Some time ago, I wrote a piece called "How to argue LIKE STALIN - and why you shouldn't".  It was a comment on the tendency, which is very widespread online, to judge an argument not by its merits, but by the motive of the arguer.  And since it's hard to determine someone else's motive (especially on the internet), this decays into working out what the worst possible motive could be, assigning it to your opponent, and then writing him off as a whole.

Via Cracked, here's an example of such arguing from Conservapedia:

"A liberal is someone who rejects logical and biblical standards, often for self-centered reasons. There are no coherent liberal standards; often a liberal is merely someone who craves attention, and who uses many words to say nothing."

And speaking as a loud & proud rightist myself, there is more than a little truth in the joke that a racist is a conservative winning an argument.

I've been puzzling over this for a few years now, and trying to work out what lies underneath it.  What always struck me was the heat and venom with this kind of argument gets made.  One thing has to be granted - the people who Argue Like Stalin are not hypocrites; this isn't an act.  They clearly do believe that their opponents are morally tainted. 

And that's what's weird.  Look around online, and you'll find a lot of articles on the late Christopher Hitchens, asking why he supported the second Iraq war and the removal of Saddam Hussain.  Everything is proposed, from drink addling his brain, to selling out, to being a willful contrarian - everything except the obvious answer: Hitchens was a friend to Kurdish and Iraqi socialists, saw them as the radical and revolutionary force in that part of the world, and wanted to see the Saddam Hussain regime overthrown, even if it took  George Bush to do that.  No wishing to revist the arguments for and against the removal of Saddam Hussain, but what was striking is this utter unwillingness to grant the assumption of innocence or virtue.

  I think that it rests on a simple, and slightly childish, error.  The error goes like this: "Only bad people believe bad things, and only good people believe good things."

But even a basic study of history can find plenty of examples of good - or, anyway, ordinary - chaps supporting the most apallingly evil ideas and actions.  Most Communists and Nazis were good people, with reasonable motives.  Their virtue didn't change anything about the systems that they supported. 

Flipping it around, being fundamentally a lousy person, or lousy in parts of your life, doesn't proclude you from doing good.  H.L. Mencken opposed lynching in print, repeatedly, and at no small risk to himself.  He called for the United States to accept all jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich when even American jewry (let alone FDR) was lukewarm at best on the subject.  He was on excellent terms with many black intellectuals such as W.E.B DuBois, and was praised by the Washington Bureau Director of the NAACP as a defender of the black man.  He also maintained an explicitly racist private diary.

Selah.

The error that I mentioned leads to Arguing Like Stalin in the following way: someone looks within himself, sees that he isn't really a bad person, and concludes that no cause he can endorse can be wicked.  He might be mistaken in his beliefs, but not evil.  And from that it is a really short step to conclude that people who disagree must be essentially wicked - because if they were virtuous, they would hold the views that the self-identified virtuous do.

The heat and venome becomes inevitable when you base your self-esteem on a certain characteristic or mode of being ("I am tolerant", "I am anti-racist" etc.)  This reinforces the error and puts you in an intellectual cul de sac - it makes it next to impossible to change your mind, because to admit that you are on the wrong side is to admit that you are morally corrupt, since only bad people support bad things or hold bad views. Or you'd have to conclude that just being a good person doesn't put you always on the right, even in big issues, and that sudden uncertainty can be just as bad.  Try thinking to yourself that you - you as you are now - might have supported the Nazis, or slavery, or anything similar, just by plain old error.

Self-esteem is hugely important.  We all need to feel like we are worth keeping alive.  So it's unsurprising that people will go to huge lengths to defend their base of self-esteem.  But investing it in internal purity is investing it in an intellectual junk-bond.

Emphasizing your internal purity might bring a certain feeling of faux-confidence, but it's meaningless ultimately.  Could the good nature of a Nazi or Communist save one life murdered by those systems?  Conversely, who care what Mencken wrote in his diary or kept in his heart, when he was out trying to stop lynching and save Jewish refugees?  No one cares about your internal purity, ultimately not even you - which is why you see such puritanical navel-gazing you see around a lot.  People trying to insist that they are perfect and pure on the inside, in a slightly too emphatic way that suggests they aren't that sure of.

After turning this over and over in my mind, the only way I can see out of this is to base your self-esteem primarily on your willingness to be rational.  Rather than insisting that you are worthy because of characteristic X, try thinking of yourself as worthy because you are as rational as can be, checking your facts, steelmanning arguments and so on.

This does bring with it the aforementioned uncertainty, but it also brings a relief.  The relief that you don't need to worry that you aren't 100% pure in some abstract way, that you can still do the decent and the right thing. You don't have to worry about failing some ludicrous ethereal standard, you can just get on with it.

It also means you might change some minds - bellow at someone that he's an awful person for holding racist views will get you nowhere.  Telling him that it's fine if he's a racist as long as he's prepared to do right and treat people of all races justly, just might.

First post here, and I'm disagreeing with something in the main sequences.  Hubris acknowledged, here's what I've been thinking about.  It comes from the post "Are your enemies innately evil?":

On September 11th, 2001, nineteen Muslim males hijacked four jet airliners in a deliberately suicidal effort to hurt the United States of America.  Now why do you suppose they might have done that?  Because they saw the USA as a beacon of freedom to the world, but were born with a mutant disposition that made them hate freedom?

