By Dr Tom Finegan

The public debate leading up to the Brexit vote was fascinating. Not so much for the substance of the arguments put forth by either side of the debate, but for basic messaging of the Remain side against the Brexit position.  The messaging was encapsulated in those (in)famous PR images of couples kissing, with one partner’s face painted as the EU flag and the other’s as the British flag. The basic message was that a vote for Remain is a vote for love and that a vote for Brexit is a vote for hate.

The Remain side’s response to the vote confirmed this messaging. Racism, xenophobia and hate were depicted as the drivers and beneficiaries of the Brexit result. It was that simple: a binary choice between love and hate, and the UK went with hate. There is something quite fundamentalist about this view of what the vote means.

Of course, there no doubt were some nefarious motives behind some of the decisions to vote Leave. But it is also fair to presume that some less-than-praiseworthy motives lay behind some decisions to vote Remain, like financial greed, an undue concern to protect one’s social status, and eurocentrism.

But this level of analysis – questioning motives – ultimately undoes the integrity of public discourse. Proper analysis should focus on publicly available reasons and not on private motives that are more or less obscure to everyone bar the individual themselves and those closest to them.

Unfortunately, motive-centric public discourse is not restricted to EU referendums. It is the norm when it comes to social issues like marriage, abortion, and conscientious objection. Just like with the Brexit debate, the social liberals go to great lengths to turn these debates into love and tolerance v. hate and ignorance affairs. The rush to examine (and condemn) motives (and by implication the characters animated by the motives) invariably leads to less attention being given to the adequacy of the reasons offered for one position or another.

So those who reason that abortion violates the right to life of the unborn child etc. etc. etc., are very often met with a response that overlooks the reasons given and simply asserts, “you hate women”. Those who reason that marriage is by nature a one-flesh union of minds, hearts and bodies, a union which by definition can only be actualised by one man and one women etc. etc. etc., are very often met with a response that overlooks the reasons given and simply asserts, “you hate gay people”.  And those who reason that the right to conscientious objection is a more fundamental right that the right to absolute equality of treatment as regards the provisions of goods and services etc. etc. etc., are very often met with a response that overlooks the reasons given and simply asserts, “you hate those who will be inconvenienced by the exercise of the conscientious objection”.

Those on the receiving end of these character judgments often complain that liberals are more interested in personally judging their opponents’ characters than in critically evaluating their opponents’ reasons. This leads those accused of “hate” to wonder whether liberals really are sure about the adequacy of their own arguments, for it they are they would surely want public debate to focus on reasons.  

Much more could be said here. I’ll simply finish with this: it is not the mark of a bad person to challenge his opponents’ reasons rather than their character, but it is the mark of a bad argument that its advocates would challenge their opponents’ character rather than their reasons.