16 Arguments I

The last Module culminated in an assignment in which you laid out some of the reasons for and against an important public policy decision.

To give reasons for or against something is to engage in argument.

Often, of course, we use the term “argument” to mean a heated or angry exchange of words. Here, we’re using the term in another, less common but still accepted, sense. Arguments in our sense are attempts to show why a claim should be believed to be true. This is done by giving other claims that support it.

This is, for instance, how debaters understand argument, and it’s also how lawyers understand argument. Legal cases involve a claim being made: e.g., “Jones stole Smith’s wallet,” “my client is not guilty of manslaughter,” or the like. Lawyers on opposing sides in a case present their arguments for and against such claims. Trials even typically involve what are called “opening arguments” and “closing arguments” where the support for these claims are given.

Arguments work by means of inference. A given claim is inferred from others which are taken to be true. If they are true, and the given claim follows logically from them, then it is true as well. We call the inferred claim, the one whose truth we want to establish, the conclusion of the argument. The claims it is inferred from are called the premises of the argument.

Just to be clear, let’s put this into a formal definition:

• An argument is a set of claims (the premises) given to support or justify another claim (the conclusion), which is inferred from them.

When we talk about the structure of an argument, we’re referring to these different parts (premises and conclusion) and how they are connected.

In this chapter, we’re going to go quickly through all the steps for laying out an argument that we’ll be looking at in the chapters to come, where we’ll also develop techniques for analyzing whether an argument is successful or not. Having an overview to refer back to will hopefully help you make sense of each step as we go through it. We’ll work with an example similar to the one from your last short project, which actually gives us two competing arguments — in many situations that’s what we’ll be faced with, so it’s good to start with that. We’ll go through one, and then the other you’ll look at in your homework.

It’s helpful to think of a conclusion, what’s being argued for, as the answer to a question. Here we’ll take as our question: “should the state relax its social distancing guidelines?”

Putting aside nuanced ‘maybe’ or ‘it depends’ answers, each straightforward ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answer to this can be expressed by an evaluative claim:

(a) The state should relax its social distancing guidelines.

(b) The state should not relax its social distancing guidelines.

These are evaluative claims because they say what should or should not be done. They thus rely on a view about what would be good or at least better to have happen.

Let’s focus on (a). In your projects, you will have found some reasons people have been giving for relaxing social distancing requirements. Our goal is to see if these are good reasons, i.e., if we should accept claim (a) based on them.

The first step in we need to take is to outline the argument. To do this, you list each reason as a separate premise, and then put the conclusion below the premises. Doing this for (a) might get something like this (note that I’ve numbered the premises, just to make things really clear; that’s often a helpful thing to do):

Steps for Outlining an Argument

There are a couple of things you want to do when outlining an argument (this mostly applies to one you find someone else making; in a later chapter we’ll look at the same steps where the focus is more on arguments you yourself are making to represent your own view).

