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"To be intellectually honest requires that you apply the same standards to your own thinking that you would apply to others’. You’re holding yourself to the same standards of reasoning and consistency and evidence-based thinking that you hold others to. You’re not pointing out fallacies in other people’s arguments that you don’t notice or are unwilling to see in your own. So it’s a consistency across the board in how you judge the merits of arguments. It’s the only way of thinking about the world that scales and becomes universalisable, and it’s the only way of thinking about the world that’s not dependent on you being you and me being me. It’s one of those things where if I gave you a series of claims and their justifications, a page of claims about the environment, say, or the dangers of technological innovation, and I gave you those arguments and you read them, and you found them valid, but then you turn the page and you see that this is a long quotation from the Unabomber, right? You can’t suddenly say that they are invalid because the Unabomber said them. This is an experiment that many people have done. There are at least two books I’ve seen where you see a long quote that makes a lot of sense and then you turn the page and you see it’s attributed to Ted Kazinsky, the Unabomber, and then all of a sudden you’re brought up short and the effect that’s achieved is that the reader is left thinking “Jesus, I was just agreeing with the Unabomber! What does that say about me?” But what it can’t say is that the arguments are illegitimate because the Unabomber said them. And that’s the move that’s so often at the back of what we’re calling intellectual dishonesty.

It’s that you are attacking the person rather than the evidentiary or logical claims being made as though that were a surrogate for having a better argument against your opponent. Just calling someone a racist is not an argument, right? It’s not even proof that they’re a racist, and it’s certainly not an argument against whatever they’re claiming about the dangers of immigration or having an open borders policy, right, in Europe, say, or whatever the case may be. "