There is a practice in modern public discourse that I find not merely unpersuasive but intellectually dishonest, and it is so widespread that most people no longer recognize it as a failure. It is the habit of engaging with the weakest version of an opposing argument rather than the strongest.
The name for this failure is the straw man. The remedy is what philosophers call the steel man: the deliberate construction of the most powerful, most coherent version of a position you disagree with, so that when you refute it, you have actually refuted something worth refuting.
I am here to argue that this is not optional. It is an obligation.
The Problem With Winning Easy Fights
Consider what happens in a typical public debate – on a panel, in an op-ed exchange, on a social media thread. Person A states a position. Person B does not engage with the position as stated. Instead, Person B identifies the most extreme, most poorly articulated version of a similar position held by someone else entirely, attributes it to Person A, and then demolishes it.
The audience applauds. Person B has “won.” But nothing has been accomplished, because the argument Person A actually made has not been addressed at all.
This is not a failure of rhetoric. It is a failure of intellectual courage. Engaging with the strongest version of an opposing argument carries a risk: you might not win. You might discover that the opposing position is more coherent than you assumed. You might be forced to revise your own view.
That risk is precisely what makes the exercise valuable.
How to Steel-Man
The practice requires three steps, and the difficulty increases with each one.
Step one: State the argument as its proponent would state it. Not as you would paraphrase it, not as its critics summarize it, but as the person making the argument would recognize and endorse. If you cannot do this, you do not yet understand the argument well enough to reject it.
Step two: Grant every premise that is defensible. Most arguments contain true premises and a flawed conclusion, or sound reasoning applied to a questionable starting point. Identify which parts are genuinely strong, and acknowledge them without qualification. This is not conceding defeat. This is demonstrating that your engagement is honest.
Step three: Identify the precise point of failure. Not a vague gesture at “the problem with this view,” but the specific logical step where the argument breaks. The narrower your refutation, the more devastating it is, because you have shown that you understand the argument better than most of its defenders – and you can still identify where it goes wrong.
Why This Matters Beyond the Academy
I am sometimes told that this approach is a luxury of academic philosophy, too slow and too generous for the pace of real-world debate. I reject this completely.
The reason public discourse has degraded is not that people argue too carefully. It is that they argue too carelessly. The straw man has become the default because it is fast, because it feels satisfying, and because audiences that have been trained on combat-style debate do not know the difference.
But the consequences are real. When we consistently engage with caricatures of opposing views, we lose the ability to understand what the other side actually believes and why. We stop being able to identify genuine common ground. We create an environment where being right matters less than being loud, and where the most sophisticated thinker in the room is at a disadvantage because nuance reads as weakness.
The steel man corrects all of this. Not by making debates nicer – I have no interest in niceness for its own sake – but by making them productive.
An Objection Worth Addressing
The strongest objection to the steel-man obligation runs as follows: some arguments do not deserve to be strengthened. Some positions are so harmful, so clearly motivated by bad faith, that constructing their best version lends them a legitimacy they have not earned.
I take this objection seriously. There are contexts in which engaging at length with a position can, in itself, grant that position a platform it does not merit. But I would observe that this objection applies to a far narrower range of cases than its proponents typically claim. The vast majority of arguments we encounter in public life are not beyond engagement. They are simply arguments we find inconvenient to address honestly.
The test is straightforward: if you refuse to steel-man an argument, can you articulate a principled reason for the refusal that does not reduce to “I do not want to do the work”? If you can, the refusal may be justified. If you cannot, the refusal is intellectual laziness wearing the mask of moral conviction.
The Standard I Hold
I converted fifty philosophers through argument. I did not do this by misrepresenting their positions. I did it by understanding those positions better than they did, and then showing them what they had missed.
This is the standard I hold for public discourse: not that we agree with one another, but that we take one another seriously enough to argue honestly. The steel man is not a technique. It is a minimum requirement for intellectual integrity.
If you cannot state your opponent’s position in a way they would recognize and accept, you are not ready to argue against it. Go back. Read more carefully. Think more honestly. And then come to the debate prepared to engage with the best your opponent has to offer.
That is where the real argument begins.