On a practical level some good rules are:

Listen to people and answer the things they actually say; not the 'easy to shoot down' arguments you would have liked them to put forward.
Sounds obvious, but I've lost count of the number of times people have demanded I defend things I never said, on this site. Inventing straw men to defeat, is practically all most UK newspaper columnist can do.

See if you would accept the standards you are demanding of others yourself. Try the same sentence, but with your name in there. See how you like it when the 'the rights of group x must be ignored' becomes 'my rights must be ignored'.

Something is true depending on if it matches reality not because who said it.
When lawyers start attacking the witness instead of the facts; it's because the facts aren't on the lawyers side.
If you can't produce facts to back what you are saying up; you are wrong.
People are innocent till proven guilty. In the absence of evidence the assumption is innocence.
These sounds so obvious and far below the high minded arguments I'm seeing in this thread. But the standard of debate on this forum doesn't even satisfy these obvious rules in reality. Invention backed up with abuse is the norm.
qjs