The archetype of this rhetorical perversity shines with sinister clarity in that famous judicial question: "Have you finally stopped beating and mistreating your legitimate wife?" Observe how the cognitive trap closes inexorably on the victim: if he answers affirmatively, he confesses that he committed the aggression in the past; If you deny it with a "no", you admit that the violence persists in the present. The trick consists of having welded two questions of a chronological and historical order—whether previous abuse existed and whether it has ceased—into a single proposition that does not tolerate a univocal answer. The only curative and liberating pedagogy in the face of such procedural abuse is the surgical fracture of the verbal unity: the free man is not compelled to chain himself to the monosyllable of the inquisitor, but rather has the moral imperative to tear apart the interrogation and denounce the underlying slander, exclaiming before the court that such mistreatment has never existed and that, therefore, it is meaningless to investigate its interruption.

From the syntactic trap we rise towards a pathology of dogmatic reason that has wreaked havoc on the history of casuistry and legal morality: the Fallacy of the Secundum Quid, whose classic title in Scholasticism is the argument a dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid, that is, the undue jump from a statement uttered absolutely or in its general rule towards a conclusion referring to particular circumstances that modify the essence of the case. Whoever suffers from this dialectical paralysis confuses with tragic myopia the general norm—which governs the common order but remains open to circumstantial prudence and the hierarchy of superior goods—with a universal and rigid mandate devoid of conceivable exceptions.

The Angelic Doctor and pontifical moral theology teach with unsurpassed wisdom that universal ethical commandments are applied according to the prudence of reason in the living fabric of contingency. The natural and biblical precept of not killing prohibits the murder of the innocent in its pure formulation; However, the logical Pharisee incurs the heresy of the Secundum Quid when he attempts to deduce from that general rule the immoral prohibition of the armed legitimate defense of a father to protect the honor of his home or the power of the Christian State to repel the unjust invader with the military sword. Neurologically, Dr. Ibáñez-Soto identifies this error with a failure of the orbitofrontal cortex in evaluating the changing context and an excess of cognitive rigidity; It is the opposite pole of Hasty Generalization, because while the latter inflates atypical and rare cases to proclaim an illusory general law, the Secundum Quid crushes atypical cases and collisions of duties under the weight of an abstract norm, fossilizing justice until it becomes the summum ius, summa iniuria of authoritarianism without mercy.

In this same orbit of abusive deductions, the False Argument ex Silentio and its accusatory degeneration in the Fallacy ad Ignorantiam are manifested. The legitimate argument of silence - widely revered by ecclesiastical historians and philologists - postulates that the absence of mention of an event in diplomatic documents or contemporary memories where it was imperative and natural to record it authorizes the reasonable assumption that such event did not verify its existence. However, ex silentio reasoning is perverted into sophistry when it neglects two transcendental conditions: that the documentary trail sought was necessarily obligatory to leave, and that the search has been truly exhaustive and uncontaminated.