Beliefs, Commitments, and Ad Baculum Arguments

Typically, an ad baculum argument is one where an arguer threatens a respondent in order to induce them to adopt a standpoint. It is a fallacy, a common account goes, because the power to impose a standpoint is irrelevant to its truth or acceptability. However, fallacies, if they are to be anything, ought at a minimum to be persuasive, and it is hard to see how an ad baculum might persuade. Employing an ad baculum just underscores how terrible someone’s reasons are. Despite this, cases of fallacious ad baculum arguments seem to exist, and this is a fact that requires some explanation. This paper offers an account where the real target of an ad baculum is an audience downstream from the initial ad baculum exchange. This means that the ad baculum consists of misrepresenting the quality of evidence by means of the forced adoption of a particular standpoint.