RAIL

The folks over at the blog Less Wrong use the term ‘dark arts’ to refer to the usage of knowledge about heuristics and biases, fallacies, and human rationality generally in a manipulative, destructive or otherwise sinister way.  A recent post there focuses on this manner of using presuppositions:

An excellent way of doing this is to embed your desired conclusion as a presupposition to an enticing argument.  If you are debating abortion, and you wish people to believe that human and non-human life are qualitatively different, begin by saying, “We all agree that killing humans is immoral.  So when does human life begin?”  People will be so eager to jump into the debate about whether a life becomes “human” at conception, the second trimester, or at birth (I myself favor “on moving out of the house”), they won’t notice that they agreed to the embedded presupposition that the problem should be phrased as a binary category membership problem, rather than as one of tradeoffs or utility calculations.

This sort of thing is nothing new to argumentation theorists, of course, but the explicit labeling of such maneuvers as “dark arts” may well be.  Argumentation theorists, rhetoricians, and informal logicians often think in terms of fallacies, mistakes or blunders instead, usually meaning to impute no moral status to such things.  In the main I think this is wise, as highly developed skill at arguing and avoiding fallacies and other such mistakes is rare. That being the case it would be deeply problematic to assume nefarious motives lying behind every fallacy.

Still, it seems increasingly clear that such manipulative–or at least morally questionable– deployments of fallacy, including loading questions with damaging presuppositions are on the rise in public discourse.  The recent furor over this BBC interview with disabled student activist Jody McIntyre is a case in point:

(For the official BBC response to the overwhelmingly negative public response to the interview click here. )

By now we are all somewhat familiar with the kind of tactic this interviewer uses.  After all, this sort of thing is the bread and butter of partisan talk shows in the United States.  In fact, one could be forgiven for being troubled by the fact that we are so used to it; that so much of our public discourse is now like this that we’ve almost come to expect it.  One can of course say that such tactics have been with us since the earliest days of journalism and pamphleteering and this is of course correct.  That said it strikes me the media-saturation in which most of us live now makes these tactics far more problematic, however familiar they may be. A little occasional radiation can be tolerated, but constant bombardment with it can be lethal.  It’s that kind of thing.

Regardless of the historical precedents at issue or of the familiarity we have with such tactics, however, it seems to me that argumentation theorists are well positioned to call out those who abuse the tactics and strategies of argumentation with malice aforethought (as it were).  I’m thinking less here of a widespread program of social activism to curtail “dark arts” type abuses in journalism and public discourse (though that would be nice) and more of a classroom-based approach.

There are two sides to this.  Skill at rhetoric and argumentation is deeply powerful.  Certainly we want to protect our students, as much as we can, from being taken in by the kind of deception and cognitive sleight-of-hand that characterizes so much of our public discourse.  But in empowering them with the necessities of “cognitive self-defense” we also give them the means to become practitioners of the “dark arts” themselves.  If we don’t want this to come of our teaching, then it seems to me that incorporating some kind of ethics of argumentation into our classroom presentations is an unavoidable necessity.

But of course to do so requires that we have, at least to some degree, a coherent position on the ethics of argumentation ourselves.   To teach rhetorical and argumentation skills without the inclusion of at least some ethical guidance for their use seems to me to be on something like a moral par with teaching people how to use firearms without ethical or legal guidance.

I’m sure many of us do incorporate some form of ethical guidance in our classrooms, but I wonder how well worked out this guidance is.  Need we go beyond remarks like “obviously this kind of thing is immoral?” or should we have more developed lessons on the subject? Is it acceptable for us to assume that whatever ethical foundation our students show up with is sufficient to guide them in their usage of rhetorical or argumentation skills?

The “dark arts”, certainly, are here to stay.  What if anything should we do about it?