Musings: The Friend Argument [View all]

"The friend argument is an argument used by people who want to claim knowledge about and/or sympathy with a group, by referring to their "friends" belonging to this group. It is commonly used to clear and absolve oneself from suspicion of racism, xenophobia or other kinds of prejudice. It is a particular form of the "Not prejudiced, but..." statement.
Conversely, if the above argument — that "if you're close to somebody, you can't wish to do them harm" — were true, one would expect to see far fewer (read: zero) domestic abuse cases.

The friend argument is one of the laziest ways to try to worm out of accepting the responsibility for endorsing prejudice. The idea is that someone cannot be prejudiced if they have friends of that demographic; if they had a real prejudice against that full group, then none of them would be okay to hang around, and conversely, then that member of said group would no longer be their friend.

In a rather absurd example, someone can cite a specific example that excuses their general behaviour, for example "how can I be a misogynist, I love my mother."- or, in an even more absurd example "I'm not sexist- after all, all of my girlfriends have been female." While this line of reasoning might be true for someone who genuinely doesn't have a general prejudice, it isn't a good argument to prove it - and it certainly doesn't absolve someone who actually does hold such a belief. Such argumentation can be used as 'evidence' that someone is not prejudiced, but this alone does not amount to 'proof'. The underlying fallacy is that one single point of data, this one "friend," completely overrides any other bits of evidence we have to assess someone's views. This is simply not valid reasoning. The presence (or not) of a prejudice is determined by what follows the "But..." in those above examples, not what comes before.

Often, the excuse is accompanied by the fact that this hypothetical friend is "not typical" of the group being discriminated against. This would be like saying "I have a Muslim friend, he's not a typical Muslim because he doesn't fly planes into buildings," or "my friend is an atheist and he doesn't preach about it like Dawkins". This usually reveals more about where someone's prejudices towards a group stem from; anecdotal evidence, selective reporting of the "bad" ones, or existing stereotypes. The fact is, a person attempting this argument is guilty of forming a prejudice against an entire group by only looking at a few examples that confirm their views."

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Friend_argument