103. SAYING NO TO WHAT IS DONE - On The Tyranny of Appealing to Decorum

Philosophers are already familiar with the fallacy of appealing to authority. When someone cites impressive, but not necessarily relevant, credentials of someone who agrees with them as if they have made a winning argument, we can see - and dismiss - the strategy fairly easily as irrelevant. To tell me that the proposed cuts to welfare are well justified because an esteemed economist said they were, or that we ought to also be able to have celebrated without covid caution at carefree Christmas parties in 2020 because our Prime Minister did, is to tell me you have no actual argument beyond “but person X said it was ok”, and that is not a sufficient justification.

Not all authorities are irrelevant, of course. There is some worth in the appeal to the authority when we take a qualified doctor’s health advice over that of a friend down the pub - but the worth comes here because the authority appealed to is independently earned and relevant to the issue. When I nod to the Prime Minister’s festive debauchery there is no connection between their happenstance hierarchical authority as leader of government and their possessing any specific moral knowledge (much to Plato’s chagrin) so their position in politics has no bearing on their advice as an ethicist. The doctor, however, is qualified precisely because they have specialist knowledge on matters of health. This both pertains directly to my question and supersedes my friend down the pub’s knowledge of medicine, being as the friend does not have any such qualifications and is essentially just guessing about my symptoms.

But even here, being “a doctor” needs to be qualified. The appeal to authority is not enough, for there are doctors and there are doctors. If I am seeking specific advice about a skin rash, I probably want to speak to someone with a specialism in dermatology rather than oncology or ear, nose and throat. My GP, for example, may send me to a specific specialist once my conditions surpass their expertise. Both have the authority of being a “doctor”, but my specialist is quite justified in saying my GP got the diagnosis wrong, prescribed me the wrong treatment, and telling me to do something completely different than I was told previously because, on this matter, they may actually know something more. But if this dermatologist also happens to be an anti-vaxxer who tells me, as a doctor, that I ought not to get a booster jab, I am free to ignore their authority as a doctor here because vaccines are not something they have the same authority to speak about. Meanwhile I, as a doctor myself (one of philosophy), have no authority whatsoever to give any health advice worth listening to simply because it came from me. My own doctoral authority has no bearing on matters of medicine.

All of which is to say that we can see the many perils of appealing to authority when it comes to knowledge claims, because authority does not entail truth. While some authorities based on qualified expertise and not mere hierarchy might provide relevant justifications or counter-points towards particular truth-claims within a specific domain, even there there is no guarantee of any necessary connection. Humans, after all, have biases, conflicting interpretations, and often equally reasonable but conflicting takes on the same data sets. So philosophers have long warned against using this appeal when trying to make a convincing argument. Do the premises entail the conclusion (or at least support the idea that the conclusion given is a reasonable inference) is all we should be asking - not whose argument is it.

But recently I have been thinking about a pet peeve of mine. Possibly the most frustrating appeal to authority of them all. I shall call it the appeal to decorum.

The appeal to decorum is when someone is told that they ought to do X simply because X is “what is done” or because X is in keeping with “good taste” or propriety. In other words it is no argument at all. You ought to do X because people do X and X is what is expected. Yes, but why do people do and expect X? Because X is what people do.

I think about this in the school context a lot. Our students wear ties as part of their uniform despite the fact that fewer and fewer adults are wearing ties in society at large. Why? Because it’s what we expect a school uniform to look like. People have always worn such ties. And why a uniform at all? Because people in the UK expect their children to wear a school uniform when they attend a school.

But it pops up in ways that can actually be quite damaging. To mitigate somewhat against COVID these days, school classrooms often have windows and doors open for better ventilation, making the classroom very cold during the winter. Obviously, there is good reason therefore to let staff and students wear their outdoor coats to protect them against the icy breeze. However, the delay on finally allowing this in some schools, and continuing push back from staff who tell their students it’s not cold enough for coats yet, does not stem from any meaningful argument beyond: students shouldn’t be wearing their outdoor coats indoors. Why? Because it isn’t done.

