Argumentum ad baculum

Brute force is almost never an admirable substitute for sound reasoning when someone’s trying to win an argument. Even the threat of such force should raise serious doubts about the legitimacy of the threatener’s position.

So when Donald Trump or his backers start talking about carrying their opponents out of his rallies on a stretcher, you have reason to be suspicious of the candidate’s core values. And when one of his top supporters says the Trump campaign will keep track of opponents’ hotel room numbers, you’re not exactly encouraged to trust the benevolence of the threatener.

The same skepticism applies when you hear the CEOs of big and wealthy corporations boast to the media about how they’re going to penalize the state of North Carolina because they don’t like a particular law passed by that state’s legislature. The CEO at PayPal, Dan Schulman, instead of promoting a thoughtful discussion and addressing the specific merits of the case, says his company will cancel plans to build a new office complex in North Carolina, costing the state some 400 jobs.

Like Trump and his supporters, PayPal and Schulman are throwing their weight around. It’s what classic students of logic have called the argumentum ad baculum—or an appeal to force. And almost every time you sense that it’s happening, you should sound the alarm and note that somebody’s changed the subject and is trying to win the day using an argument where force, coercion—or, more typically, the threat of force—is its main justification.

We can sense when someone’s resorting to an inappropriate one-upmanship—whether physical, numerical, or financial.

I say “almost every time” because there are obviously occasions when someone’s got not just the most weight but also the moral right to pursue his case. Indeed, a policeman has a duty to use his advantage to subdue a delinquent and violent child—and no one should call the cop a bully for doing so.

But most of the time, we can sense when someone’s resorting to an inappropriate one-upmanship—whether physical, numerical, or financial. It’s the kind of behavior reportedly exhibited by Josef Stalin late in World War II at a meeting in Yalta with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. When Churchill said he knew that the pope favored a particular course of action, Stalin asked slyly, “And how many divisions ready for combat did you say the pope has available?” It was, of course, a not-so-quiet threat by an evil man. Argumentum ad baculum.

In the current high-profile debate over the rights and privileges society should extend to people in the so-called LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) segment of our population, it would be one thing to arrive at tolerable conclusions through traditional discussion and debate—in the appropriate legislative settings, and in the political processes through which those legislative settings are staffed. The citizens of Charlotte, N.C., for example, may not have liked the city ordinance approved by the City Council there, but future elections are coming by which they can challenge and maybe change the makeup of that council.

It is something altogether different, though, to have to reckon with the clumsy demands of corporate entities that have no accountability in the various settings where they have become so intrusive and noisy. Who is PayPal—and who are their corporate colleagues? How do we know what those companies’ policies are? When they come thundering in to tell us which of our policies are OK with them and which ones aren’t, what redress do we have? If they have the right to shape our future so profoundly, do we have any reciprocal rights to shape their futures as well?

It’s a free country, of course, and I’m not inclined to deny the freedom of such companies to intrude in Indiana, North Carolina, Mississippi, and elsewhere. That’s the price tag liberty sometimes carries.

But neither do we have to pretend they are being anything close to helpful citizens. If they want to come in with all their arrogance and pretense and hypocrisy, we may be compelled to tolerate it. But we’ll also challenge them to engage us in honest debate. And we’ll hold on to the freedom to call PayPal and all their friends exactly what they are: neighborhood bullies, appealing to force.

Email jbelz@wng.org

Listen to Joel Belz’s commentary on The World and Everything in It.