Motte and Bailey, VI

Another example of where the fallacy is not always so fallacious?  Ad hominems.  Oh yes, I think so.

Let’s say you accuse your opponent for dogcatcher of throwing bottles at the neighborhood cats.  Certainly this is an ad hominem in the strict sense: he may be perfectly good at rounding up stray animals, honest in his bookkeeping, keep an impeccable pound, etc.  But one may rightly counter that the ad hominem reveals certain truths about the would-be dogcatcher that suggest that he is not the best man for the job: cruelty to cats suggests the possibility of cruelty to other animals, and one would not want a cruel dog-catcher.  The ad hominem is relevant.

The devil of political races, of course, is that people have sometimes very different standards as to what hominibus are actually disqualifying—and those standards may also change from time to time and culture to culture.  Reagan’s divorce was considered scandalous by some (though I can’t think of a person or pundit who actually considered it disqualifying); that was then.