of any hypocrisy.
Knowing how to spot logical fallacies of this sort is important, but we shouldn’t get carried away. Accusations are often made without taking a moment to consider what’s really being said. A previous piece delved into this tendency, and explored why it’s good to learn why the fallacies are harmful, but also how a claim might appear as if it’s committing a fallacy without actually doing so. That’s the point of this series, and this is our first fallacy under discussion.
You can probably remember a time when you were called out for advocating for some view you didn’t embody well enough yourself. You felt exposed. Chances are, your interlocutors were committing a fallacy. That’s because accusations of hypocrisy aren’t usually carefully separated from the truth-value of the underlying claim. The fallacy at play here is an attack on the person making the argument rather than the argument itself, so it’s a subcategory of the ad hominem fallacy. It distracts attention away from the argument and casts doubt on the claim the argument makes, in an implicit and illegitimate manner. The taxonomy of this fallacy can be traced back another level to fallacies of relevance, which shift focus onto factors that aren’t relevant to the original claim.
Hypocrisy is often about recommending a course or principle while not pursuing that course or following that principle. An especially vivid form of hypocrisy is when someone tends toward the opposite direction in their actual behavior relative to their stated principles. But strictly speaking, that has nothing to do with whether or not their principles are correct.
A common example is of a person advocating for vegetarianism whilst taking a big bite of a juicy cheeseburger. In that scenario you wouldn’t be surprised to hear someone respond, “look who’s talking!” The original claim never gets a hearing, and is left delegitimized. That’s a textbook tu quoque fallacy.
It can also occur at the larger, organizational level. Say for example there are only two choices of which group of people to lead an organization, and one is a lot worse than the other. Anyone pointing out the flaws of the worse option will inevitably be reminded of similar but lessor flaws of the better option, as if being guilty of anything blocks consideration of something even worse. It’s not that a real moral equivalence is ever established, but that one source is delegitimized as a vessel for a message of moral comparison. That’s a tu quoque as well, because it moves scrutiny over to the allegedly hypocritical behavior of the person or organization making the original claim.
As maddening as the tu quoque fallacy is, an equally maddening possibility emerges when people separate the person or source on the one hand, and the argument on the other, when the two should remain joined. Credibility is a real consideration, particularly because of the overwhelming amount of information we have to sift through in such a limited amount of time, now more than ever. We’re often left with only track record to evaluate.
A typical assumption is that what separates properly informed people is knowledge, but that can’t be the only or even the decisive quality, because no one is educated enough to be a subject matter expert in science, law, economics, politics, culture, military, religion, and so forth. If there’s any sophistication behind informational and media literacy, and it seems like there is, it’s located in a more qualitative, general characteristic. It’s more second-order skill than first-order knowledge. However this characteristic should be described, one competency it develops is in weighing context and track record.
Once a person or source is wildly off enough times, downgrading their credibility is warranted. Eventually, one learns the telltale signs in source, timing, pitch, context, and the like. This might feel a little open-ended, and indeed some thinkers have a distaste for studying informal fallacies. Part of the explanation for that distaste is that it sometimes requires a general, artful judgment to distinguish when a fallacy is or isn’t occurring. This will involve evaluating facts of proportion and context that aren’t found in the rules of the fallacies alone.
Formal fallacies are stark and mechanical. You start with a more self-assured feeling that once you master the principles, you have everything you need. Informal fallacies, on the other hand, are somewhere in-between formal fallacies and rules of thumb. The judgement it takes to identify when a fallacy has occurred is similar to what it takes to identify when an accusation of a fallacy has been overdone. Accusations of the tu quoque fallacy are at risk of being overdone when credibility and/or track record are central to evaluating evidence. In other words, it’s often not a fallacy of relevance when the judgement is about a testimonial act. Rather, it’s inductive reasoning. Or often, it’s an inference to the best explanation – in other words, abductive reasoning.
