The Richard Wagner Fallacy Part 2

What philosophy (and Mozart) can teach us

In Part 1 I claimed that cancel culture is underwritten by a form of ethical judgment called The Richard Wagner Fallacy. Of course, in calling it a fallacy, I want to do more than merely describe. I want to argue that The Richard Wagner Fallacy is a logically flawed form of judgment. What common error of inference, then, do the disparate examples of cancel culture thus far presented possess that make them examples of The Richard Wagner Fallacy? 

A good place to look for an answer to this question is in the philosophical literature on informal fallacies, for The Richard Wagner Fallacy bears a strong resemblance to one of the most familiar of them: the ad hominem argument.  Coined by John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ad hominem arguments are versions of genetic fallacies, or fallacies of origin, which in turn are a subcategory of ‘fallacies of relevance’ or ‘fallacies of irrelevant reason’.¹ As these labels and their Latin name suggest, ad hominem arguments incorporate irrelevant attributes of the person into their structure or, as American philosopher Irving Copi explained, they are ‘errors in reasoning into which we may fall because of carelessness and inattention to our subject matter’.²

And the case for classifying The Richard Wagner Fallacy as a type of ad hominem argument is strengthened by analysis of three different versions of this informal fallacy.³ The first is called the tu quoque (Latin for “you, too” or, more colloquially, “look who’s talking”). This version of the argument involves rejecting a viewpoint, counsel, or advice because its source does not follow it her- or himself (hence fallacy of origin). For example, we may be disinclined to follow the advice of an alcoholic who tells us we should give up excessive drinking. And it is this feature that makes the tu quoque a plausible candidate for capturing the essence of The Richard Wagner Fallacy, for in focusing upon the source’s hypocrisy, and just like the Fallacy, it cites irrelevant personal traits to reject the advice. Put another way, and as common parlance would have it, the tu quoque invokes personal traits to “shoot the messenger, rather than the message”, and it is this that makes it fallacious, for it turns out that the validity of advice does not rely upon the integrity of its source. Excessive drinking is bad for us no matter who tells us so, and being advised to give it up by an alcoholic does not make the advice any less valuable.⁴

Moreover, and to press the case for considering The Richard Wagner Fallacy to be premised upon the tu quoque still further, we have seen that a significant number of our examples - “liberalism is wrong because its defenders were racists and apologists for imperialism and colonialism”, “vegetarianism is wrong because Hitler was a vegetarian” - involve if not the rejection of advice or counsel, then certainly of viewpoints or doctrines.  Not only, then, does the Fallacy cite irrelevant personal traits, it does so to cancel the very things that the tu quoque is employed to discredit. Yet, because the tu quoque is concerned exclusively with the hypocrisy of its source, The Richard Wagner Fallacy only exhibits logical or, as the philosophers would say, “formal” similarities to it. Recall in this connection that many of the cancel culture arguments we have countered do not invoke an individual’s hypocrisy, but often another of her or his personal identity traits, be these of agency or of identity.

Another candidate is the ‘circumstantial’ ad hominem.  Here, one’s viewpoint is rejected not on the grounds of hypocrisy, but because it is held for improper reasons, such as self-interest. Yet, whilst at least one of the examples discussed in Part 1 matches this version of the argument - recall “you only made that argument because you are white” - The Richard Wagner Fallacy is not typically committed to cancel on the grounds of self-interest.

Perhaps the strongest candidate for capturing the essence of The Richard Wagner Fallacy is the third, ‘abusive’ version of the ad hominem argument, and not just because this label neatly captures how cancellation often feels to those who have experienced it.  Here it is argued that an opinion or advice should be rejected not on the grounds of hypocrisy or of self-interest, but because of some other unfavourable agency trait. The examples of Kevin Spacey, Michael Jackson, and indeed of Richard Wagner himself, are more clearly examples of abusive ad hominem arguments, in that they invoke irrelevant agency traits - sexual misconduct, the expression of anti-Semitic views - to justify cancellation. The same argument from irrelevance can be made in the case of demands for the cancellation of other historical figures. It would make no more sense to cancel the creative product of Gandhi, Hume, or Kant on account of their anti-African bigotry, than it would Marx (anti-African bigotry and anti-Semitism), Martin Luther King (homophobia), Mary Wollstonecraft (homophobia and anti-Catholic bigotry), or Emmeline Pankhurst (imperialism and eugenics). 

Taken to its most extreme, The Richard Wagner Fallacy leverages the logic of irrelevant considerations to yield comedic gems worthy of a Titania McGrath tweet.  The pompous theatrics of “had I known Mein Kampf was written by Hitler I would never have read it!” amuse precisely because they exploit the Fallacy to dress up the spurious as serious. “The Richard Wagner Fallacy is no such thing because it was identified by a white male” achieves similar, now postmodern, levels of amusement.

Cancel culture beyond the ad hominem

This survey shows why the philosophical explanation of The Richard Wagner Fallacy as a form of abusive ad hominem argument is a prima facie persuasive one, for it too involves the citing of irrelevant personal traits to pass judgement on the individual who is said to possess them. 

But The Richard Wagner Fallacy is only a close match to the abusive ad hominem, for whilst exhibiting the same inferential logic, it casts its net very differently. Consider the following argument: