Sign-Up for Mid-Term Office Hour Marathon

Tuesday, November 2, 2021

12.00 Barrett

12.30 Anna

1.00 Cheo

1.30 England

2.00 Bells

2.30 Eri

3.00 Kellen

3.30 Soheil

Mid-Term Precis Assignment and the Toulmin Schema

 For your mid-term assignment, I am expecting everybody to hand in a 2-3pp. precis next Friday (October 23, 2021) summarizing the key moves of an argument you encountered in one of the assigned texts for our course together so far. I am providing you with a written description of the Toulmin schema which we discussed at length at the beginning of yesterday’s lecture to help facilitate your efforts.

As I said in class this week, a “precis” is simply the concise recapitulation of a complex argument. You are expected to capture what you take to be the argument and its essential elements for any one of the texts assigned in class so far. The purpose of the precis is not to argue for an interpretation of the work you choose, but to summarize in your own words what you take to be the argument of the work you choose. Reproducing your chosen text's argument will involve identifying what you take to be its thesis, any qualification or exceptions to that thesis, definitions of terms, supportive reasons and data, implicit warrants, and efforts to anticipate and circumvent objections. You may also want to discuss the illustrative force of metaphors and other figures.

Since so many of these elements are also at the heart of the Toulmin analysis of argument we discussed this week, I am asking that you apply a simple Toulmin Schema to your chosen text, identifying as many elements in your chosen argument as seem useful (do not worry if not all of the elements of the Schema we discussed appear to be in evidence in your chosen text, that happens all the time). In highly simplified terms, the Toulmin schema models an argument in terms familiar from the adversarial way arguments play out in courtrooms and similar settings, but useful for understanding all sorts of argumentative discourse as well. The Toulmin schema distinguishes three basic functions in an effective argument:

I. The Claim

a. Thesis

b. Qualification of the thesis

c. Exceptions to the thesis?

II. The Support (of the Claim)

a. Reasons

b. Data/Evidence

c. Warrants (implicit general assumptions on which explicit reasons and conclusions depend)

III. The Refutation (of anticipated objections to the Claim and its Support)

a. Anticipation of Objections

b. Efforts to Rebut these Objections

c. Efforts to Circumvent these Objections

(Note: these are not YOUR objections to the argument, but the author's effort to respond to objections they anticipate.)

In class, I illustrated the elements of the Toulmin Schema by applying them to parts of a simple editorial argument about banning (nonhuman) animal testing of cosmetics. I’ll reproduce that example in case you didn’t get it in your notes already:

Congress should ban animal research. [thesis] More than a million nonhuman animals are killed in cosmetic company labs each year. [data] Non-harmful alternatives usually exist but are more costly. [evidence… for:] Cosmetic companies only test on animals to save money. [reason] ***This is an unstated/implicit [warrant]: The well-being of nonhuman animals matters more than corporate profits.*** After providing sound scientific result for centuries, however, perhaps some would argue that a complete ban may go too far for now -- perhaps it should not apply to life-saving medical research for which no non-harmful alternative means seem yet available? [anticipation of objections] And so: Congress should ban MOST [qualification] animal research, UNLESS it is the only way to save lives. [exception]

I hope the Schema will be a useful guide to organize and clarify your precis. Good luck and remember to ask me any questions that might occur to you!

PS: Just in case you were looking for more practice with the Toulmin Schema, here is a short essay written by a bioethicist. This is an argument I disagree with quite vehemently but I think Toulmin clarifies how it operates.

William F. May, Rising to the Occasion of Our Death

For many parents, a Volkswagen van is associated with putting children to sleep on a camping trip.  Jack Kevorkian, a Detroit pathologist, has now linked the van with the veterinarian's meaning of "putting to sleep." Kevorkian conducted a dinner interview with Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old Alzheimer's patient, and her husband and then agreed to help her commit suicide in his VW van.  Kevorkian pressed beyond the more generally accepted practice of passive euthanasia (allowing a patient to die by withholding or withdrawing treatment) to active euthanasia (killing for mercy).

     Kevorkian, moreover, did not comply with the strict regulations that govern active euthanasia in, for example, the Netherlands. Holland requires that death be imminent (Adkins had beaten her son in tennis just a few days earlier); it demands a more professional review of the medical evidence and the patient's resolution than a dinner interview with a physician (who is a stranger and who does not treat patients) permits; and it calls for the final, endorsing signatures of two doctors.

     So Kevorkian-bashing is easy. But the question remains: Should we develop a judicious, regulated social policy permitting voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill? Some moralists argue that the distinction between allowing to die and killing for mercy is petty quibbling over technique. Since the patient in any event dies -- whether by acts of omission or commission -- the route to death doesn't really matter. The way modern procedures have made dying at the hands of experts and their machines such a prolonged and painful business has further fueled the euthanasia movement, which asserts not simply the right to die but the right to be killed.

     But other moralists believe that there is an important moral distinction between allowing to die and mercy killing. The euthanasia movement, these critics contend, wants to engineer death rather than face dying. Euthanasia would bypass dying to make one dead as quickly as possible. It aims to relieve suffering by knocking out the interval between life and death. It solves the problem of suffering by eliminating the sufferer.