Realistically, most people don't construct their life stories with themselves as the villains.  Everyone is the hero of their own story.  The Enemy's story, as seen by the Enemy, is not going to make the Enemy look bad.  If you try to construe motivations that would make the Enemy look bad, you'll end up flat wrong about what actually goes on in the Enemy's mind.

If I'm misreading this, please correct me, but the way I am reading this is:

1) People do not construct their stories so that they are the villains,

therefore

2) the idea that Al Qaeda is motivated by a hatred of American freedom is false.

Reading the Al Qaeda document released after the attacks called Why We Are Fighting You you find the following:

What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?

1.  The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.

A.  The religion of tahwid; of freedom from associating partners with Allah Most High , and rejection of such blasphemy; of complete love for Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to his sharia; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories, and religions that contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad.  Islam is the religion of all the prophets and makes no distinction between them. 

It is to this religion that we call you …

2.  The second thing we call you to is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.

A.  We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling and usury.

We call you to all of this that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, which your leaders spread among you in order to conceal from you the despicable state that you have obtained.

B.  It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed in the history of mankind:

i.  You are the nation who, rather than ruling through the sharia of Allah, chooses to invent your own laws as you will and desire.  You separate religion from you policies, contradicting the pure nature that affirms absolute authority to the Lord your Creator….

ii.  You are the nation that permits usury…

iii.   You are a nation that permits the production, spread, and use of intoxicants.  You also permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of them, even though your nation is the largest consumer of them.

iv.  You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom.  

"Freedom" is of course one of those words.  It's easy enough to imagine an SS officer saying indignantly: "Of course we are fighting for freedom!  For our people to be free of Jewish domination, free from the contamination of lesser races, free from the sham of democracy..."

If we substitute the symbol with the substance though, what we mean by freedom - "people to be left more or less alone, to follow whichever religion they want or none, to speak their minds, to try to shape society's laws so they serve the people" - then Al Qaeda is absolutely inspired by a hatred of freedom.  They wouldn't call it "freedom", mind you, they'd call it "decadence" or "blasphemy" or "shirk" - but the substance is what we call "freedom".

Returning to the syllogism at the top, it seems to be that there is an unstated premise.  The conclusion "Al Qaeda cannot possibly hate America for its freedom because everyone sees himself as the hero of his own story" only follows if you assume that What is heroic, what is good, is substantially the same for all humans, for a liberal Westerner and an Islamic fanatic.

(for Americans, by "liberal" here I mean the classical sense that includes just about everyone you are likely to meet, read or vote for.  US conservatives say they are defending the American revolution, which was broadly in line with liberal principles - slavery excepted, but since US conservatives don't support that, my point stands).

When you state the premise baldly like that, you can see the problem.  There's no contradiction in thinking that Muslim fanatics think of themselves as heroic precisely for being opposed to freedom, because they see their heroism as trying to extend the rule of Allah - Shariah - across the world.

Now to the point - we all know the phrase "thinking outside the box".  I submit that if you can recognize the box, you've already opened it.  Real bias isn't when you have a point of view you're defending, but when you cannot imagine that another point of view seriously exists.

That phrasing has a bit of negative baggage associated with it, that this is just a matter of pigheaded close-mindedness.  Try thinking about it another way.  Would you say to someone with dyscalculia "You can't get your head around the basics of calculus?  You are just being so close minded!"  No, that's obviously nuts.  We know that different peoples minds work in different ways, that some people can see things others cannot. 

Orwell once wrote about the British intellectuals inability to "get" fascism, in particular in his essay on H.G. Wells.  He wrote that the only people who really understood the nature and menace of fascism were either those who had felt the lash on their backs, or those who had a touch of the fascist mindset themselves.  I suggest that some people just cannot imagine, cannot really believe, the enormous power of faith, of the idea of serving and fighting and dying for your god and His prophet.  It is a kind of thinking that is just alien to many.

Perhaps this is resisted because people think that "Being able to think like a fascist makes you a bit of a fascist".  That's not really true in any way that matters - Orwell was one of the greatest anti-fascist writers of his time, and fought against it in Spain. 

So - if you can see the box you are in, you can open it, and already have half-opened it.  And if you are really in the box, you can't see the box.  So, how can you tell if you are in a box that you can't see versus not being in a box?  

The best answer I've been able to come up with is not to think of "box or no box" but rather "open or closed box".  We all work from a worldview, simply because we need some knowledge to get further knowledge.  If you know you come at an issue from a certain angle, you can always check yourself.  You're in a box, but boxes can be useful, and you have the option to go get some stuff from outside the box.

The second is to read people in other boxes.  I like steelmanning, it's an important intellectual exercise, but it shouldn't preclude finding actual Men of Steel - that is, people passionately committed to another point of view, another box, and taking a look at what they have to say.  

Now you might say: "But that's steelmanning!"  Not quite.  Steelmanning is "the art of addressing the best form of the other person’s argument, even if it’s not the one they presented."  That may, in some circumstances, lead you to make the mistake of assuming that what you think is the best argument for a position is the same as what the other guy thinks is the best argument for his position.  That's especially important if you are addressing a belief held by a large group of people.

Again, this isn't to run down steelmanning - the practice is sadly limited, and anyone who attempts it has gained a big advantage in figuring out how the world is.  It's just a reminder that the steelman you make may not be quite as strong as the steelman that is out to get you.  

[EDIT: Link included to the document that I did not know was available online before now]