Link to original article

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rhetorical Abusability is a Poor Counterargument, published by Cullen OKeefe on January 8, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post is a bit less polished than ideal, but I wanted to get it out of my drafts Introduction One sometimes sees the following type of objection to consequentialism or utilitarianism: P1. Consequentialist reasoning would justify X. P2. X is not justifiable. C. Therefore, consequentialism is wrong. Similar argument structures can also be applied to any number of ideologies/philosophies: P1. Libertarianism would justify X. P2. X is not justifiable. C. Therefore, Libertarianism is wrong. Call this general argument format the Justifiability Argument. Some recent criticisms of longtermism arguably follow this structure. We can also call the ideology in P1 the "target ideology" for generic purposes. However, note the potential ambiguity of "justify" as used in the Justifiability Argument. Depending on the sense in which it is used, P1 could mean either of the following: A. Consequentialism, properly applied, implies X is justifiable. B. A speaker can use consequentialist reasoning (e.g., consequentialist argumentation, consequentialist phraseology) to make a rhetorically convincing case for X. A. is a normal premise in a modus tollens. A lot has been said on when and whether moral arguments of this form are compelling, especially where P2 is supported by ethical intuitions alone. I will not add to that discussion here. B., however, is much more interesting. For the Justifiability Argument above to work under interpretation B., one needs an additional premises or argumentation. This post explores the Justifiability Argument under interpretation B, which I will call the Rhetorical Abusability Argument. To focus solely on that question, for the sake of argument we can assume that P2. is true, though in reality we may also disagree with it. Supplying the Missing Premises Rhetorical Abusability To make the Rhetorical Abusability Argument work, one could try to insert a premise like: P3. It should not be possible for a speaker to make a rhetorically convincing case fora false conclusion using the reasoning of the true moral theory. Call this the "Rhetorical Abusability Premise." I think most people who make the Justifiability Argument implicitly assume something like the Rhetorical Abusability Premise. Unfortunately, the Rhetorical Abusability Premise seems incredibly weak to me. For one thing, what is rhetorically convincing to people is a product of moral psychology, not of moral truth. It would be very odd if first-order moral truth depended on the contingencies of how convincing different rhetoric is to different audiences. Different people will find different things rhetorically convincing, and different speakers are differently skilled at rhetoric. It should not be surprising if there are many false (by supposition) moral conclusions that a skilled rhetorician could make some number of people believe. Laypeople's moral beliefs are not especially coherent, and for most of history (and possibly still now) people have believed morally unjustifiable things. So, the mere fact that someone can rhetorically abuse some theory to convince some listener of a false moral conclusion cannot be a good reason to reject that theory. There are other reasons to reject the Rhetorical Abusability Argument as formulated here. One advantage to the person using the Rhetorical Abusability Argument is that the Rhetorical Abusability Argument imposes no obligation to present the criticized moral theory correctly. What's important to the Rhetorical Abusability Argument is that the cited arguments or phraseology merely purport to apply the target ideology. This is beneficial to the person making the Justifiability Argument for a number of reasons. One is that it simply ...