“So you want to kill babies?”
My first semester back to college after a two year hiatus was one of the most memorable for me. I was a newly minted computing major and I was dipping my toes in with a handful of softball classes to test my schedule against the course-load. Among these was a variation on the standard Freshman speech class, ‘Argumentation and Debate’. In spite of my discomfort in public-speaking, the class became a favorite of mine. To this day, it still stands out among all of the classes I’ve taken in four years of higher education.
The crux of ‘Argumentation and Debate’, the vital essence, was exactly what was on the tin. We held a series of debates and mock-trials, interspersed with lectures on logic and theory. The instructor gave us exercises on learning fallacies, our ability to spot them was tested on both the midterm and the final. I felt like I was being armed with the spin-master’s lexicon, ready to latch onto any argument that fell into fallacious territory and rip it to shreds. However, when it came time to actually put this into practice, I realized that I knew very little. It’s only in sober reflection, years later, that I’m able to piece together what I really took away from that classroom.
Our second debate was a team debate. My partner was shy and timid. While I’ve never been far from it myself, I’ve always been able to feign confidence in the moments where I’ve absolutely needed it. I offered, to their relief, to lead the debate to the extent the grading rubric would allow. We selected the topic of “Physician Assisted Suicide” from a pool. We wouldn’t find out until the day of the debate which side we would be arguing for, so we had to research the issue from both angles.
We figured out terms of our own and did our best to identify terms the opposition would potentially request. We looked at the argument from every angle that made sense to us, and by the end, we really had something solid. On the day, I had my fingers crossed to argue for assisted suicide. It was the side of the argument my personal convictions fell on and I believe that led to me making that portion of our case a little bit stronger.
I opened the procession with a rousing speech about agency, I clearly defined our terms. We were discussing the legalization of physician assisted suicide in the case of terminally or chronically ill adults, both willing and able to give clear and enthusiastic consent. I really felt we had it in the bag. The confidence I was feigning became real confidence when the first rebuttal included a general agreement to terms and a litany of fairly weak counterpoints. Then we hit the cross-examination.
I was batting away questions about the sanctity of life and Hippocratic Oath, when I was blindsided. A member of the opposition asked me “So you want to kill babies?”. The best answer I could think of in the moment was “No”. Our time resolved and the second round started.
They had found a weak point and hammered it home. I had prepared most of the material and my partner was uncomfortable doing much beyond reading, so they read the material I wrote for them. None of that material contained an appropriate rebuttal to “So you want to kill babies?”. This deepened the divide. When it came time to close, I could do little more than restate the terms and do my best to explain that no part of my plan included the killing of babies.
The students not participating in the debate were the judges. When the verdict came through, our proposition lost. We lost the debate. We didn’t lose to a reasoned response or carefully constructed counterpoints that contradicted our own. We lost to an inflammatory statement that fell well outside of the rules of engagement. Our instructor didn’t stand up to explain to the crowd that they’d been hoodwinked. They didn’t overrule the decision of the judges on the grounds that it was based solely on an illogical line of discourse.
Our instructor let this stand. There were several other incidents that were very similar and he let those stand as well. When my team for the mock trial bent the rules to the point of being rebuked by the opposition, only to bend them a bit further, our instructor didn’t intervene. When our instructor taught us theory, they were teaching us how people should argue. But when we had our debates, our instructor was teaching us how people actually argue.
There are many rules for how argument and debate should work. Absolutely none of them matter if you can get away with breaking them. Con artists know this, and they use that fact to argue against reason. Logic and reason cannot win against an opponent that refuses to acknowledge them. You can’t get out into a crowd in the middle of a debate and explain to them that your opponent is using a straw-man argument which is an logical fallacy. You can’t go into the home of every American that is told that weed will lead to looting in the streets that slippery slope arguments don’t work and that extrapolation is an unscientific exercise.
I wish I was ending this with a solution. I wish I could say that educating everyone to the point where they have the tools to cut through nonsense would lead to a utopian society where no one lied and everyone had Socratic conversations with everyone they met. Unfortunately, even the very educated fall into the trap of believing nonsense that jives with the way they see the world. If there is any potential answer in any of this, maybe it’s that we just don’t trust the shit anyone says. I don’t mean shouting “Liar!” at everyone that tosses an opinion your way, but maybe we’d be better off if we did our best to source our own opinions inthings like our own sense of morality, our experience with the world, and the experiences of the people we love. Or maybe this is just another line of bullshit. Your call.
