How to Deal with Bad Faith Debaters
The difference between extreme ideas and extremists
By MARTIN REZNY
Hello Juanitta, your response indicates that I haven’t explained myself properly. When I say that extremists are the problem, the thing that drives the society apart and any conversation off the cliff, I’m speaking about the people, not any extreme ideas. Like I said, no content is toxic by itself, certainly not when presented by good faith debaters, so banning content is not going to help.
It may seem like banning extremists is going to effectively censor the extreme ideas that they bring to the debate, but the reality of how that works is much less straightforward. As a general rule of thumb, any violent extremists can be considered to be bad faith debaters, and bad faith debaters don’t bring forth ideas so that they can be debated. They do anything but that, actually.
Here are some of the types of bad faith debaters and their methods and goals:
a) BULLY
This is the simplest kind of bad faith “debater” (more like shouter) who is the least skilled at hiding what they’re really after and the least nuanced in trying to get it. A bully will use violence, threats of violence, harassment, or blatant lying in order to torment and silence their opposition. This is a fairly ancient tactic, used by religious fanatics and other tribalists since forever, and internet hasn’t changed it much, not in essence. Today, it is employed most notably by white supremacists, Muslim extremists, or even the worst of ANTIFA (ironically). This is the intolerance that democracies can’t afford to tolerate.
b) MORALIZER
A highly specialized form of bad faith debater, equally common among religious and secular activists and politicians across the political spectrum. It’s the kind of person who desires to control what other people think or do. Most often, these speakers try to train people to believe that good manners (however they’re defined by them) are what makes a good person. In reality, good people are those who don’t intend to harm others, while taking away freedom from other people is harming them. It would be someone like Bill Cosby, who chastised other comedians for bad words, while being a rapist.
c) SOPHIST
As the root of the name implies, this is a vastly more sophisticated type of bad faith debater. Often, this would be specifically a trained competitive debater, like Ted Cruz. This type of speaker will use absolutely any argument that can help them to make their case in the moment, contradicting themselves frequently over time. They’re smart enough to use truth when it suits them, but as they have no genuine principles (except for self-empowerment), lying is like breathing to them. Sophists have their place in polite society, as lawyers. In politics, however, they can be an extremely destructive force.
d) AUTHORITARIAN
The key difference between a bully, moralizer, or sophist and an authoritarian is that the authoritarian bad faith debater has already managed to establish themselves in a position of power. They may still use bullying, moralizing, or sophistry in order to keep their power, but this position also allows them to default to some form of disingenuous conservatism or traditionalism. They will always argue that the way things are is the best way and that everything must stay the same, because it benefits them. Anyone who disagrees will be painted as an anarchist, traitor, idiot, sucker, and so on.
These bad faith debaters are generally the most dangerous ones, as they will also use their wealth and power to bribe potential opposition and manipulate news and laws to carry their message and solidify their advantage. Given that bad faith debaters are in general that way because they lack self-awareness or any kind of self-restraint, this can only become worse and worse over time, until they’re rejected by majority consensus (in a meaningful, practical way), or until they’re taken down violently by bullies, who then merely replace them. The content of the ideology espoused by either side doesn’t matter.
What Does It Mean to Be a Good Faith Debater?
Think about the various types of bad faith debaters and what they have in common, and then flip it. Everything bad faith debaters do caters to their ego or strengthens their position. Bad faith debaters are not honestly interested in ideas, they’re after results. Therefore, good faith debaters are, put simply, people who are willing to admit that arguments that don’t benefit them personally may be right. It’s people who’s minds are open to be changed.
When people enter a discussion with this mindset, they may still end up with erroneous or harmful ideas in the end, but even then, they won’t attempt to derail the discussion systematically. They will allow other people to disagree with them, without necessarily considering them to be bad people because of it. They’ll address bad arguments or hateful speech wherever they see it, but they will argue for the shutting up of anybody only to prevent mayhem.
After all, for good faith debaters, everything is up for debate, including the limits of free speech. But it is up for debate so that whatever the society decides to do is well reasoned and justified, so that people achieve a general informed consensus about it. Maybe it’s objectively not okay to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, or to promote Nazism, but it’s not that way automatically, without reasoning. People need to understand the rules.
In terms of debate moderation, what should be forbidden or penalized to minimize the effectiveness of bad faith debaters are calls to violence, personal attacks, harassment, and deception. Of these, only deception is difficult to identify, especially if it’s subtle (because some sophists are very skilled) or officially promoted (because governments and regulatory institutions are filled with moralizers and authoritarians). But at least bullies can be stopped.
The Place of Extreme Ideas in the Public Discourse
Especially the example of Bill Cosby is interesting in this regard, since in all of comedy, there’s arguably no more extreme type of joke than a rape joke. This has already been explored very well by Jim Jefferies in one of his routines. To sum up his argument, the person who makes jokes about the subject of rape with no intention to harm anyone is an infinitely better person than one who would never joke about rape, but would actually do it, many times.
