A lot of times, precision doesn’t really matter.

When the Supreme Court announced their Hobby Lobby decision (granting employers who provide subsidized health insurance coverage to their employees the right to exclude certain forms of contraception from that coverage on religious grounds) it understandably angered a lot of people.

In the wake of the decision, many people on social media forums aired their frustration in ways that were, admittedly, imprecise. For example, a number of people suggested that the decision would allow employers to exclude all contraception from coverage. Of course, this is not true. Even more imprecisely, some posters commented that, after Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court clearly did not view women as “people”. This, clearly, is nowhere to be found in the text of the opinion.

Conservatives and contrarians of the world lost their shit in response to all this imprecision. “The Supreme Court only allowed corporations to opt out of certain forms of contraception, and no one uses IUD’s anyway!” and “Really, the Supreme Court declared that women aren’t people?!?! Read the opinion before you post on Facebook!” are approximations of the types of comments that littered my Facebook newsfeed in response to frustrated statuses related to the decision.

Note that responses of this type totally obfuscate the discussion of the real issues. These responses allow contrarians to maintain a “smarter than thou” persona without ever having to really defend anything. The fact that not all contraceptives are included in the decision ignores the fact that, for the first time, the Supreme Court allowed corporations to use religious grounds for rescinding benefits from exclusively female employees that would otherwise have been provided. This is something that many strongly disagree with, and even if details are incorrectly transcribed in the public iteration of that frustration and disagreement, that doesn’t excuse the other side from having to defend the actual decision that was made.

Moreover, the cavalier comment that “of course the Supreme Court still thinks women are people” ignores the thrust of the argument being made by opponents of Hobby Lobby—the Court’s assertion that the religious views of the owners of closely held corporations outweigh the rights to access certain forms of health care for their female employees feels dehumanizing. By chuckling about angry feminist liberals overclaiming the impact of Supreme Court decisions, contrarians are able to escape defending what is a frightening decision to many people, just because that fright was expressed imprecisely.

I don’t intend this general point about the relative unimportance of precision in argumentation to be of mere historical interest, referring only to the Hobby Lobby debate. I just think that debate is rich with particularly salient examples of the type of arguments I’m describing.

My own writing, on this very blog, has been subject to the same sort of obfuscatory criticism. My recent post about universities lowering burdens of proof in sexual assault related disciplinary hearings was, through the series of tubes that is the Internet, shown to someone who disagreed with it. (I’m happy about this, by the way. I don’t write so that you can all applaud and agree with me.) One argument I made in that post is that lowered burdens of proof are appropriate in college disciplinary hearings because the consequences of being found guilty in those hearings are significantly lower than the consequences of being found guilty in a court of law (namely fines and jail time).

My detractor’s response to this argument? Universities sometimes issue fines, too. The guy is right. I was imprecise. I should have said that only the state can issue fines backed by threat of violence or incarceration. But by pointing out my imprecision rather than engaging with the crux of the point, my responder has done something both craftily and argumentatively cowardly—he has avoided actually engaging or defending anything.

I guess my overall claim here is as follows. When you find yourself engaged in an argument about a political or social issue, and you find that the person with whom you’re arguing has been imprecise, you should use serious restraint before making use of that imprecision as the entirety of your response. In neurosurgery, I have no doubt precision is important. In socio-political discourse, by contrast, I think the devotion to precision does vastly more harm than good.