Of all the topics the students wrote in about, the one that they touched on most
often was vegetarianism, whether or not it's wrong to eat meat.
Lots of these arguments were extremely interesting, on both sides, but we wanted
to pick one to reflect that student interest.
So here's an argument by Gizelle Rush from South Africa.
The title is Save the World, One Steak at a Time.
You gotta like that. Meat eating can be bad for your health.
It has been conclusively linked to heart disease, cancers, and other maladies.
It's also unhealthy for our planet. Many meat production facilities Farms is a
completely misleading term. Our enormous monocultures providing ideal
breeding grounds for diseases like BSE and Avian Flu.
Bse is Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. They emit tons of chemical pollution and
greenhouse gases while using vast quantities of land.
Water and nutrients to produce only a tenth of the plant based food that would
require those same resources. Levels of meat consumption are rising
around the globe when clearly the opposite would be better.
Eat less meat, not just for yourself but for the world.
One thing that's great about this argument is its clear structure.
The first bit tells you about the effects of eating meat on your own personal
health. Then the next bits are about the effect of
eating meat on the health of the world and makes three points.
That the kinds of farms that we depend on spread diseases that affect us.
It pollutes our environment, and it produces greenhouse gases that affect
global warming. Now, the weakness is that many of these
premises need to be supported by a lot more facts.
One student, Gary Shakar, made this point in the discussion forum and cited some
studies to back up some of Gizelle's claim.
Gizelle wrote this response. My original argument included all sorts of
studies, as well as things about possible ethical concerns around meat eating.
But even in bullet form, I had over 300 words.
So I had to trim it down, radically. Well that's our fault.
We never should have expected you to address these worldwide issues that are so
complex, in only 100 words. But remember, that you need to learn to
formulate your arguments very quickly, because rarely will you have people who
are willing to listen endlessly while you spell out the details.
So it's a real skill and a valuable skill to be able to trim your aruguments down to
a 100 words. But when you do, it's always useful to
have other people on your side. And as I said, many students submitted
arguments for and against meat eating. So, let's look at one more example.
Alexander submitted this argument. Sentient animals are similar to us in some
significant ways. It says that they have nervous systems and
some conscious awareness. The principle of equal consideration of
interest guides us to treat all affected parties as if they were equal.
Animals are often treated as if they were machines in both factory farms and family
farms, where they're routinely caused immense harm.
We ought not to cause unnecessary harm to animals because pain is pain regardless of
species or magnitude, which is generally a bad thing.
So we ought to embrace a vegetarian diet because it minimizes unnecessary harm to
animals. Now what I want to do is compare
Alexander's argument to Gizelle's argument.
They agree we should eat less meat, but they give different reasons for it.
And Gizelle is very helpful not only in providing in the forums a list of all the
different arguments regarding meat eating. But also in outlining the different
reasons that people give against eating meat.
Here's her comment. The anti meat group base their arguments
on a desire to make the world better. First, less environmental damage.
Second, better health outcomes. Third, more equity and food security.
Fourth, less unethical or immoral treatment of animals.
Those are the reasons that people gave in the various arguments against eating meat.
Alexander focused on the fourth reason regarding the treatment of animals, and
Giselle focused on the first two reasons regarding personal health and the health
of the world. So what are we going to do?
We even got a bunch of different reasons for one conclusion.
Well, one possibility is to use them all, the more arguments, the better.
And then, you could put them in a branching structure.
Remember in week 3, we talked about the difference between branching structures
and joint structures an linear structures? And if these are independent reasons, it's
going to be a branching structure instead of a joint structure or a linear
structure. And we could try to use a larger argument
with a branching structure that employs all of these reasons at once, that would
be one possibility, and that's a nice strategy, but there's a problem, because
there are differences between these different kinds of reasons and the
different kinds of arguments that are given by Giselle and Alexander.
The first big difference is that Alexander argues for a stronger conclusion.
He argues that we ought to be vegetarian, but eat no meat at all, whereas Giselle
argues for a weaker conclusion, we ought to eat less meat.
And it's easier to argue for weak conclusion than for a strong conclusion,
because after all, there are a lot of different kinds of animals.
And if you're going to say we should eat no animals at all, you've got to cover
them all. But if you say we ought to eat less meat
then there's not as much to prove, and sometimes that's a good strategy.
I one of my favorite books is Ethics into Action by Peter Singer, which is about
Henry Spira, who started the animal rights movement, or is one of the people who
started the animal rights movement, and a large part of the book is about the role
of compromise. And whether it makes more sense when your
in a social movement to ask people to be purists.