I have dug a little deeper with some colleagues in the profession about this and found that a variation reason is this: it doesn’t look tidy. In fact there are a lot of rules about presentation and the placement of personal belongings such as bags which all amount to trying to keep the school looking “presentable”. But when you take that idea and examine it - ask why it is important to be presentable - we just tumble down a rabbit hole of appealing to decorum: we want the school and its students to look presentable because that’s what a good school looks like. Why? Because that’s what parents expect. Why? Because that’s what they’ve been told to look for. Why? Because that’s what a good school looks like. Why?…

COVID has been a real exposer of these silly appeals to decorum. Groups of people mingling safely in masks and having a great, albeit socially distanced, time, choosing to take masks off for the photographs. Why? Because we don’t want to see all the masks in the photos. Why? Because they look ugly. Why? Because we don’t normally see such masks in happy photographs. Why? (Because the last global pandemic, the Spanish Flu, came at a time where we couldn’t take hundreds of pictures an hour on a mini computing device stored in our pockets)…etc. I know the magician Penn Jillete certainly attributes taking his mask off for a photograph as the most likely source of his own case of COVID 19, and wonder how many people caught the virus because wearing a mask at a particular time simply wasn’t “what is done”. It reminds me of when I was eleven. I had just been diagnosed by the optician as needing glasses and my mother, a journalist, was interviewing a portrait artist one weekend who had offered to do portraits of me and my sister. My mother told me not to wear my glasses for the sitting as “you’ll probably wear contact lenses when you’re older and look back at the portrait and regret keeping on the glasses”. Well, I’m nearly 40 now and still don’t wear contact lenses. The portrait, meanwhile, is gathering dust somewhere, unhung. It never really captured me because, without the glasses, it didn’t look like me at all.

Decorum is not something which only goes on in schools (although it is endemic to large institutions which trade on tradition and pseudo-prestige). A few weeks ago we saw Labour MP, Stella Creasy, told she could not bring her baby into the chambers of Parliament. MPs are not given the same maternity leave as other new parents because democracy, so the argument goes, demands the duly elected representative and not a substitute, so the job cannot be put on pause to be a parent. But this rule - how it has “always been done” - basically makes being a mother and being an MP untenable unless that mother MP can accommodate - and feed - her baby in the workplace. But apparently an MP can’t bring, or feed, their baby in Parliament. Why? Because it’s not the done thing. Why? Because it’s unseemly. Why? Because…? Again - the rules of decorum impede progress, cripple equality and stunt our humanity, and all on absolutely zero justification.

What if the baby cried throughout an important Parliamentary session I hear you ask? Well, so what if it did? The noise of a screaming baby is only jarring during a parliamentary debate because we have never heard it before. The politicians seem perfectly capable of carrying out their business amidst the usual rowdy jeers and cheers of the venue, the groans of yay and nay, the whirring of television cameras and clatter of journalists’ fingers.

There are two types of teacher - those who hear a pen lid being clicked in a classroom and freak out, and those who are able to ignore it. We can all choose to be the latter, and can accommodate other jarring noises once we accept their right to be there (hence we tend not to get furious at an unexpected birdsong waking us up, or the pounding of rain on the window: we accept that such sounds are always part of the potential noise-scape.) If you add baby sounds and the image of a feeding child to the accepted schema of what might go on in Parliament, outdoor coats and pen clicking to what you expect to possibly see in a classroom, and mask-wearing during a global pandemic to the possibilities of looking back on family photos, the appeal to decorum suddenly falls away. Indeed, we can replace it with an alternative view of propriety where what is obscene or untidy is a representative system of government which impedes new mothers from being involved, or a classroom where students are forced to freeze in uncomfortable and outdated clothing simply for the perverse whims of their adult observer’s expectations, or where people would put each other at risk for the sake of a social media snapshot.

The point is not the commit the same fallacy myself - the alternative interpretations of decorum are no better than the conventional ones currently in play - but to show that using “because it is what is done” as an argument is meaningless.

If you want to exclude mothers from parliament, freeze young children or infect your nearest and dearest with a potentially deadly virus, at least provide some independent justification and argument for why. Something that can be engaged with, objected to, or even supported, if the argument is actually good enough.

Let’s stop doing what is done because it is what is done and start asking questions about why it is done, and if what is done continues to serve any purpose (if it ever served any purpose at all).

“When you meet the Queen you must refer to her as ‘your majesty’.”

Why? And why is there a Queen at all?

“When the Head Teacher enters the room everyone stands.”

Why? And does this mean those physically unable to stand should be told off for their disability?

“We only eat mince pies at Christmas.”

Why? Would the world end if I had a mince pie in July?

“Women just don’t get paid the same as men do.”

Why?

“Black students just get expelled from school in greater numbers than white students.”

Why?

“Trans people just seem to feel more suicidal than non-Trans people.”

Why? Why? Why?

Forget Wilfred Owen - Quod Decet, Putridum Est - What is fitting is putrid. If we don’t ask questions about convention and tradition we are not only being bad philosophers, we will be stuck on the same rotten treadmill for eternity.

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE  and from all good booksellers.  Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here.