A good faith debater, like most comedians are, may choose to explore a taboo subject, like rape, cannibalism, incest, hard drug use, and so on. More often than not, these explorations are not only not detrimental to public discourse, but revelatory and cathartic, vastly improving the quality of the discourse. It’s the intention of the speaker that matters the most. When a good faith debater lacks sufficient skill, they can do that poorly, but that won’t destroy society.
If any people are psychologically harmed by speech coming from a good faith debater, a person who doesn’t mean them any harm, then, in the spirit of the ancient philosophical tradition, the solution is to raise young people to be less intellectually fragile. This is the kernel of truth that’s hidden in the largely disingenuous “free speech” argument from the American right wing sophists. It’s not good for anyone to not be able to handle people saying mean things.
Partially, it’s the problem with seeing bad words as a sign of bad character, partially it’s the inability to understand that context of usage is what makes words bad, but most importantly, it’s the problem that every debate worth having must be over something controversial. Questioning cannot be done without breaching boundaries of what’s considered true, nice, or polite. Debating is still a fight, only by nonviolent means. Violence is the alternative.
When Your Heart Leads You Astray
The general argument, as far as it can be called that, coming from the people who want other people to stop using hurtful words, is that when one says something that may be hurtful to other people, they’re being an asshole, and why be an asshole. The problem with this position is that while it sounds reasonable at face value, it’s only a sentiment, not an argument. Technically, it’s an appeal to emotion, which is considered to be a logical fallacy.
Emotional appeals tend to be more obviously fallacious when the emotions that are appealed to are fear or hate, and rightly so. However, appeals to different, positive emotions like hope or love are still fallacies. All appeals to all emotions are fallacies because how something feels is in no necessary relationship to factual accuracy or constructive outcome. One’s hopes or empathy can be misguided as well as harmful in the overall effect.
The main sign that this position is not a fully thought-out argument is that in the case of hurtful words and being an asshole, the promoters of word policing and euphemistic language tend to ignore that their arguments are considered hurtful by many people, which makes the word-policers look like assholes. No form of speech will be felt the same by all people. Conversely, every form of speech is offensive to someone. It’s not obvious what to police.
When I tried to make this argument to some of these people, undoubtedly good faith debaters in that case, I was half-jokingly accused of being a Vulcan, with the implication that the lesson that Vulcans keep learning on Star Trek over and over again is that logic can’t solve everything. While that’s true, what logical reasoning cannot touch is what lies outside of our sphere of knowledge. Emotions can be understood, you can reason about them.
If you decide, logically, that people’s feelings (of offense) should be your priority in forming policies, or in other words in making laws, you have to define which feelings of whom matter how much based on what principles. If you want to forbid the use of racial slurs and other invectives, you have to define which groups can be offended, and which cannot. If you want to get nuanced, you must define which contextual uses are fine, and which aren’t.
This then runs, logically speaking, into many potential practical problems that will result in you failing to make people feel better and to minimize actual harm in the real world. If you succeed at shutting up some people who are inclined to be impolite, it won’t change their mind. It will harden their resolve and ramp up their anger. If you shut down debates about controversial topics, it will move them deeper underground, making the issues harder to address.
To give you some examples, if you avoid sexual education, you will get more underage pregnancies and more STDs. If you avoid debating drug abuse, you will get more overdoses and drug-related crime. If you prevent people from questioning the government, you will get more corruption and real criminal conspiracies among the elite. Debating these issues is bound to hurt many people’s feelings. Not debating these issues will cost lives. Don’t you care?
Regarding the issues central to people in the political correctness camp, which include race, gender, sexual orientation, and body image, it’s not wrong to say that we shouldn’t call people names to their faces. It’s the problem of nuance. You could say that many black people are offended by blackface, but what about when Robert Downey Jr. played a blackface-sporting character in Tropic Thunder to make fun of actors wearing blackface? Intention matters.
When somebody like Ricky Gervais makes fun of fat people, when George Carlin swears, or when Jim Jefferies makes rape jokes, it matters why, and exactly how, they’re doing it. In language itself, you have many rules of good writing that can be demonstrated by being broken, like when you say for example “Avoid clichés like the plague.” This is what some of the most brilliant wordsmiths do to improve language and expand our thinking.
However well-meant a word or thought-censoring initiative may be at its core, it goes fundamentally against what society needs more of — free, open debate. Which is why such initiatives often get hijacked by moralizers or used as rallying cries by bullies or sophists to polarize the public and agitate its more extreme elements. Which makes such initiatives fail spectacularly at their primary goal, making people feel better, or better able to handle their feelings.
This is why in the end, while recognizing the value and power of emotions, it is more logical to allow anyone to say anything, as long as they do so in good faith. That doesn’t necessarily mean guaranteeing them a platform, that definitely doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be criticized for being offensive or wrong, but it does mean for meaning well to be judged to be more important than being polite. If we don’t learn that, bad faith debaters will always win.