Don't eat any meat at all, or to compromise, and say eat less, and that
will help animals even if it's not the perfect thing to do.
So that's always a difficult issue of strategy, whenever your trying change
peoples minds. And it's interesting here that Giselle
goes one way, and Alexander goes the other way.
For our purposes, the point is when the conclusion is weaker, then the argument
can provide more reason for that conclusion simply because the conclusion
doesn't claim as much. So Gizelle's conclusion that you ought to
eat less meat is easier to arugue for than Alexander's conclusion, that you ought to
eat no meat at all. These arugments also appeal to very
differnt premises. Alexanda bases his whole arugment on the
principle of the equal consideration of interests which guides us to treat all
affected parties as if they were equal. Now that's a very strong premise.
And some people are going to accept it, sure, but other people are going to deny
it, and they might deny it on several grounds.
First, they might say it doesn't really apply to animals cus animals are so
different from us in so many respects. After all, Alexander's first sentence in
his own argument says, sentient animals are similar to us in some significant
ways. Sure some, but that's compatible with
saying they're different in lots of other significant ways.
And so you might say, I'll buy your principle, but it doesn't apply to
animals. We should only treat things equally when
they're equal in all respects, not just in some respects.
But another response is to say, I'm not going to buy that principle at all.
Maybe you think that animals do feel pain, or at least, many animals feel pain.
Pain and that pain is similar to our pain but that doesn't mean we have to treat
them the same. Maybe we can do medical experiments on
animals, at least some animals, say, maybe mice or oysters, and not be allowed to do
the same kinds of medical experiments on humans.
So that's another way to respond to the principle, to say, actually, that
priniciple of equal treatment, when we're equal in respect of pain.
It's not a good principle and we ought to reject it.
Now I'm not saying the principle is false. Right, Alexander accepts it, a lot of
people accept it. My point is simply, that when you appeal
to a principle that has such radical implications, and that other people are
not going to apply to the situation in the same way or might reject entirely, then
your argument is not going to reach as many people.
Your audience is not going to be as wide, your arguments not going to be as
persuasive. It still might justify, and might give the
best reason for the strong conclusion that you want to reach, but a lot of people are
going to find it very questionable. And I wanted to raise this point largely
because it contrasts with Giselle's own premises, because what does Giselle appeal
to? She appeals to personal health.
She says, if you eat meat, it's going to create diseases.
Well, everybody wants to be healthy. And then she says, and if you eat meat,
there tends to be more factory farming, and that's going to pollute the
environment and create global warming. But everybody wants the environment to be
good because we all have to live in it. Not everybody's willing to sacrifice for
the environment or to work to make sure the environment doesn't get degraded, but
everybody cares about the environment because they and their children have to
live in it. So one advantage of Giselle's argument is
that she appeals to a premise, that, is going to be much more widely accepted.
Course she still has to show that meat eating has those effects on the
environment and on health. We already talked about that and the need
for more studies. But if she can make that premise apply,
then at least it's going to be a premise that fewer people in her audience are
going to reject. So, Giselle's argument has two really nice
features. First, it has a weak conclusion, that's
going to be easier to support. And second, it appeals to premises that
are. Widely accepted.
But still you might say it's not enough. It might not be enough because you want to
reach the stronger conclusion that we ought not to eat any meat at all.
And you also might think that the real reason why we shouldn't eat meat is
because we care about animals, not just because we care about ourselves.
And you also might want to add in more arguments to reach more people, because a
single argument is always going to have people who don't follow it.
And by using multiple arguments you might be able to reach more people.
So it's a real question of strategy whether you want to add additional
arguments. The more arguments you add, the more
objections your opponents can raise because they can point out weaknesses in
some of your arguments and that's going to make your overall position less persuasive
because people found flaws. If you stick to one argument there are
less flaws but you might reach fewer people.
Because they might not accept your premises.
And there's real strategy questions there, depending on the context, on the audience,
and there are no general principles I can tell you now.
But notice that at this point what are we talking about?
We're talking about persuasion, right? We're talking about how many people are
going to bee persuaded by the argument or convinced because they accept the premises
and care about the values that are being mentioned.
And persuasion is different from justification.
Both of these arguments might perfectly well justify the conclusion by giving a
good reason to accept the conclusion. The differences, however, suggest that
Giselle's, by being a weaker conclusion and more widely accepted premises, will be
more persuasive. And now you have to ask yourself whether
your purpose in presenting the argument is to persuade more people or to justify your
belief. And that's up to you.