Whataboutism

This is not a question but an observation from today's news.

Whataboutism is a variant of ad hominem (tu quoque), that basically says “you do it too.” (or "did it too").  With Tu Quoque, however, there may be evidence in support of the claim that the other party did it too, even though it is irrelevant to the conversation.  With Whataboutism, the claim is made without any basis for believing the other party also did it.  Both President Trump and Trump’s haters were often guilty of this.

I mention this because Whataboutism received some attention in connection with Russia/the Soviet Union’s tactic of deflecting criticism of their aggression by accusing the West of misconduct or aggression.   This is still happening now--in today’s headlines, Putin accused the West of provoking the crisis in Ukraine and accused Ukraine of committing crimes against humanity.  Similar tactics were used by Hitler in attempting to deflect from his aggressions.

This is one of those tricky ones, because when a person 'whatabouts', they're attempting to call out either what they see as hypocrisy ("you criticised me for doing X, but you did it yourself 20 years ago - what about that?") or a more important problem that they think should be tackled ("you're concerned about X, but Y is an even bigger issue - what about that?")

It should be noted that these devices, if fallacious, are relevance fallacies. The premises these arguments supply may be true.

For instance, it might well be the case that I did X 20 years ago - but it doesn't change the fact you did it today, and if we are discussing your wrongdoing, it would be a red herring to try and deflect from said wrongdoing by pointing to someone else. That is also assuming that you did not make a false equivalence between my situation and your situation (I might have had valid reasons for doing X, whereas you didn't).

Alternatively, it is possible that Y is 'more important' than X, but that does not entail X should not be spoken about or dealt with. It does not even suggest X should be dealt with only after Y (sometimes a less important problem is easier to deal with, so it could be done before the bigger, more complex problem).

Double standards do exist, however. It is not fallacious or unreasonable to merely point them out. In fact, holding them is the problem. They are arguably the result of political polarisation, where people assort themselves into 'sides' or 'teams', then relentlessly defend anything done on their side (by making spurious, irrelevant excuses for the behaviour) while denigrating the 'enemy' - even at the expense of reason, logic and evidence. People who condemn 'whataboutism' are correct to try to keep things on topic, but should consider whether the standards they hold are unfair or not - because if they are, that should certainly also be a topic.