Chapter 6: Fair dealing

Sections:

• The Principle of Charity
• Failing to Engage: Ad hominem, strawmanning, and whataboutery
• Question-Begging Arguments
• The Burden of Proof and Arguments from Ignorance

This chapter is about various ways in which people can fail to deal fairly with other people’s arguments and ideas. For example, if you write a comment on a blog post and others completely misrepresent what you’ve said and slag off at you for things that you didn’t in fact say, they are not dealing with you fairly.

It’s annoying to be on the receiving end of unfair dealing. We will give you some tools for recognising and responding to it.

We also encourage you to deal fairly with other people’s arguments. The various kinds of unfair moves we will be discussing might sometimes “win” an argumentative discussion, if the person you are arguing with is not alert to them. But you should not be solely interested in winning – where “winning” means having the other person give up and either agree that you are right or just not bother to engage with you anymore. It’s much better to persuade people by clearly and straightforwardly presenting genuinely good reasons in support of your view than by brow-beating them or confusing them.

Unfair dealing attempts to shut down other people’s attempts to say what they think and have their arguments heard. There are two different kinds of reasons why this is bad. The most obvious one is that it’s bad for the people whose arguments you are suppressing or dismissing – put yourself in their shoes, and you will see how frustrating that would be, and how much it might make you feel as though you are not being treated as someone worth listening to. This is an ethical reason to be a fair dealer.

The other kind of reason has to do with what kind of approach to arguing is most likely to get you, and the people you are talking to, closer to the truth. If you are genuinely interested in finding out what there is good reason to believe, or deciding what really is the best thing to do in some situation, then you should encourage others to say what they think and why they think it, open-mindedly consider what they say, modify your own view if they have presented good reasons why you should, and clearly and calmly put forward your own arguments so that they can point out any problems with them. This is fair dealing.