Definition Fallacy
One of the most common fallacies that are made in moral and, to a smaller extent, factual arguments is the definition or consistency fallacy. The fallacy is to call out some proposition as immoral or factually incorrect if some of its elements are not properly defined. Perhaps the most prevalent example regards transgender people. The “what is a woman” is a veiled example of the definition fallacy in this case.
Indeed, most proponents of the transgender movement, who are not knee deep in its philosophy and apologetics, will struggle to define “woman” in a way that allows for a transgender identity to be logically consistent. At the same time, opponents of transgenderism will have a simple and concise definition of “woman” as “adult human female”. And even when transgenderism apologists will successfully define woman without the definition being circular, there will be an issue with their definitions a level down.
So, does that mean that the transgender movement is logically inconsistent? Indeed, it is difficult to point out the issue with this argument. The issue, of course, is the aforementioned definition fallacy. There are actually a few reasons why appeals to definitions fail. The first reason is that eventually all arguments are circular; the depth (how many definitions until we get circularity) may be large, but the circularity will be there. In reality, we use the definitions (and language in general) to convey ideas. Surely, transgender people have some idea of what it means to be a transgender person, and what it means to be a woman or a man. If they convey that idea using circular definitions… who cares? The idea is still there.
Indeed, even if a person is incapable of conveying their idea at all, that does not mean that their identity is made up or that they do not feel a certain way. I could, for example, ask you to define something incredibly abstract, like “material object”. Even if you struggle to do it succinctly and precisely, and after every attempt, I find a flaw in your definition, that does not discredit the existence of an idea of a material object in your mind. But every idea must have a way it can be conveyed, right? No, actually, most feelings that we have are quite difficult to convey using words, a famous example being conveying a feeling of blue to a blind person. The idea is there, the definition is not.
The source of the fallacy stems from a pretty popular idea among laypeople, that every word has a singular, unique, inherent definition. This is not true because definitions are largely about ideas, not words, and they might have many ways in which they could be conveyed, or indeed, they might not have a single one. Finally, objective morality does not even exist, so the idea that a proposition is morally wrong because of poor definitions is not true (not accurate to our experiences). Poor definitions do not discredit descriptive propositions either; they are still going to be accurate or inaccurate to our experiences, whether they are properly defined or not.
