Who does not know that feeling when a discussion becomes unfair, as if sabotaged? You make a good point, but suddenly the person you’re talking to says something odd, absurd or irrelevant. Say you advocate for salaries to keep up with inflation when someone replies that in the good old times, real men worked harder instead of complaining. You ignore or try to gloss over this weird statement, but soon the discussion changes, your concerns are undermined. You feel like something slipped through your fingers, while the other side smirks with pride.

Some such conversation tactics even have names: red herring, whataboutism, slippery slope, non sequitur, etc., and anyone can mistakenly employ them from time to time. But they are most often used deliberately because of just how effective they are when trying to confuse the other side, to undermine, redirect and downplay their worries. Yes, a person doing this will quickly become unbearable and likely lose friends; however, such strategies help one quickly rise to the top of the political ladder.

Should we simply learn how to live with logical fallacies ¹ or are there ways to heal our societies from the most virulent ones? Before we can attempt to answer that, let us look at some historical examples:

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Nowadays, it is common knowledge that women are humans too, but in many parts of the world, they were historically treated as if they belonged to other species. That is why, in a 1792 book, Mary Wollstonecraft argued for the rights of women to receive proper education, to be part of the political life and generally for moral equality between the sexes. Though the book was mostly well received, there were some especially sleazy counterarguments. In a satirical response, philosopher Thomas Taylor retorted that if women were to have equal rights to men, then so should cats, dogs, magpies and other animals. Not only this, but he ‘hoped’ others would venture to write ‘treaties on the rights of vegetables and minerals.’ To prove beyond any doubt Wollstonecraft’s hypocrisy, he also mentioned how she, ‘though a virgin, is the mother of this theory, often, as I am told, eats beef for mutton.’

Now, of course, we can very well see what happened there: the topic of the discussion was changed to something absurd. This is a clear example of narrative control; the joker who makes such a statement wins no matter what. Either you recognise that women and animals are not equal, to which they’ll claim you are a hypocrite or you mention how animals deserve moral consideration too, which they’ll laugh off as dumb and impracticable. So that, even though the basic principle of equality means equal consideration of interests and ‘equal consideration for different beings may lead to different treatment and different rights’ (Peter Singer), try even making such an argument after the discussion was changed from ‘let’s treat women nicer’ to …

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