The identification of abductive reasoning traces back to the founder of American Pragmatism, Charles Sanders Peirce. Unlike deduction, which produces necessary outcomes from rules, abduction generates the best possible explanation. In our context, the since expanded concept of abduction justifies by inference. Rather than deducing a necessary conclusion or directly discovering a law of nature, abduction posits the best explanation from the evidence.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides the example of one morning finding in your kitchen “a plate and cup on the table, with breadcrumbs and a pat of butter on it, and surrounded by a jar of jam, a pack of sugar, and an empty carton of milk.” You conclude that your roommate got up in the middle of the night and made a snack, leaving the mess to clean up later, rather than that a burglar got all that stuff out and left it on the counter just to make you think someone had a midnight snack. The conclusion that your roommate had a midnight snack does not follow with necessity. Abduction as justification is often lumped in with induction, which is about establishing conclusions with degrees of probability or generalizing from repeated observations. In any case, the important thing is that strict logical necessity is not at play.
So when we read “Alert: The Rat Bastards are Doing it Again!” from sources that caused many false alarms in the past, and even spread misinformation through their warnings, it’s appropriate to take track record into account. It is an “and you?” sort of counter, but it is entirely warranted. We can’t follow every path to the end. We have to create a short-hand method for sorting information.
It goes deeper than that, because relying on abductive reasoning is often the best we can do when asked to account for our most basic beliefs, such as regularity and causation that underpin our entire thought process. When the logic of the tu quoque is embraced too tightly, the logic that supports our entire belief system can be needlessly called into question.
That is to say, if every evaluation of every claim must rely solely on the content of the claim itself, quite apart from established credibility and consistency, then our most basic beliefs are problematized, because our beliefs are utterly reliant on testimony at a deep level (and even basic induction can be called into question when viewed from such a pure lens, as David Hume demonstrated). If we acknowledge the already enormous role consistency, reliability, and credibility play in our lives, then we shouldn’t ignore them as we evaluate claims along the way.
It would be too much to say that we consciously decide to use abduction or induction as our official belief system early in life. Rather, at some point, as we introspect and scrutinize our most basic beliefs, we discover this kind of reasoning already implicit in our habits and processes. This reasoning can be said to be a kind of parent, nurturing and protecting us during long periods of our lives without our even knowing or appreciating it. We shouldn’t cast that off now. We should follow the admonition to “honor you father and mother.” We should bring them into the light.
So credibility and consistency can serve as independent kinds of evidence. When we only have two choices, the group that’s practiced and protected cannibalism cannot legitimately gin up support by warning that the non-cannibalistic group wants to eat people. This is true even when a prominent member of the non-cannibal group has had concerning friendly interactions with cannibal groups – let’s call this person Triangulating Squish or TS for short. The pro-cannibal group points to TS’s activities to express alarm. A supporter of the non-cannibal group counters by pointing out the cannibalistic and cannibalistic-sympathetic tendencies of the pro-cannibal group. A supporter of the pro-cannibal group counters “Again, what about TS?!”
Some might argue that this is just another example of the tu quoque fallacy, but what’s really happening is that a consideration of a counter-point (an attempt to fully realize a longer track record) is being blocked by the pro-cannibal group. Admittedly, it would probably be ideal if no one ever even flirted with cannibalism, but the accusation of a tu quoque fallacy is coming from the supporter of the pro-cannibal group, and it’s a mistaken accusation, because the underlying endeavor is to select the most trustworthy group on the spectrum of cannibalism.
The mistake here, then, is a kind of fallacy-fallacy, which in our context can serve as an accusation of a fallacy that itself displays a kind of fallacious reasoning (as opposed to the more established meaning, which is that a conclusion is wrong simply because the argument that produced it contains a fallacy). Note that whether the tu quoque fallacy has occurred or whether this kind of fallacy-fallacy has occurred can depend on the order in which the claims are made. That is to say, whether the move is made to delegitimize a source as a proper moral vessel to the detriment of consideration of an issue, or on the other hand, to block consideration of an objective track record. When the cannibal-sympathetic group points to a much more marginal activity on the other side and expresses deep concern, either out of bad faith or ignorance, “look who’s talking!” is exactly the right response.
Similarly, when a source has shown itself to be highly erratic and misleading, we don’t have to delve into every claim it makes. We still have the parents of our evaluative life at our disposal that have raised us and brought us to the present day, and the bulk of the unsung work they’ve done so far is in compiling and weighing and sifting, rather than confirming and disconfirming on case-by-case basis. It is not that a claim is false because it comes from an unreliable source, but rather that we don’t have to take every claim seriously in the first place and we’re entitled to use track record as real evidence. In cases where these factors are relevant, the fallacy ain’t a fallacy. It’s just good sense.
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