Motte-and-Bailey Feminism

Reason suggests that the retreat from the 'believe all women' position to 'believe women who accuse Republicans' is an example of an informal fallacy.
In truth, believe-victims activists have been making generous use of the motte-and-bailey fallacy. This is a form of argument in which a person makes a strong, unreasonable, and indefensible claim—the bailey—and then falls back on an uncontroversial claim—the motte—when challenged. With "believe victims," the bailey position was something like what Biden and Clinton said: Presume that each and every alleged victim is telling the truth. The motte position is closer to this: Respect and support alleged victims, and don't automatically discount what they say. In the wake of Reade's allegations against him, Biden has unsurprisingly retreated to the motte.
This is a topic that Slate Star Codex has treated repeatedly over the years.

I'm not sure it's properly speaking a fallacy so much as an objectively dishonest rhetorical strategy. A fallacy is an error in logic; informal fallacies occur in ordinary rhetoric, which isn't usually amenable to the strict logic in which formal fallacies occur. You can get a formal fallacy in rhetoric, it just doesn't happen much: but if I make a claim that P -> Q, !P, therefore !Q, I've made a formally fallacious argument. If I argue that you're a bad person therefore you can't be right, that's informally fallacious. In both cases, I'm making a claim that doesn't follow from the premises.

The motte-and-bailey is only an error if you don't notice that you've shifted your goalposts substantially. Otherwise, it's a lie. Reason also uses the term 'gaslighting,' which I learned from Tex, and which is a form of intentional deception.

So the question is whether or not they notice their own shift. Maybe not; progressivism is based on fervently asserting beliefs in things that you probably have to know are not true, e.g., that all people are per se "equal" (rather than possessing one form of political equality). Maybe at some point you just don't notice that you've shifted from really saying 'believe all women!' to 'don't just dismiss women'; or from 'it is sexist not to build systems biased in favor of women' to 'feminism is just about equality!' (And which equality, again?)

Eric Hines accuses me of being too generous to my opponents. Perhaps I am; but I do see a lot of self-deception in humanity. I think many of these people really are in error rather than intentionally lying; I think they really can't see outside the lies on which they've founded their lives and their vision of justice. It's a big problem. It's hard to reason with someone who is lying to themselves all the time about the very questions you're treating, especially when (as here) they have gigantic social support systems to reinforce the lies and to protect them from having to grapple with the fact that they are engaged in a (self?) deceptive practice.

4 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

"So the question is whether or not they notice their own shift. Maybe not;" Exactly what I was thinking at that point. Self-deception can be fairly automatic when we have something to lose. Common in this sort of discussion is a contra-contra position. Surely I don't want to be one of those people who is unsupportive of women in a difficult place? No, no, I want to be as far from that as possible! But this rides on a parallel track to Surely I don't want to be one of those people who doesn't give someone a chance to defend themselves. No, no, I want to be as far away from that as possible! Both disks exist and can be put on the spindle to play instantly, automatically. Once installed, it has additional emotional pull.

I read some liberal woman recently who said quite bluntly, "Sorry Tara, I believe you but we have to defeat Trump." The recent essay that I think prompted the Reason essay, of a woman striving mightily to show that "believe all women" was not something the left had actually ever said, but merely an exaggeration by the right, which should not be answered. In both cases, there is some approach to seeing the contradiction, but ultimately an even deeper rejection of it.

I don't know how much control we have over this. When I read Greg Cochrane over at West Hunter he is quick to call others liars. I contend that this is not entirely how human beings actually operate. He is technically correct, and I think we should press people for consistency. But few have much objectivity.

Except me, of course.

Texan99 said...

It's just plain old hypocrisy (x for me, not for thee) when it isn't conscious dishonesty in service of a higher good.

MikeD said...

Hypocrisy is nothing more than rationalized lying. You say you believe that all X are bad, but when someone you support does the thing that makes them part of X, you rationalize that either it doesn't (when it manifestly does) or that it does but he's not really part of X. No, it just means that you lied when you said all X are bad.

E Hines said...

Humanity are not our opponents, nor are they liars. Most of the Left or of Progressive-Democrats are not our opponents, nor are they liars. This despite the simple fact that deception is lying, whether it's deception of the self or of the others. It's murky here, though: a mistake is not a lie, no matter for how long the mistake has been accepted as fact or the parallel difficulty of correcting a long-standing mistake. Generosity is warranted here; although, to call simple recognition of the error and the difficulty of correcting certain kinds generosity might be overstating the matter.

Those who hold themselves out as smarter than us, more nuanced than us, more moral than us--these are not our opponents, either; they are our enemies.

Additionally, since we know a thing, those smarter of course know the same thing, and they are overtly lying when they deny either the knowledge of the thing or the thing itself. These are our enemy.

A guild that insists on being the gateway, the filter, of what we will be informed about the doings around us--as no lesser lights than Christiane Amanpour and Howard Kurtz have insisted they are and that no one in that guild has disputed--have the dishonesty of their arrogance and the separate dishonesty of their censorship. These, too, are our enemy.

Our enemy wants no generosity from us, nor mercy, not when it's so straightforward to stop being our enemy.

Eric Hines