Pilaster arguments
Stop pretending that your beliefs are based on things that they are not based on
cw: discussion of arguments about animal cruelty, sexual assault and victim blaming, racism, death penalty, abortion, transphobia
This post was inspired by this Facebook post, which was in turn inspired by this Twitter thread. Many of the arguments below were suggested by commenters on Ollie’s Facebook post.
h/t Kiran Lloyd for the term ‘pilaster’.
In architecture, a pilaster is a column that appears to be structurally necessary, but is in fact ornamental. Pilaster arguments are arguments that a debater raises to support a certain position, but that are actually irrelevant, from the point of view of the debater. (Throughout, I use ‘debater’ to refer to a person engaged in a political, philosophical or factual disagreement with another — I’m not implying that this only happens in the context of a formal debate).
If you remove a pilaster, the building doesn’t fall down; similarly, if a pilaster argument is proven wrong, the debater’s view doesn’t change, because their view was never really based on the pilaster argument in the first place.
This is very abstract; here are some examples. All of these are pilaster arguments for positions that I believe. The bolded bit is the claim I think is right, and the unbolded bit is the pilaster.
‘Women who are sexually assaulted are never “asking for it”, even if they were wearing sexy, revealing clothes at the time, because many women are assaulted even when they are “modestly” dressed’
So if it turned out that people wearing more ‘provocative’ clothes were much more likely to be sexually assaulted, would that mean that they deserved to be assaulted, or that they bore a responsibility to dress more “modestly”?
‘White Britons shouldn’t be racist against non-white people, because early humans in Britain, like Cheddar Man, had dark skin.’
So if early Britons had had white skin, white nationalism would be ok?
‘The death penalty is bad because it’s extremely expensive.’
So if people could be executed very cheaply, it would be ok to execute them?
‘We shouldn’t ban abortions because if we ban abortions, people will have them anyway, but they’ll be more dangerous.’
So if the state harshly cracked down on illegal abortions and therefore they became extremely rare, it would be fine to ban abortions?
‘It’s untrue that our gender is always and only determined by our biological sex, and it’s therefore both misguided and cruel to identify trans people with their assigned sex at birth. Biological sex is not a strict binary; a non-negligible minority of people are intersex, with a mixture of male and female sex characteristics.’
So if there were no intersex people, and biological sex was straightforwardly binary, would it be ok to misgender and stigmatize trans people?
‘We shouldn’t factory farm chickens, because chickens can dream, and recognize up to 100 faces, and feel empathy’ (and other pro-veganism arguments of this structure)
So if chickens didn’t dream, felt no empathy, and were cognitively unsophisticated, would it be ok to factory farm them? As Jeremy Bentham said, ‘The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’
Of course, whether or not an argument is a pilaster argument depends on the debater. An argument that is absolutely a non-load-bearing pilaster for one person might actually be a crux for another. Consider my last example: I, personally, don’t want to cause severe suffering for any animal, no matter what they can do. But some people choose not to eat specific animals because they are mentally sophisticated (either because they think that we should care more about more intelligent beings, or because they believe that more intelligent animals suffer more than less intelligent ones). For me and people like me, ‘chickens can dream’ is a pilaster; for others, it is a genuine reason not to farm and eat chickens.
Why do people make pilaster arguments, if their beliefs do not really rest on them? One (superfically sensible) reason is that their opponents claim to base their position on the opposite fact. If a misogynist is claiming that women are “asking” to be assaulted by dressing provocatively, then it is helpful to point out that dressing modestly does not actually protect you from assault. If a racist says that Britain is “historically white”, it makes sense to point out the relative modernity and contingency of contemporary racial categories.
A debater might also make a pilaster argument if she thinks that her opponent is unlikely to be convinced by arguments that are load-bearing for the debater herself, but that they might be convinced by a pilaster. A conservative might be more convinced by a ‘biological’ argument for why transgenderism makes sense, than by an appeal to the liberal principle of self-determination, or a postmodern argument that sex and gender are social constructs.
Nonetheless, I think we should usually avoid pilaster arguments, for two reasons. The first reason is epistemic: when we use pilaster arguments interchangeably with load-bearing arguments, this erodes our own awareness of why we believe what we believe. This, in turn, can prevent us from noticing when our own beliefs are no longer supported by good reasons.
The second reason is practical: when a person makes a pilaster argument, they often get dragged into debating the truth of the pilaster argument, which is a waste of both interlocutors’ time since the overall claim that they are supposedly debating doesn’t actually depend on the pilaster. Imagine that I’m arguing that the death penalty is bad, and I point out that it is extremely expensive, and therefore a waste of taxpayers’ money. My opponent might link me an article claiming that executing a felon works out cheaper than funding life imprisonment for them at a high-security prison. At this point, I have to read that article, work out whether it’s credible or suspect, see if I can find other articles that claim the opposite, work out whether those are more credible, etc… Such diversions are sometimes interesting, but they are irrelevant if my real opposition to the death penalty has nothing to do with how expensive it is.
Rather than getting into the weeds like this, a debater also has the option of jettisonning the pilaster as soon as it’s challenged:
E.g.:
A: ‘If you ban abortions, people will just have them anyway.’
B: ‘Actually, surveys show that banning abortions does decrease the total number of abortions in a state. Even if there are some illegal abortions happening, there are far fewer of these than there are legal abortions in states where abortion is legal.’
[I have no idea if this is true btw, this is for the sake of example]
A: ‘Well… I don’t care about that — people should be able to have abortions because they should be allowed to decide what happens to their own bodies’.
If A’s support for abortion rights was never really about the practicalities, then it is reasonable for her to concede no ground here. She has done nothing wrong epistemically. But she *looks* weak and opportunistic. She should have just led with the stronger ‘bodily self-determination’ argument that her belief actually rests on.
I like this idea of a pilaster argument, and examples presented. Small suggestion: I found the 'bald' convention unclear - whether or not you personally agree with claim does not seem important in understanding the examples. Also, there are two unbolded bits: the pilaster and the explanation for why the pilaster is a pilaster. One potential alternative is that for each example, you have three bullet points: claim, pilaster, why pilaster is a pilaster.