The morality of Debating - In Defense of Sophistry

Many people, both inside and outside the debating community feel a sort of moral unease about debating. People have remarked this when I tell them I debate, and I know debaters who are worried it has made them worse people.

This obviously doesn't come from a utilitarian judgement of the consequences of debating, but a gut feeling that there is something wrong or dishonest about arguing for things that you don't believe in and trying to make yourself as good at that as possible.

This feeling isn't confined to debating. Society feels uncomfortable about lawyers, for their willingness to manipulate facts and defend the guilty, and sales jobs are generally considered slightly sleazy.

Plato offers a POI

And this discomfort isn’t restricted to our current time and culture, it stretches back to the origins of the western intellectual tradition in ancient Greece. Plato’s dialogues[1] tell the story of our hero Socrates, the bringer of truth and logical thinking, father of Philosophy, and his greatest enemies the Sophists.

The Sophists would teach young Athenian gentlemen the dark arts of argument and rhetoric, with the intention of letting them do better in Politics and society at large (in Athens all important decisions were made by popular assembly of the citizens, so being able to speak well literally gave you the power to kill your enemies). And worst of all, for Socrates, the Sophists charged for their teaching.[2]

Socrates decried sophism as the art of making the lesser argument seem the stronger,[3] by deliberately using fallacious reasoning and rhetorical trickery, and believed it to be the enemy of truth (and therefore morality and all other nice things). To Socrates a true Philosopher (a literal lover of wisdom) should use rational argument as a method for seeking the truth of things.

In a weird way I’ve ended up being the modern equivalent of a Sophist. I teach young people how to argue for a living, seeking to make them more persuasive with no regard to truth. I even sell it to them on the basis it will allow them to bluff their way through interviews and meetings. Competitive debating makes people better and better at manipulating the truth to whatever end they are assigned. We train people to never compromise on a position, to treat an argument as about winning and losing, not the pursuit of truth.

So am I a bad person? Is everyone who engages in debating?