Are All Objections Question-Begging?
Against lazy dismissals
Imagine a consequentialist dismissing every objection to their view as “question-begging” and unworthy of engagement. The transplant counterexample? It’s “framed” in a way that invokes deontic concepts. ’Nuff said. The alienation and separateness of persons objections? They raise issues of fitting motivation that most consequentialists don’t care to talk about. Couldn’t possibly be worth discussing, then!
This strikes me as an objectionably incurious and unphilosophical attitude to take towards the biggest concerns that intelligent colleagues and interlocutors have about one’s view. Rather than finding excuses to ignore them, it seems much more philosophically valuable to seriously engage with the objections and explain in detail how one hopes to defang them. (You can survey a selection of my efforts along these lines by following the above links.) “That seems like a tendentious framing” is a promissory note, not a complete objection. The real work is in developing one’s case in a way that has some hope of communicating one’s perspective to someone who didn’t share it to begin with.
Philosophical dialectic is often best understood as a matter of rival proponents vying for the hearts and minds of the uncommitted in their audience. Accordingly, it is not necessary to convince committed opponents. That would rarely be a realistic ambition. Better to aim at the goal of highlighting a neglected cost or else convincing a neutral party that the costs attributed to your view are not so bad as they might at first have seemed.
My opening scenario might sound absurd—who has ever dismissed the Transplant objection for invoking deontic concepts?—but the funny thing is that it happens all the time when you flip the positions around. I’ve written before about how the most common response to my recent work on deontology’s dispreferability problem is to dismiss it as “question-begging”, either for invoking the concept of preferability at all, or for “framing” the scenario in a way that highlights the welfare costs of deontology (shocker, I know; what’s next, a counterexample to utilitarianism that highlights its apparent neglect of individual rights?)
It’s hard to express how deeply baffling I find these dismissals on a metaphilosophical level. Like, what do the critics think good philosophical objections look like? Can they point to any objection to deontology that they recognize as philosophically serious and worth engaging with? (If not, doesn’t that seem awfully revealing?)
The problem: People are lazy and motivated to find excuses to dismiss objections to their views rather than doing the philosophical work of engaging and countering objections. As a result, many are quick to accuse arguments of being “question begging” whenever they are personally unconvinced. They forget that all arguments in philosophy—even the very best ones—leave some people unconvinced.
My solution: apparently, writing blog posts with the twin goals of (i) instilling a sense of intellectual shame at the prospect of indulging in such irrationality, and (ii) encouraging explicit reflection on better criteria for identifying when arguments are question-begging vs. worth engaging.
What it means to beg the question
Question-begging arguments transparently presuppose their conclusion. Of course, there’s a logical sense in which every valid argument presupposes its conclusion: logical validity just is the property of having the premises logically necessitate the conclusion. So if you’re unwaveringly committed to not-C, we can already tell that you must be (at least implicitly) committed to rejecting some premise of any valid argument for C. It would be awfully silly to dismiss every valid argument on this basis!
The transparency condition is key. Informative philosophical argument is possible because we are not logically omniscient. Nobody has fully thought through all the implications of their views. We are naturally drawn to a variety of claims, many of which are subtly inconsistent in ways we don’t appreciate until a clever argument brings the problem to our attention.
As I like to reiterate every few years:1
Sometimes people assume that an argument they personally find unconvincing is thereby “question-begging” or otherwise worthless. This is a mistake. A determined opponent can always just reject a premise; that’s inevitable. Arguments can’t force people to change their minds, so that isn’t a realistic expectation.
We do better to think of arguments as highlighting neglected costs (of rejecting the conclusion), and inviting those who nonetheless reject our conclusions to (i) seriously consider which costs they’re willing to accept (i.e. which premises to reject), and (ii) suggest any counterarguments that mitigate the apparent cost of their preferred move (or perhaps even show it to be a “feature” rather than a “bug”). In a successful dialectic, everyone leaves with a clearer view of the costs and benefits of the competing views on offer.
A question-begging argument is one that offers no such illumination. The conclusion is so transparently contained within the premises that there is no conceivably “neglected” consideration there to highlight—nothing that might, for example, help to sway a “fence-sitter” who was as-yet-undecided about whether to accept the conclusion. Any such fence-sitter would necessarily be just as undecided about the question-begging premise.
Put another way: An argument is an invitation to grapple with a problem: some people may have been tempted to hold all of {P1, … Pn, not-C} but this turns out to be an inconsistent set. Something has to go! (The arguer encourages switching to accepting C, but this directionality is a rhetorical artifact. The real philosophical work is just identifying the inconsistency, and readers may judge for themselves how they prefer to resolve it.)
To charge an argument with being “question-begging” is to deny that it raises any interesting problem. It is to say, “You philosophical nincompoop, how could you be so muddle-headed as to imagine that anyone would ever be tempted by that inconsistent set? Nobody would ever be tempted by P1 unless they already accepted C. So there’s no problem here; nothing to grapple with and nothing to learn. Stop wasting our time!”
This charge will often come across as quite insulting. A question-begging argument is an abject philosophical failure, a total waste of time, unworthy of a moment’s consideration or discussion. It offers no opportunity for rationally updating or revising one’s views. If someone offers a question-begging argument as a source of potential interest and insight when it really has zero potential for either, you may start to have serious doubts about their philosophical competence!
