Ad hominem

I was arguing with a friend about Chelsea Manning (formerly known as Bradley Manning). My friend did not think that Manning was a "hero" but rather that she was a tragic example of being so messed up by her transgender identity that she ruined her life by leaking all of that government information. It was hard not to think that my friend was just using Manning's trangender identity as an excuse to write her off and downplay her efforts.

People love to write other people off based on personal characteristics. I was reading an article about "journalese" (the jargon of journalists) that defined the word "coffers" as "Where organisations of which we disapprove keep money." Another recent article about someone the journalist clearly did not like described the subject's "dilapidated Victorian home," his "appearance more akin to Coronation Street’s hapless cafe owner Roy Cropper than a cutting-edge satirist," his "battered Toyota vehicle," and his "gap-toothed" maw.

We call these ad hominem arguments and they work because of our reductionist desire to simplify the world and people into clear cut categories of good and bad, troubled or heroes. From Wikipedia:

Ad hominem arguments work via the halo effect, a human cognitive bias in which the perception of one trait is influenced by the perception of an unrelated trait, e.g. treating an attractive person as more intelligent or more honest. People tend to see others as tending to be all good or tending to be all bad. Thus, if you can attribute a bad trait to your opponent, others will tend to doubt the quality of their arguments, even if the bad trait is irrelevant to the arguments.

Under this reasoning, of course we can't believe that Private Manning acted in what she considered the best interests of her country -- how could she when she was in the midst of a gender identity crisis? Similarly, Edward Snowden seems simply too "weird" or unpredictable to be a hero.

What is particularly self-defeating about this type of thinking is that it suggests that certain types of people are not capable of certain actions. Transgendered people cannot be patriots. Eccentric people cannot be acting in what they think is the greater good. Ugly people cannot have good or important or at least legitimately controversial ideas. Disabled people cannot be commander in chief. Sociopaths cannot do pro-social things? The more we know about people's personal lives via social networking and the eternal memory of the internet, the easier it will be for us as a society to get tripped up in these fallacies. But the truth is that we can never predict people's behavior, especially not based on their appearance or their feelings about their gender, or how eloquently they're able to articulate their beliefs. And we can never know someone's true motivations. All we know and all we can see is what they say and do. So why can't we judge those things based on their own intrinsic merits, without also "considering the source"?