Tu quoque

Template:About Template:Short description Template:Italic title {{#invoke:Lang|lang}}Template:Efn is a discussion technique that intends to discredit the opponent's argument by attacking the opponent's own personal behavior and actions as being inconsistent with their argument, so that the opponent appears hypocritical. This specious reasoning is a special type of Template:Em attack. The Template:Em cites John Cooke's 1614 stage play Template:Em as the earliest known use of the term in the English language.<ref name=OED/>

Form and explanationEdit

The (fallacious) Template:Em argument follows the template (i.e. pattern):<ref name=Nizkor>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Person A claims that statement Template:Mvar is true.
Person B asserts that A's actions or past claims are inconsistent with the truth of claim Template:Mvar.
Therefore, Template:Mvar is false.

As a specific example, consider the following scenario where Person A and Person B just left a store.

Person A: "You took that item without paying for it. What you did is morally wrong!"
- Here, Template:Mvar is the statement: "Stealing from a store is morally wrong." Person A is asserting that statement Template:Mvar is true.
Person B: "So what? I remember when you once did the same thing. You didn't think it was wrong and neither is this."
- Person B claims that Person A is a hypocrite because Person A once committed this same action.
Person B has argued that because Person A is a hypocrite, he does not have a right to pass sentences on others before judging himself.

Other artificial examplesEdit

The example above was worded in a way to make it amenable to the template given above. However, in colloquial language, the Template:Em technique more often makes an appearance in more subtle and less explicit ways, such as in the following example in which Person B is driving a car with Person A as a passenger:

Person A: "Stop running so many stop signs."
Person B: "You run them all the time!"

Although neither Person A nor Person B explicitly state what Template:Mvar is, because of the colloquial nature of the conversation, it is nevertheless understood that statement Template:Mvar is something like: "Running stop signs is wrong" or some other statement that is similar in spirit.

Person A and/or Person B are also allowed to be groups of individuals (e.g. organizations, such as corporations, governments, or political parties) rather than individual people.Template:Efn For example, Persons A and B might be governments such as those of the United States and the former Soviet Union, which is the situation that led to the term "whataboutism" with the "And you are lynching Negroes" argument.

The Template:Em technique can also apply to one's support of certain figures, rather than direct actions done by the argument's participants. For example, it is possible for Person B who supports a certain Politician B, who recently did something wrong, to justify not changing their support to another politician:

"Yes, Politician B did do this-or-that immoral thing, but then again so do other politicians. So what's the big deal?"

In this example, Person B supports "Politician B" while Person A supposedly supports "other politicians."

Whataboutism is one particularly well-known modern instance of this technique.