Or, to give another example, a young woman alleges that the Governor made improper advances. But she makes the allegation at a news conference sponsored by the Governor's political enemies. We have no fact as to whether or not what she alleges is true, but what we know it that the context in which the allegation is made bears materially on the question of what might be the motive of the person who makes the allegation. A witness sells her story to the tabloids. That witness is then less credible in a court of law, because the act of selling the story raises the question as to what might be the motive for telling the story, to get the money or simply to testify to the truth.
Ad hominem inference is inescapable, it seems to me, in the real world of public discourse, because in the real world of public discourse we are all calculating in our efforts to try to discern what the motives are of people who are speaking to us. The reason that we're doing that is because our measure of the reliability of the argument is determined to some extent by what we know about the motives of the speaker. We trust the news more when it's reported in an organ whose editorial opinion we share. When it's reported in an organ whose editorial opinion we abhor, we have doubts about the truth of that news, even though, as we all know, editorial and news reporting functions of every respectable newspaper and magazine are strictly separated. Nevertheless, we ask ourselves the question, What kind of person, what kind of institution, what kind of organ is this that has made this argument, and on the basis of that, we're prepared to draw some conclusions.
What I want to argue is that that process of inference has a very important implication about the vitality of public discourse, a negative implication. I want to suggest that we're well inside of the set of possible things that could be achieved in our interactions in society precisely because of our concerns about giving offense to people's expectations, precisely because of our own necessary suspicions, in the ad hominem vein, about who is it that's speaking, precisely because of the anticipation that if we don't conform to certain social norms, we will be judged to not affirm certain desirable values. That's the mechanism that I'm calling on in trying to understand why it is that self-censorship seems to be such a universal phenomenon in political speech, and why it seems to have the deleterious consequences that it does. That is, that audiences invariably draw conclusions about the character of speakers from the willingness of speakers to engage in certain kinds of expression. The very fact of raising the question comes to symbolize the holding of some negative value or the not holding of some positive value.
Let's say just hypothetically we talk about the Cuban community in South Florida, and within that community we consider the vitality of public discussion about the question of What should be US relations of the government of Fidel Castro. Suppose a young member of that community has gone off to a good business school and learned something about the interrelationship between economic and political change, and comes to think that relaxing the trade embargo against the Cuban government would be a boon to political liberalization on the island. A person might plausibly come to that conclusion. That argument might in fact be right. History and political analysis could well support the objective validity of that argument. The free flow of goods across the border will encourage that kind of foment and development that's necessary for the political change that we hope to see on the island, such a person might argue. But that kind of argument, within the Cuban community of South Florida, the Cuban immigrant community of anti-Castro people, the people of the generation who were run off that island, is unlikely to get much of a hearing. It's unlikely to be seen in those objective, political-economic terms. Instead, the person who makes that argument is more likely to be greeted with the question, "Who are you? Are you indeed a member of our community? Do you not know what we suffered at the hands of Mr. Castro? How could you possibly say that? What kind of person would say it? Only someone who doesn't share our deepest values, only someone who isn't really part of the shared experience, would make that argument." And as a consequence, it could well be that the development of the political agenda within that community would end up being stifled precisely because certain lines of argument were ruled out of bounds a priori due to the meanings that would have been ascribed to the very act of making them.
All contents copyright (C) 1995,1996 Richard Landau. All rights reserved.
Revised: January 21, 2005