This is such a good post that it’s worth perfecting. The Martin Luther King example is a bad one. I’ve never heard anyone use the argument, “But MLK was a criminal”, meaning he had been in jail. On the other hand, frequently people say, “MLK was a plagiarist” or “MLK was a philanderer”, and we’ll be seeing more of “MLK laughed as he watched rapes”. Those are a different fallacy, ad hominem, if the subject is, say, whether MLK was brave. We don’t want to confuse that with the noncentral fallacy, which sounds a lot like it but is distinct.
This is such a good post that it’s worth perfecting. The Martin Luther King example is a bad one. I’ve never heard anyone use the argument, “But MLK was a criminal”, meaning he had been in jail. On the other hand, frequently people say, “MLK was a plagiarist” or “MLK was a philanderer”, and we’ll be seeing more of “MLK laughed as he watched rapes”. Those are a different fallacy, ad hominem, if the subject is, say, whether MLK was brave. We don’t want to confuse that with the noncentral fallacy, which sounds a lot like it but is distinct.