13 Evaluative Claims

• Star Wars is the greatest movie of all time.
• George Lucas should not have made any more Star Wars movies after Return of the Jedi.
• Health is one of the most important goods for a happy human life.
• Doctors should respect their patients’ autonomy.
• A good doctor is respectful towards their patients.
• Everyone should have the right to free health care.
• People should each have to pay for their own health care.
• Barack Obama is a great person.
• Donald Trump is a great person.
• You should treat others as you would have them treat you.
• It is better to be hated than loved.
• Panda Express has better food than Taco Bell.
• Panda Express should expand their menu to include more vegetarian options.
• We should prevent the earth from getting any warmer.
• One ought to recognize and admit when one lacks knowledge.
• Abortion is wrong.
• Every woman should have the right to have an abortion.
• Eating animals is morally wrong.
• Eating animals is morally permissible.
• Brussels sprouts are delicious.
• I like donuts. [But see the discussion in the next section for how this can also be a non-evaluative claim.]

There is a lot of diversity in the claims here. Some of these are about what the right actions or policies are, some are about personal taste, some are about moral/ethical matters, and some are about aesthetic matters. For some of the claims, it’s unlikely that dispute over them would lead to violence. Others have actually been disputed violently.

For many  of these, you probably have a view about whether you think it’s true or not.

CRUCIAL POINT #1: whether or not a claim is true is a separate issue from whether it is evaluative or non-evaluative.

CRUCIAL POINT #2:  Evaluative claims are not the same as opinion claims. See the next chapter on non-evaluative claims for more about what opinion is and isn’t. (I know I’m repeating myself here, but that’s because this is really important.)

For any of the claims on this list, you can ask, “why should I believe that?” To answer that question means providing reasons for why the claim should be believed to be true. To engage in this kind of reason-giving is to engage in argument — providing reasons (what we’ll call “premises”) for a claim (what we’ll call a “conclusion”).

Depending on the kind of value in question, the reasons will be quite different. If you ask why I think Brussels sprouts are delicious, all I can really say is that they taste good to me.  If you ask the person who says Star Wars is the greatest movie of all time why they think that, they might answer by telling you that it’s got compelling characters, innovative special effects, a classic story line, etc. There’s room for difference of opinion here, but there’s also room for rational discussion based in careful analysis of this film and others. If you ask the person who says that eating animals is morally wrong why it is, they might say that we shouldn’t cause unnecessary pain and suffering, and eating animals requires we cause them pain and suffering. Here the appeal is to values that the person making the claim thinks should be universally shared and recognized, without there being room for differences of opinion. And so on for any of these claims.

One of the key points, though, is that evaluative claims that are about a particular case or example or person or situation almost always rests on some sort of general value (a core value in the case of ethical claims). So, the person who thinks that eating animals is wrong has, among their core values, the belief that it is good to alleviate or prevent pain and suffering. The belief about eating animals applies that core value to a particular case. The person who thinks Star Wars is great has general views about the importance of characters, story line, and special effects. Those general views are used to assess Star Wars in relation to other films.

Think back also to Socrates pressing Euthyphro for a general definition of piety. That was because he wanted a “standard” he could apply to evaluate any action to see if it was pious.

That’s partly how our values work: they are general, and we apply them in particular instances to evaluate what’s good and bad and so what we should and shouldn’t do.

Ultimately these are the things we’re interested in: how we reason based on our values (applying general ideas to particular cases), and the related process of giving reasons to support the claims we take to be true. Good critical thinking requires recognizing claims, distinguishing them for the reasons that support them, and being able to provide those reasons in a cogent way.

But we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. We’ll get back to arguments in the next Module. First we need to look at what other sorts of claims there are besides evaluative ones.