Time to ditch the devil's advocate
Where the phrase came from, and why it isn't helpful
Hi friends,
Last week we had a general election in the UK.
With a right-wing party called Reform UK predicted to win big, I spent most of the week in tense debate with friends or getting into arguments with strangers on LinkedIn.
And as the election got closer and closer, I started to hear more and more sentences that started like this: “I’m not saying you’re wrong, but to play devil’s advocate…”
Gulp.
It got me thinking: why does the devil need any more advocates?
What exactly are we saying, when we announce we’ll generously advocate for the devil in this conversation?
And where does it even come from?
“As a concept, the devil’s advocate is incoherent. If a position is really as unpopular as the name indicates, there is no need to argue for it.” - Maya Rupert
The history of playing devil’s advocate
In her brilliant book “No Offence, But…”, Gina Martin reveals the roots of “playing devil’s advocate”.
Here’s a brief overview:
In the 16th century, being an advocate for the devil was a revered role reserved for a member of the Catholic Church.
This person was considered almost perfect in the eyes of the law. Often, martyrs, missionaries, theologians, nuns, priests, and so on, would be given the role of devil’s advocate.
The advocate of the devil played an important part in the canonisation of a saint. (The final step in declaring a dead person a saint.)
They would express opposing viewpoints on the supposed-saint-to-be, uncovering their flaws to make sure they deserve the title of a saint.
This helped the church to assess them more objectively, to make a better decision.
The role was in use until as recently as 1983. Now they’ve got a more streamlined process to canonisation (perhaps an app?)
Who plays the devil’s advocate?
Fast forward to the 21st century, and playing devil’s advocate is often a way to:
give yourself status (as the self-appointed judge of the mortals around you)
play with harmful ideas (without taking responsibility for the impact)
bait people who are more directly-affected by an issue, into having emotional reactions,
opt out of consequences (the thing is: you really can say anything you want. But you’ll get feedback. By playing devil’s advocate, people can pretend it’s just a “though experiement”)
have a bit of fun - but what’s a fun little debate for you often means debating someone else’s humanity, safety or right to exist.
I’d love to know: who’s the last person you heard play devil’s advocate?
(If you can’t remember, which friend/family member springs to mind?)
I’m willing to place a bet on the kind of identities this person has.
Because the devil’s advocate is all about playing with power dynamics: often it’s about dancing with issues like racism, ableism, sexism and classism… when you don’t experience them yourself.
Who plays the devil?
I’m not saying all white men love to play the devil’s advocate, but there are some patterns.
Gina Martin writes a lot about gender equity, and she notices the devil’s advocate crop up whenever feminism is being discussed.
It goes something like this:
Generally, we’re trained to believe that men are entitled to dominate any conversation. That we should listen to and learn from them.
Some people believe men introduce reason and logic to our discussions.
And we’re accustomed to thinking men are more informed than women - even when there’s a debate between men talking about issues they don’t experience, versus women and other genders talking abotu our own daily realities.
We’re accustomed to thinking men are more informed than women - even when talking about our own, actual, real-life, lived experience.
A lot of people associate men with knowledge, confidence and - yawn, this sexism is getting boring - credibility.
Anyway, like I said, it’s not always men.
But the people who play devil’s advocates quite often are men. Men talking about why gender-based violence really isn’t that big a deal.
Or white people saying “imagine this thought experiment for a moment, and I think you’ll agree reverse racism is a thing” (They usually follow it up with talking about something not-at-all hypothetical, which in no way establishes the existence of reverse racism).
(Gina Martin puts this down to a “deep, subconscious need to disprove that men are responsible.”)
“White CisHet men [are seen] as archetypes of intelligence and competence” - Gina Martin
Or other people with majoritised identities: not-yet-disabled folks, middle and upper-class people, CisHet people and so on.
Aren’t different perspectives helpful?
Adding more complexity or nuance to a debate is a good thing, right?
Sure.
But some people’s emotions, safety and existence are seen as up for debate.
While other people’s perspectives are taken as facts.
Minoritised people are asked to give proof of the harm they face, or treated as “trying to present themselves as perfect victims” when they’re just describing reality.
All too often, they’re ignored, when being deeply listened to could genuinely help.
Adding more complexity or nuance to a debate is a good thing, right? Absolutely. But some people’s emotions, safety and existence are seen as up for debate.
Playing devil’s advocate is a nifty way to argue an opposing viewpoint and avoid accountability.
By staging your views as a Sophisticated Thought Experiment™️, you get to engage with very real topics - like abortion, gender-affirming healthcare, justice for rape survivors - in a theoretical sense.
But they’re not theoretical. Not to the people who live these issues daily.
The devil’s advocate is a clever little trick to:
take a dismissive approach to important issues,
create space between yourself and your opinion,
preserve distance so as to avoid being challenged,
elevate your viewpoint as “above” theirs (because it’s clean, logical, rational - not sullied by “messy” emotion).
“It becomes incumbent upon the person who may otherwise be offended by the argument to […] engage with the “best” version of the argument. In turn, the other person […] is allowed to shield themselves from accountability for their argument by insisting they don’t really mean what they’re saying.” - Maya Rupert
And it forces the people who actually live these issues to provide data, logical explanations or arguments to explain what they already know is true.
For minoritised people, interacting with a devil’s advocate:
invalidates their experiences,
frames their lives as a narrative open to scrutiny, their needs as mere opinions that can be argued away,
protects and perpetuates harmful beliefs,
makes people feel seriously unsafe,
adds to the burdens that minoritised people are already hauling,
forces them to prove their humanity.
“Most often, the devil’s advocate is really saying there is something at the core of the argument that they are (perhaps ashamedly) compelled by, and so they employ a rhetorical trick allowing themselves to argue a position without ever having to hold it. This allows exploration of deep-seated racism under the guise of putting forth someone else’s argument.” - Maya Rupert
When should we play devil’s advocate?
I’m not saying there’s never a place for the devil’s advocate.
Maybe you’re discussing how to celebrate a win, or picking a few topics to focus on in a strategy, or figuring out when and where to start a programme of events.
No one’s humanity is on the line.
If you want a group of people to consciously question the options available to them, then playing devil’s advocate can inject fresh perspectives.
Impact matters. It’s the difference between helping to surface possibilities versus toying with someone else’s painful life experiences.
If you find yourself tempted to play devil’s advocate, ask yourself: will this genuinely help to uncover useful solutions?
Or am I just advocating for the devil, when the devil has more than enough advocates?
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Thanks for this interesting read! I was reminded of how schoolboys in the Renaissance were encouraged to practise "in utramque partem" debates: they had to develop coherent arguments for both sides of a question (often a bit of an outrageous one such as "should one never get married") in order to cultivate flexible minds and powerful persuasion skills with an eye for their later careers as diplomats, lawyers, and civil servants. -- I always thought it was a good thing, and that everything ought to be question-able in the sense of subject to examination, but wonder whether I should re-consider that now... perhaps it depends on the context, too? As in a schoolroom with a specific task for a specific amount of time is different from chatting in a pub? I don't know, but am mulling it over! Thanks again! 🪻