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“That’s Unhelpful, Harmful and Offensive!” Epistemic and Ethical Concerns with Meta-argument Allegations

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Abstract

“Meta-argument allegations” consist of protestations that an interlocutor’s speech is wrongfully offensive or will trigger undesirable social consequences. Such protestations are meta-argument in the sense that they do not interrogate the soundness of an opponent’s argumentation, but instead focus on external features of that argument. They are allegations because they imply moral wrongdoing. There is a legitimate place for meta-argument allegations, and the moral and epistemic goods that can come from them will be front of mind for those levelling such allegations. But I argue there is a dark side to such allegations, and their epistemic and moral costs must be seriously weighed. Meta-argument allegations have a concerning capacity to derail discussions about important topics, stymieing argumentational interactions and the goods they provide. Such allegations can license efforts to silence, punish and deter—even as they provoke the original speaker to retaliate in kind. Used liberally, such allegations can escalate conflicts, block open-mindedness, and discourage constructive dialogues. In response, I defend “argumentational tolerance”—a principled wariness in employing meta-argument allegations—as a virtue of ethical argument.

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Notes

  1. ‘Meta-arguments’ refer broadly to all arguments about arguments, including the exploration of argumentation methods and standards, such as by argumentation theory (see Finocchiaro 2013, Ch. 3). However, for our purposes here, I use the adjective ‘meta-argument’ to specify a special type of challenge to arguments—namely, one that eschews interrogation of ‘internal’ argumentation qualities like soundness and validity, and instead directs attention to other properties of the target argument, such as its effects in a given context.

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Acknowledgements

This paper was presented at the 2017 Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics Annual Conference and in the 2018 University of Queensland School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry Research Seminar Series. I am grateful to discussants at both events, and also to Paul Formosa and two anonymous reviewers for Argumentation for their insightful comments on a previous draft.

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    Hugh Breakey

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Breakey, H. “That’s Unhelpful, Harmful and Offensive!” Epistemic and Ethical Concerns with Meta-argument Allegations. Argumentation 35, 389–408 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-020-09538-8

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