Suppose you are the world's best rhetorician, and can create convincing arguments to support any conclusion. To exercise this skill, each day you pick a topic,

Suppose you are the world's best rhetorician, and can create convincing arguments to support any conclusion. To exercise this skill, each day you pick a topic, roll a die to determine what position to support, and argue for that position. These arguments are clear, concise, self-consistent, grounded in concrete observations, and emotionally persuasive. However, you could have created similarly effective arguments for another side of the debate, had the die roll gone a different way this morning. Examining somebody's motives is a way of having a meta-debate. The quantity and quality of arguments on different sides of a topic is a function not only of the correctness of one side, but also of the time invested into coming up with those arguments. If somebody has an ulterior motive to their arguments, then they may be arguing in bad faith, attempting to persuade with arguments they know to be false, in order to gain support.