Tu Quoque (You Too)

Example 1

At a promotional event, after a businessman gives a lecture on the charitable activities of his company, a student accuses him and his company of selling weapons to countries that use them to kill innocent citizens. The businessman replies, “The university you attend has investments in these very companies that manufacture weapons. Your hands aren’t clean either!”

(Walton 1989, 147)

Tu quoque (Latin for “you too”) is a rhetorical move in which one responds to a criticism or argument by charging the critic with hypocrisy or inconsistency. In many informal logic guides, tu quoque is treated as a straightforward fallacy: the fact that someone does not practice what they preach does not make their argument any less sound. Standard textbook examples include a mother who advises her daughter to stop smoking, only to be met with “Why should I listen to you? You started smoking when you were sixteen!”; a father who warns his son against underage drinking, and the son retorts that the father did the same; or a teacher who urges recycling but is caught throwing a plastic bottle in the trash. In these cases, the reply is clearly irrelevant—even a hypocrite can give good reasons or make a valid point.

A you too response is not automatically fallacious. Its relevance depends on whether the original argument relies on the speaker’s consistency, character, or credibility. Consider the businessman and the student.

We begin by evaluating the student’s initial ad hominem attack. It is best interpreted as a circumstantial ad hominem: the student attempts to undermine the businessman’s promotional claims of charity by pointing to an alleged inconsistency—the company sells weapons used to kill innocents, an act that clashes with the image of benevolence the businessman is projecting. The critical questions for a circumstantial ad hominem apply: What exactly is the inconsistency? Is the commitment behind the businessman’s charitable claims incompatible with the company’s weapon sales? One can imagine a reasonable argument that selling weapons that end up killing innocents undermines the moral high ground the businessman is claiming; whether he knows about the weapons’ final use, or whether any arms dealing is inherently inconsistent with charitable ideals, are debatable points, but a plausible case for inconsistency exists. Because the businessman’s original message aimed to promote his and his company’s moral standing, exposing this inconsistency is relevant to his argument’s force. On that interpretation, the student’s criticism is relevant rather than fallacious.

Now consider the businessman’s tu quoque reply. He intends an analogous attack, accusing the student of having “unclean hands” and thus implying that the student is in no position to level the charge. In the standard fallacy model, one might immediately dismiss this reply: even if the student is hypocritical, that does not logically refute the original inconsistency the student identified. But we can press further by asking whether the student’s original argument depended on his own moral superiority.

The student did not present himself as morally exemplary; he simply pointed out an inconsistency in the businessman’s self-promotion. The original charge’s strength derives from the contradiction between the businessman’s charitable image and his company’s actions, not from the student’s personal purity. Therefore, any hypocrisy on the student’s part—even if his tuition indirectly supports university investments in weapons manufacturers—is irrelevant to that charge. Moreover, the connection between the student’s tuition payments and weapons manufacture is far more attenuated than the businessman’s direct involvement. The student’s knowledge and culpability are additional complications, but the central point remains: the businessman’s you too fails because it targets a feature of the student that the student’s argument never relied on.

The businessman’s reply therefore leaves the original charge unanswered. That does not establish that the charge is true; it means the alleged hypocrisy does not resolve it. If the student had relied on his own virtuous character, a genuine inconsistency could bear on that appeal. Here, the student’s personal purity was not a premise.