Inaugurating the domains of dialectical cowardice, we face the Fallacy of Avoiding the Burden of Proof, a serious transgression that violates the formal equity of all reasoned debate. Whoever commits this infraction utters statements without providing the slightest evidentiary basis or has the audacity to demand that the interlocutor be the one to prove the falsehood of what was proclaimed. Classical and canon law founded on Roman wisdom the perennial axiom: Probat qui dicit, non qui negat; The demonstrative obligation falls on those who state a positive proposition and alter the state of the matter, never on those who limit themselves to maintaining the presumption of normality. Neurobiology explains this slamming of the door on dialogue through the concept of voluntary mental deafness, a state of ideological shielding in which the subject deactivates auditory and semantic receptivity to protect their dogmatism from the painful metabolic effort that would be required to rationally justify their preconceptions. Avoiding the burden of proof constitutes the root that feeds gratuitous assertion, personal grievance and authoritarian dogmatism.

Close to this evasion is the famous scholastic maneuver known as Ignoratio Elenchi or Fallacy of Avoiding the Question, a strategy of dialectical distraction that consists of proving or discussing a thesis completely different from the one that forms the contentious object of the debate. When the arguer's brain notices the weakness of his premises in the central terrain of the controversy, he activates an evasive defense mechanism that moves the discussion to a parallel plane where his rhetoric can shine without risk of refutation. The wisdom of the Spanish people crystallized this mischief in that immortal exchange in which, when asked about the origin of the road, the traveler responds by proclaiming the beauty of the apples he carries in his saddlebag.

In parliamentary life and in the courts, this trick becomes what the thinker Jeremy Bentham baptized as the shield of prevaricators. If a court debates the material guilt of a defendant in a serious crime, the fallacious prosecutor avoids the discussion about the forensic evidence of authorship to deliver a passionate oratory piece about the moral gravity of the crime committed; No one in the room disputes the evil of the act, but by moving the audience with the horror of the offense, the absence of proof against the accused is camouflaged. Similarly, when a public official is required to account for the illegality of the procedure with which he awarded a project, he will respond with glowing praise for the community utility of the hospital built, diverting his gaze from the legal vice to the goodness of the material end. This mother fallacy engenders within it the maneuvers of the False Herring and the madness of the sophistry of sentimental distraction.