User blog comment:H-Man Havoc/Fallacies Within Argumentative Discourse/@comment-743796-20110425175807/@comment-743796-20110426110339

well, like I said above, there are two types of ad hominem, abusive and circumstantial. The way they were mentioned makes Abusive much more demeaning than Circumstantial. Both were provided from my notes from the class I attended (which by the way I got an A in that class). Circumstantial happens when it happens by circumstance, for example, you'd say that a rich capitalist would support more tax breaks by virtue of how much profit he/she makes from his/her job (this is by virtue of the fact that all he/she's interested in is profit. Abusive ad hominem involves putting a person in bad faith by attacking the characteristics of the person. If I modified the example above for circumstantial, then it would be something like "don't give another tax break to this greedy person because he'd continue to exploit his workers for even more profit that such a policy would provide", and this is because the person's being attacked, rather than the person's argument. Catch my drift?