Tu quoque

Tū quoque (/tjuːˈkwoʊkwi, tuːˈkwoʊkweɪ/;[1] Latin for "you also"), or the appeal to hypocrisy, is an informal fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent's argument by asserting the opponent's failure to act consistently in accordance with its conclusion(s). The Oxford English Dictionary cites John Cooke's 1614 stage play The Cittie Gallant as the earliest use of the term in the English language.[1]

This article is about the fallacy. For the historical quotation "Tu quoque, Brute, fili mi", see Et tu, Brute? For the play by John Cooke, see Greene's Tu Quoque.

The fallacy

Tu quoque "argument" follows the pattern:[2]

  1. Person A makes claim X.
  2. Person B asserts that A's actions or past claims are inconsistent with the truth of claim X.
  3. Therefore, X is false.

It is a fallacy because the moral character or actions of the opponent are generally irrelevant to the logic of the argument.[3] It is often used as a red herring tactic and is a special case of the ad hominem fallacy, which is a category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of facts about the person presenting or supporting the claim or argument.[4]

Example

In the trial of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, the controversial lawyer Jacques Vergès tried to present what was defined as a Tu Quoque Defence—i.e., that during the Algerian War, French officers such as General Jacques Massu had committed war crimes similar to those with which Barbie was being charged, and therefore the French state had no moral right to try Barbie. This defence was rejected by the court, which convicted Barbie.[5]

gollark: No language functionally is due to memory limits, but quirks of the C spec directly limit addressable memory to a finite value while other language specs don't.
gollark: Technically, C is not Turing-complete.
gollark: They should also have ominous blinking lights on them and many graphs.
gollark: The screens are cooler but also probably less practical.
gollark: Or you could just do that from your existing phone/computer.

See also

References
  1. "tu quoque, n." Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. 2012. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  2. "Fallacy: Ad Hominem Tu Quoque". Nizkor project. Retrieved 24 November 2015.
  3. Bluedorn, Nathaniel (2002). The Fallacy Detective. p. 54. ISBN 0-9745315-0-2.
  4. "Logical Fallacy: Tu Quoque". Fallacyfiles.org. Retrieved 2014-06-17.
  5. Cohen, William (2002). "The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory". Réflexions Historiques. 28 (2): 219-239 [p. 230]. JSTOR 41299235.

Further reading
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