EZEKIEL BULVER, as mentioned by a commenter in the previous thread, is the imaginary inventor of a logical fallacy. Bulver is the creation of C.S. Lewis, who said he would write a biography of the great inventor but never did.

A Bulverism is a variant on the ad hominem attack. It involves the assumption that an argument is wrong and a focus on attributes of the person making the argument. It can be very effective since almost everyone making any argument is in some way to blame for something. Let’s say, a criminal in jail argued that adultery was wrong. A Bulverist would say he can’t logically make such an argument because he is in jail. A Bulverism is essentially a form of distraction, similar to the game children play when they say, “Hey, look at that!,” causing someone to suddenly turn around.

Here is Lewis on Bulverisms:

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism”. Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third — “Oh you say that because you are a man.” “At that moment”, E. Bulver assures us, “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century. (God in the Dock, 1941)

Some, but not all, of the arguments made against me in recent days have been Bulverisms. For instance, whether I am a religious fanatic or not has nothing to do with the substance of certain arguments. One person argued in an e-mail that I have sexual hang-ups and use religion as a front. In her words, I “hide behind” God. “Are you repressed?” she asked. These points, aside from being false, are irrelevant to the issue of whether the celebration of single motherhood and the bashing of real fathers are wrong and whether the absence of fathers creates a longing in children. They are not even effective Bulverisms because they are boring and predictable. But toward anyone making an argument, effective Bulverisms can always be found. If someone had said, “You claim to defend motherhood, but I know for a fact you haven’t made an important dentist appointment for your son,” that would have given me pause and been a possible advance on the Bulverist front.

Is the claim that a Christian is not permitted to judge technically a Bulverism? This is often a Bulverist strategy for diverting attention, but it is also a substantive argument, albeit an erroneous one, about the nature of Christian belief. It is impossible to consistently maintain. If judging is wrong, then the person who is judging against judgement cannot be judged as right. The person who condemns judging really only condemns certain judgments. If someone were pouring toxic chemicals into a stream, this injunction of non-judgement would be discarded.

The claim that Christians should not judge is impossible to render into practice. Even if it were possible, it would still be wrong to remain impartial about important things. We are obligated to speak up. Silence is complicity. The questions of what is right and wrong are difficult, but not so difficult that we can’t come up with general and imperfect rules. Should a woman leave a husband or the father of her children if he has disappointed her?  Here we get to the heart of the issue, away from all the Bulverisms. We can never “expect more precision in the treatment of any subject than the nature of that subject permits,” said Aristotle. Ethical rules are not like scientific laws. “We must be satisfied with a broad outline of the truth.” The answer to the above question is: Only in the very rarest of cases and only with a sense of one’s own role in the affair, of the permanent loss for children, of the inherent risk from the start, of the necessity of marriage and of the danger in others following suit.

                        — Comments —

Steve T. writes:

This logical fallacy is formally known as the genetic fallacy. From the invaluable site “Logical Fallacies.info“, to which I resort frequently.The genetic fallacy is committed when an idea is either accepted or rejected because of its source, rather than its merit. 

Formal logic should be a mandatory class in elementary education. Failing that, I recommend that all children read “Love Is A Fallacy” by Max Shulman. So many of the idiocies of this world would be avoided if only people understood the basics of logic.

Lydia Sherman:

Everybody makes judgements daily, and moment by moment. One reason we homeschool is to train our children to have good judgement about life, so that they will not regret their decisions. We make judgements every time we eat, when we choose the food we like or dislike. We make judgements about the quality of goods we buy and the price we want to pay. We make judgements about our choice of mate. The Bible says to judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgement. (John 7:24) In other words, be able to judge right from wrong. It is our duty.

Michael S. writes:

I can only conclude that these self-yclept “Christians” who would scourge you at the pillar for your supposed sinful “judgmentalism” must not be Catholic. If they were, they would be at least passingly familiar with the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy.

One of them, of course, is Admonishing the Sinner, which is a far cry from presuming to judge the state of someone’s soul, or presuming to know how and which graces are or are not at work in a soul, or to presume to understand the degree to which a person (including oneself) has co-operated with divine grace. Truly, these things can be known only by the Lord. Any opinions on our part are conjecture.

But we are called to exercise the virtue of prudence, “the virtue that disposes practical reason to discern our true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it.”

We can certainly exercise judgment about how we can best achieve our final end, and we are certainly entitled, as Christians — indeed, in some circumstances, obliged — to call to account those who insist on setting an evil example.

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