The Allure of 'You Too!:' Can we quell, or spell, tu quoque?

"Shut the door, Randy!" My older sister could be bossy sometimes and I could certainly be lazy. The sliding door on the VW van hung open and I wasn't about to leave my comfortable seat to close it. "You've left it open before!" I said, happy with my logic. Her retort was immediate, full of primal reason: "That makes no difference!"

Fast forward too many quick years and I am up late reading a fascinating story about chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen. My wife, concerned my lack of sleep and absorbed psyche will ruin the day, sweetly and sleepily expresses concern. My inner response? "You do it, too!" I can't say what I think so I argue within: "She is up late from time to time doing what she enjoys!"

But there is a problem. That is entirely beside the point! Whether she does it once or a million times has nothing to do with whether I should do it or not. As the philosophers might say, "P is P, not something else." In common language, the door is the door and sleep is sleep. That is the only thing on the table, so deal with that, not perceived or real inconsistency with the challenger.

This fallacy is called "tu quoque" and means literally "you too." We see it all the time in political discourse. Perhaps it is easiest to see in the inverse: "Because Nixon lied (to borrow an ancient story) so can I." We know this is wrong on its face, but it's the same fallacy. We justify our behavior because someone else did it: "You too!"

Of course the normal pattern is when an opponent tries to make a charge stick, say in the morass of sex-related scandals in DC these days. The hue and cry is all over: "Bill did it, too. And you said nothing about it then." True enough but it only speaks to hypocrisy, not the issue at hand which is -- you-name-it -- let's say Roy Moore's alleged abuse of power. Is his in any way lessened because of the other party's easy treatment of Bill's behavior?

"You too" is tenacious as a carnival monkey except its head seldom gets wacked. Like too many fallacies it feels so right we just plunge on. But poor thinking is still poor and never leads to a good place.

How to fix it? Address the problem at hand and forget the rest. Refuse to press the argument beyond the terms. News flash: this makes arguments less fun, less frequent, and diminishes the thrill of moral indignation. And it means we all have to deal with our own front porch instead of someone else's. Man, that's hard! I'd much rather point out your problems. It is so much easier and fun to say "you too!"

But don't you see? When we say "you too" we catch the ricochet full in the face. If our opponent is in some measure wrong for doing it, saying "you too!" means we implicate ourselves as also wrong! Since I didn't want to do the right thing, I faulted my sister for having not done it. It is one of a thousand ways we shoulder off responsibility for moral misbehavior. If someone else didn't do it but somehow suggests we should, instead of dealing with the suggestion, we deal with them. We say "you, too", and we are still stuck in our bad behavior.

And that's why, much chagrined but rightly upbraided, I am laying this silly laptop aside and going back to bed. She's right. Whether she follows her own advice all the time is simply beside the point.

But I might check Facebook one last time. She would!