Inverted Inconsistencies

Introduction

There's a certain flawed argumentative move I occasionally see—mostly in politics, the mother of many bad arguments—which I haven't seen discussed explicitly before. It happens when someone points out a contradiction in their opponent's beliefs. This is a common way to critique another's position, but it's really only effective if the speaker is consistent on the point in question. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

Abstractly, the speaker says, "You believe A and B, which are contradictory." The mistake is that the speaker holds the opposite position on both questions; they believe not-A and not-B. If A and B are contradictory, not-A and not-B often are as well. I call this an inverted inconsistency.

Examples

As I said, I've mostly seen this in politics. Political examples can be very distracting, so try to focus more on the style of argumentation than the issues themselves.

I first noticed this pattern of argument in my younger years watching a progressive news outlet. The host was discussing immigration and criticized conservatives: "They say we can't raise the minimum wage to a living wage because the economy depends on having a large supply of low-wage labor. But they want to deport illegal immigrants, which are the biggest source of this labor! Some places have tried deporting all their illegal immigrants, and their economies practically collapse."

This may well have identified a contradiction in some conservatives' beliefs, but there's a problem: the speaker held the opposite beliefs on both questions, which seems equally contradictory. He believed the economy depends upon low-wage immigrant labor, but also that we need a significantly higher minimum wage. He could try to weasel out of this by exempting illegal immigrants from the minimum wage, but I don't think that was his position. Hence his critique failed because he was guilty of holding the exact inversion of the inconsistency he was criticizing.

I think this comes up in politics so much because of its extremely tribal nature. Camps are separated sharply into opposing sets of beliefs, so chances are that if you find a contradiction in a common pair of conservative beliefs, liberals will believe the opposite on both fronts, risking an inverted inconsistency.

Another example I've seen is the comparison of banning abortion to banning guns. I've sometimes heard liberals say, "Conservatives say banning guns won't be effective because criminals will just get guns illegally. But they're happy to ban abortion, even though women will obviously just get illegal abortions!" This speaker could be guilty of an inverted inconsistency, depending on their stances. If they do happen to believe in banning guns, and that this will somehow be effective in America, their position seems rather untenable. If an abortion ban would obviously be ineffective, why wouldn't the same be true of a gun ban?

Plenty of liberals don't actually want to ban guns of course, and many are concerned that abortion access will in fact be significantly reduced, not that women will all just start getting illegal abortions (although of course that can happen too). But if someone were to make the argument above, I believe it would be flawed.

A Word of Caution

We should be careful to apply this criticism selectively; not-A and not-B aren't always contradictory just because A and B are. Formally, A and B may be contradictory because A implies not-B or because not-A implies B. If only one of these holds, it's possible for both not-A and not-B to be true. This only yields a contradiction if both implications hold, meaning A and not-B are logically equivalent.

More concretely, one of the claims may be much stronger than the other, such that the stronger claim implies the weaker one without the weaker implying the stronger. For example, suppose a liberal criticizes a conservative by saying, "You claim that prayer in school is a basic religious freedom, yet you don't think Muslim women should be allowed to wear the hijab in public," and suppose the conservative does actually believe this.

The liberal presumably holds the opposite two positions, but I wouldn't think they're guilty of an inverted inconsistency. Prayer in school is a much stronger guarantee of "religious freedom". It instills religious expression in a public institution, with at least some pressure for students to participate even if they don't believe in it. Surely if this is a guaranteed right, a woman should be allowed to wear a hijab in public without asking anyone else to participate in any way. But the liberal is free to reject the stronger claim while accepting the weaker one. It's perfectly fine to say that religious freedom guarantees the weaker right to wear a hijab but not the stronger right of school-sanctioned prayer.

Conclusion

Overall, this fallacy is a special case of a more general mistake, in which a speaker catches their opponent in a contradiction, while failing to be consistent on the point in question themself. I've frequently seen a speaker be guilty of essentially the same contradiction they're accusing their opponent of. For instance, a Christian attacking an atheist for thinking something can come from nothing, while believing that God came from nothing. The fallacy is easier to see here since it's so directly parallel. The inverted inconsistency is a bit more subtle and thus easier to miss, and perhaps also easier to make. Do let me know if you find more examples in the wild!