PERSONAL ATTACK
Ad Personam
Personal attacks (Latin: ad personam attack) may target any aspect of the person, public or private, including his or her human dignity. Such attacks violate basic rules of politeness, civility and all ethical prohibitions that protect the individual, as a unique human being.
Personal attacks are absolutely antinomic to argument. Argumentation is not war; personal attacks are war.
The personal attack against the opponent is quite different from the ad hominem attack. The latter refers to a contradiction found between what the opponent says or between what he says and his behavior, whereas the personal attack bypasses the opponent’s positions and smears the opponent as a person in order to devalue the argument itself and exclude the person from the conversation.
Nevertheless the label ad hominem is often used to refer to personal attacks.
1. Overt and covert attacks
Insult is the simplest form of attack ad personam: “Sir, you are just a poorly educated dishonest person!”. Overt personal attacks can be a very effective strategy for undermining the debate and avoiding the issue at hand. The opponent will become agitated, he will lose track of the argument and eventually resort to personal attacks and insults. Third parties will then be tempted to leave the arguers to their battle, or to simply enjoy the show.
The personal attack may refer to the opponent’s personal life: “You better take care of your children!” said to an opponent whose children are badly behaved, is a personal attack that many would consider extremely offensive. In a debate, such a personal attack could be more subtly launched by introducing the issue of family policy, emphasizing the need for parents to give priority to their children’s education, without openly mentioning the opponent’s circumstances. The rumor and the media will explain the insinuations.
He cannot rule his family, and he pretends to rule Syldavia!
2. Degree of relevance of the attack
Personal attacks can be more or less relevant to the issue at hand. Consider the negative descriptions of the opponent made in the context of the argumentative question, “Should we go to war against Syldavia?”:
S1 — We must take military action against Syldavia!
S2_1 — Shut up, you stupid warmonger!
S2_2 — Please, stop this nonsense!
S2_3 — Poor fool, manipulated by the media!
S2_4 — Poor you, last week you couldn’t even find Syldavia on the map!
Considering the available context, S2_1 and S2_2 are unprovoked and irrelevant attacks against the person; that is, they have very little relevance to the argumentative question. But in the case of S2_3, nothing is clear; S2 is certainly wrong in calling the opponent names, but he (S2) does provides an argument that invalidates S1 because of his or her lack of basic geopolitical knowledge. If we apply the “no argument without information” principle, the attack is certainly not irrelevant. There is a difference between calling a reasonable, upstanding citizen a fool, and calling a fool a fool. But, concretely, if this difference were accepted, all slanders would be reinstated as well-suited literal descriptions of the person; hence the general prohibition of descriptive or performative insults.
[1] Latin ad personam; the term persona refers to the actor’s mask in a play.
Metaphorically, it corresponds to the interactional face or social role of the person, not precisely to his or her personal identity.