- The original use of motte-and-bailey was in critique of postmodernism
- Postmodernists claim that our perception of reality is influenced by the categories and prejudices of our society
- They then follow this up by claiming that beliefs unsupported by scientific evidence should be given just as much credence as beliefs supported by scientific evidence
- We can compare this pair of statements to a motte-and-bailey castle
- Field of desirable and productive land - bailey
- Tower in the middle - motte
- People normally inhabit the bailey
- When threatened, they retreat to the motte
- Motte-and-bailey is a perfect mirror-image of the weak man fallacy
- Weak-man is taking a weak or extreme non-representative position and pretending it’s representative for the purpose of arguing against
- Motte-and-bailey is taking a strong, but not-representative position and pretending that it’s representative for the purpose of arguing for
- Both motte-and-bailey and weak-man result from people’s tendencies to debate vague clouds of beliefs rather than specific propositions
- To get around both fallacies, taboo vague words and replace symbols with substance
- Have an actual thing you’re trying to debate
- Hypocrisy is when the stated justification for an action is belief X but the actual justification is belief Y
- What are some possible responses to suspected hypocrisy
- Do nothing
- Ask the person privately about your suspicions while publicly supporting their efforts
- Confront the person privately and act mildly offended
- Confront the person publicly and act deeply offended
- Ask a mutual friend to ask the other person about their suspected hypocrisy
- If you like the person who’s behaving hypocritically, and want them to be less of a hypocrite, what’s the best approach?
- The safest approach is to do nothing
- We don’t know whether people are more likely to update their actions to match their beliefs or update their beliefs to match their actions
- The problem with Effective Altruism is that it exposes people’s hypocrisy around charity - don’t know if the effect would be to make them give less or make them give more
- We should be careful about exposing hypocrisy until we better understand the effects of doing so
- Why do we place so much stock in self-consistency?
- Placing too much of an emphasis on self-consistency can cause us to shy away from important issues, because we feel that we would be hypocritical to do so
- Example: meat eater talking about animal rights
- We can either back down from high moral ideals or be more comfortable with hypocrisy
- Calling someone out for hypocrisy is too meta
- Completely ignores the truth value of their actual argument
- Hypocrisy is a claim that you can make regardless of the actual facts
- If someone is being hypocritical, then either what they’re saying is false, or what they’re doing is false, so just attack the falsehood
- Charges of hypocrisy discourage updating and nuance
- The best way to avoid hypocrisy is to say nothing substantive at all
- Knowing that they can be called out for hypocrisy prevents people from changing or updating their views
- Calling a group out for hypocrisy reduces the intellectual diversity of the group
- Every group has a range of opinions
- If two members of a group diverge sufficiently in their opinions, the entire group can be called out for hypocrisy
- Therefore, people will avoid associating with those who hold less defensible positions, to protect their group
- Ambitious goal-setting and self-improvement can look like behavioral hypocrisy
- Accusing people of hypocrisy encourages them to hold themselves to low, but achievable standards
- It’s hard to talk about the values you want your community to have without looking a little bit hypocritical