1. Identify the conclusion first, then the premises.
   • The conclusion will be the single claim that that the argument is trying to persuade you is true.
   • The premises will be whatever claims are offered as reasons in support of the conclusion.
2. Identify claims, both premises and conclusion, as evaluative, non-evaluative, or definitional.
   • This is because there are different sorts of support each kind of claim will need, and so different means for assessing if they are true and if they logically connect to the conclusion. If we’re dealing with non-evaluative claims, then, as Socrates recognized, we can often appeal to an objective standard of calculation or measurement, or some sort of empirical data based on such standards. But evaluative claims don’t work that way. If they express moral or ethical values, including core values, then we need to engage in a process of ethical reasoning to understand and evaluate them. (We’ll look in detail later at what ethical reasoning involves.) If they merely express a subjective opinion or personal preference, then it may not be possible to reason about them at all.
   • In the case of this argument, the first two premises are non-evaluative, but the third is evaluative. (And we already know the conclusion is evaluative.)
3. Determine which premises should go together and which should be separated. (This is covered in more detail in the Arguments III chapter.)
   • I’ve written the argument here as a single argument. And it has a certain coherence: all the premises are trying to support that one conclusion. But, notice that the first two premises point out economic effects of the policy that are, presumably, undesirable. The third premise, however, is not about economic effects at all, but is instead about the basic rights we have and the government’s obligation not to interfere with those rights. This suggests there are really two lines of reasoning packed into this argument. Though these are tied to the same conclusion, they get there by quite different paths. You can see this by considering that someone might disagree that rights are being violated, but agree that there are negative effects to businesses and workers. Or, it could be the case (hypothetically, at least), that there’s an interference with rights, but no negative economic effects. Certainly there’s no necessary connection between economic effects and infringement of rights. So, premises 1 and 2 should be grouped together as a distinct argument for the conclusion, with a separate argument for the same conclusion built off of premise 3. (See the text box below.)
4. Identify hidden/implicit/assumed premises. (This is covered in more detail in the Arguments IV chapter.)
   • This goes hand in hand with #3, and it’s maybe the toughest task of all, as it involves having to see what is not there (so, you have to exercise your logical imagination). In the previous paragraph, I said that “presumably” the economic effects stated in the first two premises are negative. But note that nowhere is that explicitly stated in the premises. So, the person making this argument is relying on a hidden or implicit premise, namely: “the state should not enforce policies that lead to bankruptcies and layoffs.” And that would actually be better separated into two, as per the first step above: “the state should not enforce policies that lead to bankruptcies” and “the state should not enforce policies that lead to layoffs.” Similarly for the argument based on rights — there’s a general evaluative claim that is lurking in the background, but which isn’t explicitly stated (see in the box below).
   • As we’ll see in the chapter on Hidden Assumptions, implicit premises often are the general rules that provide a standard we are applying in particular cases. In other words, they are what Socrates pressed Euthyphro for in their initial discussion of piety.

We can revise our initial argument now, based on these steps.

We could even split the argument on the left further, into one about bankruptcy, the other about layoffs. Given that those are both economic issues, however, it makes some sense to keep them grouped together.

Once we’ve done all this, we have arguments that are as well-formed as possible. We can then tackle the main task, the one all of this is supposed to help us with: analyzing them to see if they should persuade us to accept the conclusion.

There are two aspects to analyzing the arguments we’ve generated (which we’ll look at in detail in chapters to come). The first is to ask: if one accepts the stated premises as true, does one also need logically to accept the conclusion? This is to ask if the argument is logically valid. This is a question we can ask even if we don’t know whether the premises are true, or even if we know they are false. (This may sound weird; don’t worry, we’ll look into it soon.) If the conclusion does not logically follow from the premises, then we know the argument isn’t a good one. The conclusion may still be true, but it won’t be for the reasons given. If we are analyzing someone else’s argument, then at this point we can reject it, or ask for revision or clarification. If we are creating an argument of our own, we’ll know we need to revise it, if we hope to persuade someone.

If we do establish logical validity, then we need to ask whether the premises are in fact true. If they are, then, because we know the conclusion follows from them, we know the conclusion must be true as well. An argument that succeeds in this way we call sound. In some of the work you have ahead of you, you’ll see how this distinction between validity and soundness works, and how it is possible to have a valid argument that is nevertheless unsound (has a false conclusion).

In the course of evaluating soundness, we will inevitably have to ask questions about the truth of evaluative claims (such as the above claims about citizens’ rights). This will require we engage in evaluative reasoning (which includes ethical reasoning). What that involves we will discuss as we go. Here I’ll just reiterate a Crucial Point made a number of times already, that it’s important when we do this that we don’t immediately treat evaluative claims as ones of mere opinion or personal preference. If we do, then we are essentially throwing up your hands and saying no conversation is possible about matters of value.

We’d better hope that’s not the case, because, as the example about citizens rights shows, values shape the policies we all have to live by. And if we can’t talk about differences in value, then the only alternative is to try to force people to live by values they may not agree with, or to be subjected to the values others force on us. That may to some extent be unavoidable in a pluralistic society, where not all values can be upheld, but there’s a lot more room for conversation than we often think there is. Careful argumentation (and trying to work against our own confirmation bias) can help with this.

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If we do this same process for claim (b) above, then we will also be in a very good position to see what is really at issue between people on opposite sides of this policy dispute. Is it just disagreement about facts, which could potentially be resolvable by scientific data? Or is there a disagreement about values that needs a different approach to be resolved? Or both? And this will help us see who has the better argument, or where more conversation is needed.

The next three chapters will go into more detail on all of this. Here I’ve just presented an overview so you can get a sense of what is ahead.