Topics Logic

Question Someone deliberately advances a fallacious argument in an attempt to advance a cause she considers just. For example, she may treat contraries as if they are contradictories and thus commit a fallacy of false alternatives. Are there any living philosophers who defend the use of "noble fallacies" or "noble fallacious arguments" (and is there a better term for this kind of thing)? And are there any contemporary philosophers who criticize or condemn the practice, including when it is practiced by people who are on "their side" regarding social and political issues?

Accepted:
August 21, 2014

Comments

Fascinating inquiry!

I do not recall articles or books explicitly on when it is good to commit fallacies, but you might find of interest the literature on the ethics of lying. There is a great deal of philosophical work on when, if ever, it is permissible to lie, and this probably would include work on when it is permissible to deliberately engage in fallacious resigning. One primary candidate for justified deception involves paternalism in extreme cases, e.g. in a medical crisis when a parent has only five minutes to live and she asks you whether her children survived an accident, and you know that her five children were killed, is it permissible to lie by claiming, for example, you are not sure? Or, to make the case more in line with your question, would it be permissible for you to not disclose the truth about her children if it could only be done by you equivocating or begging the question or committing the fallacy of the undistributed middle? For terrific work on the ethics of lying with great attention to detailed cases and theories of meaning, see Lying and Deception by Thomas Carson.

I personally know of only one real world case in which one or more philosophers may have defended the use of fallacious reasoning. The details are a bit sketchy, but here is what I recall. In the 1980s I was at an American Philosophical Association meeting when Dan Brock then from Brown University along with some other panelists discussed the advisory role they had with the president of the USA and congress on medical decisions. The panelists spoke about the following dilemma they faced, perhaps more than once. The panelists all agreed that some policy X was optimal in terms of ethics, politics, the law etc but they believed that the persuasive*reasoning behind judging X to be optimal was highly complex and involved levels of abstract reasoning that would make the justification of X hopeless. However, the panel was aware of *or they created themselves a justification for X that was from a philosophical point of view very weak, and yet effective with the public. As I recall, the panel did not make explicit how they handled such cases this may be because the cases were recent and politically sensitive. But this is the best I can do in terms of relating a real world case of when philosophers have deliberated about the ethics of advancing arguments that are weak *possibly fallacious when they deem it the best or only option available to them.

For an interesting exchange by philosophers of when it is permissible to promote or not challenge beliefs or positions that the philosophers believe to be false, compare Iris Murdoch in her last book which more or less defends Platos notion of the golden lie with the harsh criticism of Simon Blackiburn.