Is this ad hominem or in general acceptable behavior during an argument?

Question

Person A: What is considered socially acceptable should be common sense regardless of outside influences.

Person B: What is considered common sense or obvious can be very different depending on the person, especially if the individual has had a fairly traumatic upbringing.

Person A: It's not my fault you don't have common sense or any idea of being a functioning person in society.

I would like to know if this is Ad Homninem or any kind of fallacy. If not, is it generally acceptable behavior for arguments to go in this direction? It just seems very exhausting and not very educational.

Answer 1

Yes, given the text, the third statement is ad hominem.

A fallacy is determined by three criteria according to T. Edward Damer in Attacking Faulty Reasoning. A fallacy is an argument which attempts to show truth by using irrelevant claims, unacceptable claims, or providing an inadequate grounds for drawing an inference. An ad hominem in particular is defined as "attacking one's opponent in a personal and abusive way as a means of ignoring or discrediting his or her position or argument".

Person A: It's not my fault you don't have common sense or any idea of being a functioning person in society.

To claim that an opponent has NO common sense or NO idea of how to function in a society is as obvious a personal attack as is the shift in third-person to second-person language. A debate regarding the nature of the relativity of common sense which invokes sophisticated ideas about psychology and philosophy should be disabused of any notion that making ridiculous claims about your opponent's psychosocial intelligences is acceptable, relevant, or adequate grounds for drawing any conclusion regarding the nature of common sense generally.

Anyone who disagrees with this position lacks common sense! ;)

Answer 2

All three statements have problems:

• The first is almost tautological. Common sense is what the common man would, without other influences, observe and conclude, which is exactly how socially acceptable is determined.

• The second statement might be true for "obvious", but not for "common sense". Individuals can see things differently, and if that is very different from the way most people see them, it isn't common sense.

• The third statement is a direct comment about the other person. It might very well be ad hominem, but without the context in which it was said one can't say for sure. (E.g. the other person might have just said "Mother, it's because of you that I don't have common sense!".)

Answer 3

Consider the following response by Person A:

Person A: It's not my fault you don't have common sense or any idea of being a functioning person in society.

This does not appear to be relevant to the argument about the role of common sense in socially acceptable behavior. Indeed it appears to be an abusive ad hominem attack desiring to shift burden of proof to the opponent who would have to defend against the attack.

Bo Bennett describes abusive ad hominem as follows:

Attacking the person making the argument, rather than the argument itself, when the attack on the person is completely irrelevant to the argument the person is making.

For a more detailed view of identifying ad hominem and deciding whether it is reasonable or fallacious, see Douglas Walton's "The Ad Hominem Argument as an Informal Fallacy". Walton concludes as follows:

It seems reasonable to conclude that the circumstantial ad hominem is more basic to understanding the argumentative structure of the ad hominem as a kind of reasoned criticism. In many cases, the abusive ad hominem is best understood as a type of circumstantial ad hominem that has gone wrong because it has been taken to excess and degenerated into a vituperative personal attack to which little or no rational weight should be given as evidence in reasonable argument. It thus can be viewed as fallacy of irrelevant appeal, similar to the ad baculum, ad populum and ad misericordiam fallacies.

A circumstantial ad hominem argument can be reasoned criticism. This can go wrong when taken to excess as appears to be the case in the OP's example.

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Bennett, B. Ad Hominem (Abusive). Retrieved on September 22, 2019 from Logically Fallacious at https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies/1/Ad-Hominem-Abusive

Walton, D. N. The Ad Hominem Argument as an Informal Fallacy. Argumentation, 1(3), 1987, 317-331. Retrieved from Douglas Walton's site at https://www.dougwalton.ca/papers%20in%20pdf/87AdHom.pdf

Answer 4

Yes it's an abusive ad hominem, and it poisons the well to boot. No, that is not an acceptable form of argument. (Other answers cover those fallacies in more detail.)

The logical reason is that even if we were to suppose that the abusive claims were wholly true, so that B had faulty senses and lacked ordinary skills, that personal fact would have no bearing on the question of the relativity of social understandings and customs in general. B could have a million faults, but the argument isn't about personal faults, it's about a general phenomenon. A more extreme example:

X: 2+3=4
Y: No, the sum would be 5.
X: Sorry, but everyone knows that you're an imbecile.

Yet the answer is 5, the abuse can't alter that.

Note that even if the answer were something else, the abuse would still be irrelevant. Modifying the example:

X: 2+3=4
Y: No, the sum would be 6.
X: Sorry, but everyone knows that you're an imbecile.

The answer is not 6, but the abuse doesn't advance the argument.

Finally, suppose X is correct:

X: 2+3=5
Y: No, the sum would be 4.
X: Sorry, but everyone knows that you're an imbecile.

The abuse is still irrelevant. It doesn't attempt to prove or disprove the disputed arithmetic.