Serhij Kiš (University of Pardubice), "Should we use legitimate fallacies? A case study of whataboutism in the discourse on the Russian-Ukrainian war”
Argumentation and Advocacy, 2024
By Serhij Kiš
In recent years, the “whataboutism fallacy” has become an increasingly discussed topic in argumentation theory. What this fallacy does when used in a debate is undermine the case of its victim by charging her/him of hypocrisy. Of course, such a charge has very little bearing on the victim’s case – and this is what makes the charge fallacious. My eating meat has no bearing on the moral rightness of veganism.
Now, we can easily think of many counterexamples showing that “what about?” question is not always irrelevant. Think of the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine. Many prominent scholars, Noam Chomsky being one of them, are asking “Yes, Russia is unambiguously waging a criminal war of aggression. But what about the role of the United States and NATO in this aggression?” The aim (of at least some) of such questions is not to charge the United States of hypocrisy, but to consider hitherto ignored evidence of what keeps the Russian war going.
Importantly, it is by no means accidental that we reflexively seek whether and when the fallacy is legitimate. This style of thinking about fallacies is very much a norm in the literature: first you identify what makes an argumentative move fallacious, then you specify when you are, in fact, permitted to deploy the fallacy.
In the paper just published in Argumentation and Advocacy, I criticize this “classical” approach. I claim that the classical approach to fallacies ignores the question of whether we should deploy a fallacy that has been deemed legitimate. The goal of this paper is to show that such a question is very much worth asking.
In the paper, I focus on the comments of Noam Chomsky and show that some of his “what about?” questions regarding the role of the US in Russian war of aggression can be deemed prima facie legitimate. However, my argument is that even if these whataboutisms are permissible, we might still have reasons to refrain from using them.
Why? Whether legitimate or not, whataboutism arguments carry serious risks. Drawing on particular examples of how Chomsky’s commentary was received, I show that even the most legitimate of whataboutisms is at a grave risk of being misunderstood and/or misused. On a simple cost-benefit analysis, then, the harm of whataboutism (especially in high-stakes scenario such as Russian-Ukraine war) outweighs its benefits.
In conclusion, I claim that it does not automatically follow that one should deploy a fallacy if one is rationally permitted to. My recommendation is that writers in fallacy theory should start reflecting that.