Seven Sophisms People Use to Defend the Indefensible

A note on the casuistry of evil

If you’ve been around ideas for much time, and paid attention, you may have been struck that there are a finite number of argument types that repeat. Over and over. The subjects change, the times change. But the same argumentative strategies are reproduced.

These repeated patterns are what the ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians called “staseis” or “topoi”: argumentative topics. The rhetoricians’ extraordinary texts, sadly neglected in education today, produced systematic lists of them for people in public life, so they could recognize and use them.

We’ve all been reminded over the last weeks that human beings often do publicly indefensible things. Like invading other nations in “special military operations” which will surely kill myriads of civilians, even children, and displace many more.

The trick is that no one can say that this is what “we” are doing, even when it is exactly what we are undertaking. Hypocrisy, someone said, is the homage that vice pays to virtue. One can add: obfuscation and casuistry.

A further sad paradox which operates here is that the fact that most people assume the best of others. Some philosophers call this “the principle of charity”. Its efficacy means that in some ways, the dice are loaded in favor of people daring enough to scorn basic moral conventions and then lie or equivocate to cover their tracks.