Tu quoque

The instructor’s credit card

In a personal finance class, the instructor shows how a credit card balance at 25% interest grows if you only make the minimum payment. Later a student finds out that the instructor carries a balance on his own card. “So that whole lesson was nonsense.”

The lesson was arithmetic, and anyone can check it. The instructor’s own balance shows only that he doesn’t follow his advice; the interest compounds the same way on his card as on anyone else’s. If anything, his situation is an example of the problem he described.

Waving off a critique with the critic’s record

Editor: Three of the figures in your report have no source. Readers will ask where they came from.

Writer: Your article last month had an unsourced number in the second paragraph, so I don’t think you’re in a position to lecture me.

Whether this report’s figures need sources depends on this report. The editor’s slip last month may be true, and worth raising another time, but it leaves all three figures just as unsourced. This is the form in which a criticism, rather than a factual claim, is waved away. The writer isn’t defending leaving out sources as acceptable (that would be two wrongs); he’s declining to hear the criticism at all.

Something you did years ago

Dana argues that board games are better played by the rules in the box, without house rules. Her brother laughs: “You invented about a dozen house rules for Monopoly when we were kids. You can’t be serious.”

This one can feel like a fair catch, but it isn’t even a good charge of inconsistency. People change their minds, and something Dana did as a child tells you little about what she thinks now, let alone about whether she’s right. Scott Aikin points out that a charge of hypocrisy needs the conduct to be the person’s own mature behavior, and close enough in time to what they’re saying now.

Trudy Govier contrasts the fallacious version with a more careful argument that people usually mean when they point out hypocrisy:

The premises are the same. The difference is the conclusion: the legitimate version says something about the advocate, and leaves P to be judged on other grounds. Govier calls the left-hand argument a blatant fallacy of relevance, and doubts that real people often make it in so bare a form; she suggests many apparent tu quoque arguments are better read as the right-hand one.

• Pointing at the critic’s conduct: “you do it too” or “you don’t practice what you preach.” The standard case, and the one covered by the examples.
• Pointing at the authority behind the claim: the charge of hypocrisy is aimed not at the person you’re talking to but at the expert they’re relying on. Aikin notes that strictly this is a “he too” rather than a “you too”, but the move is the same. It matters only as far as the claim rests on that authority’s word (see Appeal to authority).
• Retort to a personal attack: Erik Krabbe and Douglas Walton describe a narrower use of the name, for replying to one ad hominem with another (“What about you? You are just as bad yourself!”). They note that this can sometimes be an effective and appropriate reply, but that it is often a sign the discussion has turned into a quarrel.
• Whataboutism: answering a criticism with “what about...?” and a counter-accusation. Alan Dykstra writes that the word is used to name tu quoque, but the dictionary sense he quotes is wider: a counter-accusation, or simply “raising a different issue.” So it isn’t a straight synonym. When the counter-accusation is about the critic’s own conduct, it’s a tu quoque; when it’s used to excuse what was criticized, it’s two wrongs; when it points at some unrelated wrong, it’s a Red herring. The term is a journalistic one rather than a term from logic. Dykstra, summarizing the linguist Ben Zimmer’s research, traces “whataboutery” to letters and commentary about the Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970s, and its later spread to descriptions of Cold War and post-Soviet propaganda.

Its place in the family. Tu quoque is traditionally counted as a kind of ad hominem. Govier calls it “traditionally... a kind of fallacious ad hominem,” Hans Hansen’s encyclopedia entry lists it with the abusive and circumstantial types as a modern descendant of the term, and Walton treats it as a subtype. Aikin calls that classification standard, though Walton has also challenged it. Textbooks differ on the details: Krabbe and Walton report that some use “tu quoque” as another name for the whole circumstantial type, and others for one subtype of it.

Pointing out that someone doesn’t follow their own advice isn’t a fallacy. Govier notes that it’s simply a true comment about them. What matters is the conclusion drawn from it.

• The conclusion is about the person, not the claim. Inconsistency is fair evidence that someone is insincere, unserious or weak-willed. If you’re relying on their word, because you can’t check the claim yourself, their sincerity is directly relevant. Aikin argues that sincerity is a condition for being a trustworthy authority.
• The circumstances really are the same. Aikin’s example is a parent with a later bedtime than their young child. That isn’t a double standard, because adults don’t need as much sleep.
• It’s a habit, not a lapse. A committed vegetarian who once gave in at a barbecue has been weak, not hypocritical, and her one plate of ribs says nothing about her sincerity.
• It’s current. Conduct from long ago, or from childhood, shows a change of mind more often than hypocrisy.
• The point is whether a proposal is workable. If someone with every means and motive to follow their own plan still doesn’t, that can be evidence the plan is impractical. It’s still not evidence that the reasons for it are false. Aikin also notes that it can cut the other way: failing to follow good advice can show how hard the problem is.

Even a fair charge has a limit. Aikin points out that if the person gave an argument, their hypocrisy doesn’t answer it; at most it’s a reason to look at the argument more carefully.

The test: is the inconsistency being used to decide how far to trust this person’s word, or to conclude that what they said is false?

The advisor’s own savings

A financial advisor urges a client to move her retirement savings into a particular fund, saying it’s the best option for someone in her position. The client learns that the advisor, who is the same age and saving for the same retirement, moved all of his own money out of that fund last month. “I’m not moving anything until I’ve had an independent opinion.”

The client points to the advisor’s inconsistency, but she doesn’t conclude that the fund is bad. She concludes that she can’t rely on his recommendation, and she was relying on it. His conduct is recent, deliberate and in the same circumstances as hers, which is strong evidence that he doesn’t believe what he told her. This meets the conclusion is about the person condition, and the question of the fund itself is left open for someone else to judge.

The one-hour email rule

A manager announces that everyone must answer every email within an hour. Over the next month she, with the lightest meeting schedule on the team, routinely takes a day to reply. A team member says: “If it doesn’t work with your schedule, I doubt it’ll work with ours. Can we revisit it?”

This uses the manager’s failure to follow her own rule, but not to show that fast replies are worthless. It’s evidence that this particular rule isn’t practical: she has more time and more reason to keep it than anyone, and still can’t. This is the whether a proposal is workable condition.

Being told what to do by someone who doesn’t do it provokes a strong reaction. Govier describes a “gut reaction” to such cases, “amounting sometimes almost to rage,” which she says even philosophers trained in the traditional fallacies admit to feeling. That reaction is tracking something real: there often is a legitimate point to be made about the advocate. The error is letting that point slide from “I shouldn’t take this from you” to “this is wrong.”

It’s also an effective move. Aikin notes that it shifts the discussion from the issue to the other person’s character, where the accuser can score points and the accused has to defend themselves. He warns that used this way it makes people pay a social price for holding views at all. Krabbe and Walton describe the same slide as a shift from a discussion aimed at settling a disagreement to a personal quarrel.

• Separate the two questions. Is the claim true? Does this person follow it? Answer them one at a time. Admitting the second (“you’re right, I don’t”) often makes it easier to talk about the first.
• Read the charge charitably. Ask whether the other person means “your claim is false” or “I don’t trust your advice on this.” Govier suggests the second is usually what’s meant, the Principle of charity points the same way, and that version deserves an answer.
• If you were relying on their word, get another source. If they gave reasons, evaluate the reasons.
• Don’t treat the label as a rebuttal. Dykstra, drawing on other commentators, warns that dismissing a point “because it is whataboutism” risks becoming a thought-terminating cliché. Sometimes the counter-accusation is true and worth its own discussion, just not in place of this one.