How to Conduct Arguments Online (or in Any Other Medium/Situation)

1. Be Precise

Excessive and obscure verbiage leads to confusion.

2. Avoid Arguing Over the Meanings of Words

Not having the same definition of a key word in an argument leads to "arguing past each other"---each side is arguing a different topic. Many words have more than one meaning. Be sure you're not arguing past each other by a) defining words at the beginning of the argument, and b) stopping the argument as soon as misunderstanding due to different definitions of key concepts is detected.

Be open to the possibility that you can argue better by accepting an opponent's definition of a word (but if opponent is merely trying to define a concept out of existence, further argument may be futile).

Changing the definition of key terminology in the middle of an argument is an informal fallacy known as "equivocation."

3. Talk about Ideas, Not People

Arguments on the topic of political philosophy may devolve into arguments about politicians. An argument about a politician is a historical analysis. In order to argue about a historical analysis in a convincing way, the arguer will need to know a lot of facts to the point of being a specialist on the topic, as opposed to an argument about political philosophy where you only need to know the rules of logic.

4. Don’t Just Avoid Strawmanning

The straw man—where you erect and destroy an inaccurate caricature of your opponent's position—is one of the most common fallacies in online debates. 

You can't win an argument simply by demolishing your opponent's strawman versions of your argument. You have to set forth a persuasive argument, or you can't expect an opponent to be persuaded. 

5. Actively Steel-Man Your Opponent

As a corollary of "Follow the argument"(Plato, The Republic, 394d “…wherever the argument, like a wind, tends, there we must go”)---the idea that argumentation is above all a search for truth, you should proactively steel-man your opponent’s position, to help make their argument as strong as possible. Only by arguing against as strong an argument as possible can you be confident that you're getting at the truth.

6. Don’t Argue with Trolls

Not all who pose as arguers have the search for truth as their goal.

 A troll seeks, by various techniques, to manipulate an authentic arguer into degrading his logical argument to the level of an angry diatribe. When this happens, the troll has "won" (accomplished his goal for pretending to engage in argumentation).

Don't engage as there is nothing of value to get from that conversation, and it will only be a waste of your time.

7. Keep an Open Mind

As Hans-Hermann Hoppe has said, participation in an argument implies that the arguers can be convinced of the truth of an argument's conclusion by the logical validity and soundness of the argument. This is summed up in the motto "Follow the argument." In other words, when one participates in an argument, there must be the possibility not just of persuading others, but also of being persuaded oneself.

8. Know the Rules of Logic

Since the time of the Ancient Greeks, the methodology of argumentation has been logic.

(This post inspired by a post from Patrick Carroll, writing for FEE 9/23/22)

Is-ought and Its Relation to Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics

 Is-ought and Its Relation to Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics

Richard Opheim

Abstract 

     Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics (AE) purports to show that propositions related to justice can be logically justified. Previously, it had been more or less decided that Hume's Law prevented any apodictic conclusions in the realm of morals/ethics. How then, does Hoppe think that AE could make an apodictic contribution?

Intro

     As the purpose of all moral investigation (including justice) is to prescribe how humans should or ought to act, moral statements are sometimes called ought-statements. Depending on your preferred analysis of the language, an ought-statement is an imperative or implied conditional statement that tells its listener what he or she should do in order to conform to a moral rule. An is-statement, on the other hand, can be a fact or other kind of demonstrably-true statement.

Hume

     Hume held that philosophers who seek to use logic to prove the truth of moral statements are committing a logical fallacy:

“In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”1

     So, Hume's Law states that one may not deduce a normative conclusion from non-normative premises.

Poincaré

     Then is it impossible to use an ought-statement in a syllogism?

“If both of the premises of a syllogism are statements with the verb in the indicative, the conclusion will also be a statement with a verb in the indicative. In order to obtain a conclusion with a verb in the imperative, it is necessary that at least one of the premises has a verb in the imperative.”2

     It's possible to deduce an ought-conclusion, as long as one of the premises is an ought-statement. However, there are no self-evidently true ought-statements, and so an ought-statement conclusion will never be apodictic.

Hoppe

     Hoppe's justice theory argument 3  (called AE for “Argumentation Ethics.”)  is as follows:

1. The answer to the question of what constitutes apodictically true rules of justice must be arrived at via the means of argumentation.

2. The act of argumentation presupposes that arguers have access to scarce resources. This has implications first of all for self-ownership: “… no one could possibly propose anything, and no one could become convinced of any proposition by argumentative means, if a person's right to make exclusive use of his physical body were not already presupposed.”

3. Argumentation also implies the right to claim unused scarce resources via first use (homesteading), since lack of the latter would make argumentation impossible. “By virtue of the fact of being alive, property rights to other things must be presupposed to be valid. No one who is alive could argue otherwise.”

4. “…[I]f a person did not acquire the right of exclusive control over … goods by homesteading, by establishing some objective link between a particular person and a particular resource before anyone else had done so, but instead late-comers were assumed to have ownership claims to things, then literally no one would be allowed to do anything with anything unless he had the prior consent of all late-comers.”

     As Hoppe's AE argument contained no ought-sentences, he claimed to have avoided the is-ought problem.4

     None of Hoppe's critics explicitly criticized AE for attempting to turn an is into an ought. 

Summary of Hoppe's AE and Is-Ought

     Hoppe had this to say about is- and ought-statements:

“Ought-statements cannot be derived from is-statements. They belong to different logical realms. It is also clear, however, that one cannot even state that there are facts and values if no propositional exchanges exist and that this practice of propositional exchanges in turn presupposes the acceptance of the private property ethic as valid. In other words, cognition and truth-seeking as such have a normative foundation, and the normative foundation on which cognition and truth rest is the recognition of private property rights.”5 

    Since the propositions of AE are is-statements, Hume's Law was not violated. Does this mean that Hoppe's AE has transcended the is-ought gap?“6  As Hoppe himself remarked:

“There is and remains a difference between establishing a truth claim and instilling a desire to act upon the truth—with ‘ought’ or without it. It is great, for sure, if a proof can instill this desire. But even if it does not, this can hardly be held against it.”7 

Notes

1.  David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 295.

2.  Henri Poincaré, Dernières Pensées, 225. “Si les prémisses d'un syllogisme sont toutes les deux à l'indicatif, la conclusion sera également à l'indicatif. Pour que la conclusion pût être mise à l'imperatif, il faudrait que l'une des prémisses au moins fût elle-mème à l'impératif.”

3. First appeared in “The Ultimate Justification of the Private Property Ethic,” Liberty (September, 1988), but was subsequently elaborated in A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, 1988.

4. Hoppe's AE was partially inspired by Habermas's Discourse Ethics which was already seen as a demonstration of an apodictic ought-argument that didn't trigger Hume's Law.

5. Hoppe, op.cit, 345.

6. "[H]e has managed to transcend the famous is/ought, fact/value dichotomy that has plagued philosophy since the days of the scholastics.” M. Rothbard, Liberty, November, 1988.

7. Hoppe, op. cit., 408.

References 

[1] Hoppe, H.H., “The Ultimate Justification of the Private Property Ethic,” Liberty (September, 1988).

[2] ___________, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, Kluwer, Boston, 1988. 

[3] Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, Digireads.com. 2015.

[4] Poincaré, Henri, Dernières Pensées, Flammarion. 1920.

[5] Rothbard, Murray, “Beyond Is and Ought,” Liberty (November, 1988).