Of course, everyone gets muddled sometimes; mistakes happen, and questions get begged. Hardly the end of the world. And it’s helpful to accurately identify when it has happened; it’d be a shame to waste our time thinking about non-problems when there are so many more interesting problems out there we could be grappling with! But accurate identification is key. Before lobbing such a bomb, pause and ask yourself: Do you really think the argument is vacuous, or do you merely mean to make the weaker claim that you expect committed opponents to remain unconvinced? (Then consider whether the latter goes without saying.)2
Intellectual Virtue and Intellectual Empathy
If you’re reading this blog, you probably like to think of yourself as a generally rational, appropriately open-minded (discerning, not dogmatic) person. You recognize that reasonable people can disagree with your philosophical views, and accordingly that there are non-question-begging objections — objections worth considering and engaging with — that you remain personally unpersuaded by. Persuading you in particular can hardly be a necessary criterion for philosophical merit.
Accurate diagnosis of question-begging arguments thus requires a kind of intellectual empathy: an ability to consider whether others—neutral fence-sitters, for example—might reasonably be swayed by the argument even though you aren’t. If so, then it seems like there’s something there worth responding to. By attempting to inoculate your audience against the superficial appeal of (what you see as) a misguided argument, you will be prompted to add new depth to our collective philosophical understanding. That’s a good and welcome thing. (If you are rather the one who is mistaken, further steps in the dialectic may bring this to light in a way that wouldn’t be so clear if everyone just dismissed and ignored everyone they disagreed with.)
As I previously put it:
Recall that the problem with “question-begging” arguments is that they offer no substantive illumination. They are philosophically vacuous. So to assess whether a target work is indeed “question-begging”, one must ask questions like: (i) whether anyone could reasonably be swayed by it; or (ii) whether it highlights some previously-neglected cost or challenge that those who wish to reject the conclusion would need to grapple with. If the answer to either of these questions is yes—as it very often is—then it is not “question-begging”. It is, instead, merely contestable.
Remember that being contestable is a good sign in philosophy. If a paper weren’t contestable, that would seem another kind of vacuity or insubstantiality.3 Good philosophy is substantive, which is why truly question-begging papers are not worth publishing or engaging with (there is literally no substance there with which to engage). But, as noted above, the practice of rejecting papers for containing contestable claims also promotes vacuity. In other words: false charges of begging the question are bad for the same reason that begging the question is bad. Both errors deprive us of interesting, substantial philosophy, and ought to be avoided for precisely that reason.
Degrees of transparency
The strongest objection to the above is that I frame it as an “all or nothing” matter: if an argument offers any illumination at all (to anyone?), then it isn’t strictly question-begging. But what logical connections are or aren’t obvious will vary from person to person. A sufficiently confused person might be aided by (what the rest of us would consider) even the most blatantly question-begging arguments. Conversely, all the arguments we find illuminating would seem transparently question-begging to a logically omniscient being (who has nothing left to learn from philosophical reflection). Should we conclude that it’s all just a matter of degree, then?
Given the role that charges of “begging the question” play in policing philosophical dialectics and assessing philosophical value, I think it’s most helpful to keep it as a threshold concept. (An unappealing alternative would claim that every argument is question-begging to a greater or lesser degree, presumably leading to much quibbling over what degree of condemnation is warranted in each case!) We might appeal to a standard of “reasonable interlocutors”. If a sufficient proportion of reasonable, philosophically competent and well-informed fence-sitters could be expected to find the argument informative and persuasive, then it isn’t question-begging. This makes the standard contingent, and one that might change over time (as the philosophical community becomes more or less wise). But it maintains my central distinction between simply being unpersuasive to committed partisans — a property shared by many fine arguments! — and being uninterestingly question-begging.
Terminology aside, the substantive point I especially want to emphasize is that arguments we personally find unpersuasive can still be philosophically interesting, valuable, and worth engaging with rather than dismissing. So, insofar as “begging the question” is understood to warrant hasty dismissal, it isn’t a charge that we should take to be warranted simply due to being personally unpersuaded by an argument. And insofar as we think people tend to err on the side of dismissing too much, we should encourage norms of caution when it comes to diagnosing opposing arguments as begging the question. (I suspect that most such dismissals turn out to be mistaken.)
Conclusion
We should generally want to encourage more cross-camp engagement rather than less. So we should embrace norms on which it’s intellectually virtuous to seriously engage with objections that one’s critics and interlocutors take seriously, even when you think they’re bad objections. Two points to especially bear in mind:
(1) If your critics are philosophically competent, it’s unlikely that their arguments are really “question begging”, even if they’re unlikely to convince a committed opponent. Good arguments may serve more modest dialectical goals.
(2) Before dismissing an objection as “question begging”, check whether you recognize any objections to your view as philosophically serious. If nothing meets your absolute standards, shift to a comparative question: “How does this new objection compare to the standard fare?” If your critic’s objection is plausibly among the best available, then it’s worth (publishing and) addressing!
I think people online are too often tempted to share unhelpful comments—brute assertions of disagreement, sometimes even insults, etc.—when they’d do better to pick between either substantive critical engagement or simply not engaging at all.
The rare exceptions: ideas that are obvious only in retrospect. (I think core effective altruist principles are like this, as I argue in ‘Why Not Effective Altruism’: not really reasonably disputable, but still important to write about because many haven’t yet paid close enough attention to notice.)