     The impulse behind the euthanasia movement is understandable in an age when dying has become such an inhumanly endless business.  But the movement may fail to appreciate our human capacity to rise to the occasion of our death.  The best death is not always the sudden death.  Those forewarned of death and given time to prepare for it have time to engage in acts of reconciliation.  Also, advanced grieving by those about to be bereaved may ease some of their pain.  Psychiatrists have observed that those who lose a loved one accidentally have a more difficult time recovering from the loss than those who have suffered through an extended period of illness before the death.  Those who have lost a close relative by accident are more likely to experience what Geoffrey Gorer has called limitless grief.  The community, moreover, may need its aged and dependent, its sick and its dying, and the virtues which they sometimes evince -- the virtues of justice and love manifest in the agents of care.

     On the whole, our social policy should allow terminal patients to die but it should not regularize killing for mercy. Such a policy would recognize and respect that moment in illness when it no longer makes sense to bend every effort to cure or to prolong life and when one must allow patients to do their own dying. This policy seems most consonant with the obligations of the community to care and of the patient to finish his or her course.

     Advocates of active euthanasia appeal to the principle of patient autonomy -- as the use of the phrase "voluntary euthanasia" indicates. But emphasis on the patient's right to determine his or her destiny often harbors an extremely naïve view of the uncoerced nature of the decision. Patients who plead to be put to death hardly make unforced decisions if the terms and conditions under which they receive care already nudge them in the direction of the exit. If the elderly have stumbled around in their apartments, alone and frightened for years warehoused in geriatrics barracks, then the decision to be killed for mercy hardly reflects an uncoerced decision. The alternative may be so wretched as to push patients toward this escape. It is a huge irony and, in some cases, hypocrisy to talk suddenly about a compassionate killing when the aging and dying may have been starved for compassion for many years. To put it bluntly, a country has not earned the moral right to kill for mercy unless it has already sustained and supported life mercifully. Otherwise we kill for compassion only to reduce the demands on our compassion. This statement does not charge a given doctor or family member with impure motives. I am concerned here not with the individual case but with the cumulative impact of a social policy.

     I can, to be sure, imagine rare circumstances in which I hope I would have the courage to kill for mercy -- when the patient is utterly beyond human care, terminal, and in excruciating pain. A neurosurgeon once showed a group of physicians and an ethicist the picture of a Vietnam casualty who had lost all four limbs in a landmine explosion. The catastrophe had reduced the soldier to a trunk with his face transfixed in horror.  On the battlefield I would hope that I would have the courage to kill the sufferer with mercy.

     But hard cases do not always make good laws or wise social policies. Regularized mercy killings would too quickly relieve the community of its obligation to provide good care. Further, we should not always expect the law to provide us with full protection and coverage for what, in rare circumstances, we may morally need to do. Sometimes the moral life calls us out into a no-man's-land where we cannot expect total security and protection under the law. But no one said that the moral life is easy. (1990)

My personal reading through Toulmin:

I personally choose this as the thesis: “our social policy should allow terminal patients to die but it should not regularize killing for mercy.” “On the whole,” qualifies it. 

The support for the argument comes mostly in this paragraph, full of reasons, data, and evidence: “The best death is not always the sudden death.  Those forewarned of death and given time to prepare for it have time to engage in acts of reconciliation.  Also, advanced grieving by those about to be bereaved may ease some of their pain.  Psychiatrists have observed that those who lose a loved one accidentally have a more difficult time recovering from the loss than those who have suffered through an extended period of illness before the death.  Those who have lost a close relative by accident are more likely to experience what Geoffrey Gorer has called limitless grief.  The community, moreover, may need its aged and dependent, its sick and its dying, and the virtues which they sometimes evince -- the virtues of justice and love manifest in the agents of care.”

The anticipation and circumvention of objections follows from here: “Advocates of active euthanasia appeal to the principle of patient autonomy.” Remember I mentioned yesterday that there is a naïve but understandable intuition that the way to make an argument “strong” is to make a categorical assertion and then support it with as much evidence as you can pile on. But both of these intuitions are as likely to be wrong as right: A categorical assertion can be refuted with a single counterexample and undermined with the least doubt, and that makes it more brittle than strong. Similarly, the impulse to simply provide an orgy of evidence for your position may be less compelling argumentatively than taking the time to grant obvious objections to your argument and respond to them effectively in advance. This isn’t given voice to opponents so much as granting the real complexity of your object and revealing the personal stakes of your position. As I said, I don’t happen to agree with this argument – I think “patient autonomy” matters more than the author does. But in documenting how “patient autonomy” is often an illusion in capitalist societies the author provided what was to me the strongest and most compelling part of his argument. 

I think an implicit warrant of this piece is that “what a person wants to do with their own body (including ending it on their own terms when they feel that life is no longer worth living because of intense suffering) matters less than what I, William May, decide is better for society.” I think it is easy to see why this warrant remains implicit.

That second to last paragraph declaring “I hope I would have the courage to kill for mercy -- when the patient is utterly beyond human care, terminal, and in excruciating pain” sounds like an exception, but notice that it isn’t. The thesis is that there should be no legal form of euthanasia. In this “exception” May doesn’t argue that it should be legal in such extreme cases, he is saying it should remain illegal but he hopes activists will be willing to break the law and be punished as criminals for breaking a law he still defends even when he thinks it is so cruel he “hopes” he would be willing to break it!

Of course, your own application of the Toulmin Schema may lead to different choices and a different focus and interpretation. That is good news: the schema clarifies your reading but it doesn’t guarantee that there is only one good or meaningful way to interpret a text! Hope all this helps. Any questions or problems at all, as always, please e-mail me or talk to me after class, or we can schedule an office hour in person or via zoom to talk it through.