[MD] Straw Men and the Primacy of Trust

[Matt Kundert]

Ian said:
...the weasley rhetorical trick of the straw-man.

Matt:
>From the view point of observing others, commending virtues seems 
like the thing to do.  "Be honest, temperate, courageous, sincere, 
compassionate, prudent, fair, reasonable," we say to our children.  
We _want_ virtuous behavior: but is commending it the best way of 
getting it from _yourself_?

Plato and Aristotle never understood the consequences of taking 
seriously Socrates, when he said that a person never _knowingly_ 
does evil.  From the first-person point of view, _because_ we want to 
do good, we never in the moment of action perceive our actions as 
doing ill, as ignoble or not virtuous.  Even if we are self-consciously 
acting in a manner that we ourselves would normally judge ignoble, 
that fact merely punches up the fact that we feel our current action 
falls outside this normality, that this abnormal situation calls for 
something else, that we are implicitly justified in our ignoble action, 
which implicitly thereby confers virtuousness to it.

If we take Socrates seriously, and believe he's right, then the best 
way to think about _yourself_ and your actions, in order to be sure 
you're acting virtuously, is _not_ to make sure you're acting according 
to canons of virtuous action, but to _fear_ that you are acting 
according to canons of _ignoble action_.  Always fear falling into 
_vice_ from the first-person point of view, and you'll more likely act 
virtuously (if not ipso facto).

As far as intellectual behavior, one of the most important vices to 
avoid is _unfair characterization_.  If you fear more than anything 
else the possibility that the view you think wrong is _a straw man_, 
and not a view anyone holds, you will spend more time making 
_sure_ that your characterization of what is wrong is given enough 
attention that an actual person finds it plausible.

Only the ignoble, who we should spend no time upon at all (except to 
call them out as ignoble and not worth our intellectual time: 
_political_ time is something else), would knowingly deploy a straw 
man.  It _is_ a weaselly rhetorical trick.  What is difficult about 
conversation on the MD is that _only sometimes_ do people 
knowingly deploy straw men (and those times, I think, are few and 
far between, and almost all of those occasions are of parody and 
satirization or signs of having given up on real conversation).  Almost 
everybody, nearly all the time, is sincere in believing that they are 
_not_ deploying a straw man.  It is that sincerity on your 
interlocutor's part that makes conversation difficult when _you_ 
happen to think it _is_ a straw man, whatever the other person's 
sincerity.

Straw men have nothing to do with sincerity.  The trouble is that 
accusing others of _deploying one as a trick_ implies that they are 
knowingly being malicious, are being insincere.  (Ian wasn't doing 
this because he wasn't explicitly accusing anybody of anything; I'm 
merely taking advantage of the form in which Ian brought up straw 
men.)  But none of us do that.  Having an "honest debate" does not 
mean saying what you sincerely think and feel at every stage of the 
discussion: it means trying as hard as possible to get inside the 
other person's point of view; it means trying as hard as _you_ can 
to avoid a straw man.  You can't try for the other person, but you 
_can_ take care of yourself.

Having an honest debate does not even mean coming to an 
agreement on what's being disagreed about.  It only means that 
you are trying to avoid mischaracterization of your opponent.  You 
have to _trust_ that your discussion partner is also doing that.  
The feeling of dishonesty that so many feel about others here is a 
function of mistrust.  Trust is not a virtue.  You should not do it 
indiscriminately.  Trust is a social attitude, the primary attitude that 
holds together social relationships.  Inquiry is _fundamentally_ held 
together by social relationships.  To not take your relationship with 
your interlocutors seriously is one way to breed mistrust.  This is 
why I think Arlo is right that the issue between Steve and Dave is 
between Steve and Dave, and that because we can itemize every 
relationship every person has from there.  Just as in the real world, 
a person's other relationships can impinge on your relationship with 
that person, but it is always first between one and another.  I also 
think Arlo is right to think against Ian that love isn't the right thing to 
talk about.  Love is great to plug into our utopic formulas, but I think 
it misperceives the situation a bit, which can occasionally have great 
practical consequences, to think that "trust" and "love" can be 
assimilated or mutually implicating.  (We call lovers who see their 
beloved trusting some other "jealous.")

If you want an honest debate, you have to trust the other person.  
At the same time, however, you have to appear trustworthy.  Are 
you doing enough to be trustworthy?

Matt