Motive mongering in the abortion debate

While motive-mongering is a big pet peeve of mine, I find it hard not to speculate about the motives of other people. I pretty much always keep those thoughts to myself, though.

I've complained about pro choice people engaging in motive mongering before ("Have pro-choicers given up?"). The go-to tactic of pro-choicers these days is to say that what's really motivating pro-lifers is not a concern for the unborn, but just the desire to control women. After all, pro-lifers allegedly only care about people before they are born. Once they are born, they no longer care.

Besides being wrong about the motives of pro-lifers, these speculations are irrelevant. They amount to ad hominem fallacies. They suffer from irrelevance because they have nothing to say about the morality of abortion. They neither refute any pro-life arguments nor defend any pro-choice arguments. By themselves, they tell you absolutely nothing about whether or not it's okay to have an abortion.

While it bothers me how much weight pro-choicers seem to think their irrelevant motive-mongering carries, it bothers me a whole lot more when I see pro-lifers engaging in the same behavior. I've seen pro-lifers attribute some of the worst motives to pro-choicers. For example, they'll say people only take the pro-choice position so they can endulge their sexual lusts without consequences. Or they'll liken the pro-choice denial of the personhood of the unborn to the dehumanization of other races, the motive being to discriminate against them and deny them their rights.

One reason it bothers me so much when pro-lifers engage in motive-mongering is because I'd like for those who are on my side to be above all that silliness. But it bothers me even more because I think it does damage to our message. We should want to persuade people, not insult them. People tend to stop listening to you when you attack them personally.

The major problem with motive-mongering, besides being irrelevant, is that when you speculate about somebody else's motives, the other person always knows better than you do whether or not you are right. Each of us has direct and immediate access to the content of our own mental states in a way that nobody else does. If you are wrong about the motives you attribute to another person, then they know it. And if you keep insisting on it, then they also know that you're a fool. Why should they have any future interest in anything you have to say once you have exposed yourself as being a fool?

Even if you happen to be right about their motives, the fact that you are trying to shame them will make them resistant to being honest with themselves about their motives. People will delude themselves by rationalizing in order to avoid ethical pain until they convince themselves that their motives are pure, at which time, they will still think you are a fool.

Can we please stop the motive-mongering? It doesn't do anything but give you the illusion of moral superiority while simultaneously causing you to lose all credibility with the person you are trying to persuade.