“Ward was very good at articulating his Jesuit Based belief system. “
No he wasn’t. I used to listen to Ward on KGO in the early to mid 90s, including the debates he used to have with Lee Rogers when their shows were in adjacent time slots, and his “God Talk” program. Ward had a few debating tricks he would regularly trot out.
Exemplo gratis: He loved to argue “If you oppose abortion but support capital punishment, you can’t call yourself pro-life”. This is reducing what could be a serious moral discussion to quibbling over definitions.
But for Bernie Ward, it meant he’d won the argument, and permitted himself to approve, if not applaud, his own great intellect and moral superiority.
Ward also engaged in the straw man argumentation, which goes “Well, if you say (reasonable, if debatable) proposition X, then logically you must believe (absurd) proposition Y.” Except the “logic” was only in Bernie’s head. Bernie would then claim that if the person did not adopt the absurd belief, the person was “inconsistent” or hypocritical.
Hypocrisy (other people’s) was a real big thing for Ward. He beat it like a drum. His argument went like this: Some people advocate certain moral beliefs and behavior. Some of those advocates breach the very moral code they advocate. This makes them hypocrites.
What Ward emphasized less, but certainly implied, was that by dismissing the advocate as a hypocrite, we could dismiss the espoused moral principle as a sham. Thus the people who engaged in immoral behavior had a simple, if simple-minded, way to absolve themselves of any guilt, or blame.
I figured this in the early 90s, years before Ward got into trouble. What I didn’t suspect was that Ward’s vigor in pressing this argument might have been to absolve himself of his own shortcomings — what I do is O.K. because they people who say it is wrong are not perfect.
The obsession Ward had with hypocrisy, even then, was echoed in his excuse when he got caught, that his dabbling in child pornography was “research” for a book he was going to write, about hypocrisy. This excuse was soon exposed as a flat-out lie.
You have presented a very clear and perceptive analysis. Those were indeed his most favored debating techniques, similar to Saul Alinsky.
Have to agree with lee here - excellent post Flash.
Has all kinds of deep in it.
:)
Being "pro-life" does not mean preserving and protecting all life in all circumstances. One can kill an enemy in combat or an armed felon threatening murder and still be "pro-life". It is ridiculous to think otherwise. And so with capital punishment. There is a profound difference between supporting capital punishment for murderers of innocent people and being opposed to abortion to protect innocent life. One can hold both positions simultaneously without conflicting one's "pro-life" values.
Straw-man arguments are almost always easily destroyed once the debater realizes the tactic is being employed, often turning the trick around on the user.