Text For Analysis

6.3.6 EXERCISE - emotionally charged language

In September 2001, asylum seekers from Iraq and Afghanistan were picked up by the HMAS Manoora, an Australian Navy troopship, and were taken to Nauru to have their applications for refugee status

determined. Some of the asylum seekers, who had intended to land in Australia, refused to leave the ship in Nauru. After several weeks of negotiations, they were forcibly removed from the ship by the Australian military.

Read the following articles, available in e-reserve (go to http://www.lib.mq.edu.au/resources/reserve/ and search under "PHL137" ):

"Electoral games a nation's shame" by Mark Day and

"When force is the right response" by Campbell Reid

Both of these articles were published in the Daily Telegraph in response to the Tampa crisis and the government's response. The two articles - one an opinion piece and one an editorial, present opposing viewpoints, and both use strongly emotionally charged language.

Evaluate the use of language in each case. Note the examples of emotional language, and consider whether the use of such persuasive language is appropriate. What is the factual content of each of these extracts, once the persuasive language is stripped away?

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6.4 Text For Analysis

"The case for cloning humans" by Colin Honey

available in e-reserve ( http://www.lib.mq.edu.au/resources/reserve/ ) under "PHL137".

This is a text we will return to in these notes as we gradually build up a comprehensive strategy for evaluating arguments. As a new skill is introduced, it will be applied to this argument.

To begin with, we will give an argument summary, and consider the effect of author's use of language.

6.4.1 Summary of Text

The first thing you should think about when analysing an argument is the conclusion: what does the author want you to accept? From the headline, you may initially suppose that the author's purpose is to convince readers that human cloning should be allowed, but this may be a little too strong. Remember that while headlines are often a good guide to the purpose of an argument, they can be misleading: they sometimes express a more exaggerated position than the article they precede, since their purpose is to attract

attention. In many cases the headlines of articles appearing in newspapers are not even chosen by the author of the text, but by a sub-editor, so they should not be relied on as evidence of the author's intentions.

While the author of this argument does seem to be in favour of cloning, the point of this article is not to convince readers that human cloning should be accepted. The position he adopts is a more modest one: that human cloning should not be ruled out without due consideration being given to the arguments for and against it. It would be contrary to the principle of charity to present this as an argument for cloning if the author's point is not actually that strong, since the reasoning he provides is better evidence for the weaker claim, that cloning should not be ruled out too quickly, than for the strong claim that it should be supported or allowed to go ahead.

To argue for this conclusion, the author adopts a largely negative method, in the sense that the argument consists mainly of responses to objections that have been raised against cloning. He also attempts to undermine the objections of medical scientists, by suggesting that they have ulterior motives for their rejection of cloning.

The catalyst for this article, it appears from the introduction , is the claim of Brigitte Boisselier and the Raelians (a sect who believe that humans were created by aliens via cloning) to have cloned a child in late 2002. As someone who thinks cloning should be given serious consideration, it is likely that the author does not think the public should be put off cloning by its association with such groups.

6.4.2 Summary

It is not necessary to write out a summary, but it can be useful at least to think about how the argument could be summarised briefly. Without going into detail about the actual objections considered, we could summarise the main structure of the argument as follows

The author argues that human cloning should not be ruled out without serious consideration. He argues that several common objections to cloning are unjustified, and that medical scientists' objections to reproductive cloning are probably an attempt to make stem cell research more acceptable.

6.4.3 Uses of language

The tone of the article is colloquial and informal, but generally judicious and reasonable, and largely free from emotional charge. There are, however, a few uses of language that could be noted in an evaluation of the text. Not all of these points would need to be included, but these are the sorts of things you might think about.

For example, consider the effect of the opening phrase "Human cloning will happen". This is stated as though it were a significant point in the argument, but in fact it is being used for rhetorical effect. Not only is Honey not trying to argue that human cloning will actually happen, the position is not even consistent with the argument as a whole. He later acknowledges that cloning may turn out to be impossible, so it appears that this opening is just being used to grab the attention of the audience.

Another piece of language that could be considered in an evaluation is the use of the word "cloning"

throughout the argument. The author argues that medical scientists are overemphasising the distinction between cloning human beings and stem cell research. In this text, the author goes the other way and obscures that distinction, by the use of the terms "reproductive cloning" and "therapeutic cloning" to refer to these two processes. This could be interpreted as a subtle kind of loading, as part of the author's

argument in several parts of the text is that if you are willing to accept stem cell research, you should also be willing at least to consider reproductive cloning. By linking the two linguistically, he is emphasising their similarity in a way that people who believed in one and opposed the other would not do.

A similar effect is achieved by describing twins as "naturally occurring clones", and clones as "twins". By using these words interchangeably, the author underplays the distinction between them. None of this is factually incorrect: his use of words is perfectly legitimate. To describe it as a kind of loading is just to say that it is a choice of words that presupposes a particular attitude, and would not be likely to be used by an opponent.

The article is relatively free from emotionally charged language, but what is there is again used in the comparison of stem cell research and reproductive cloning. To the extent that the author does want to distinguish between these, he is arguing that stem cell research should be considered more objectionable.

Thus he describes the process involved in stem cell research quite provocatively as "killing off embryos" and

"harvesting" cells.

The other examples of language being used for persuasive effect, which can be considered later in the evaluation of specific subarguments, are several unjustified assertions of certainty, where something is presented as being common knowledge but really is not. For example his claim regarding IVF and surrogacy that "we have come to accept both". Surrogacy, at least, is still quite controversial. More problematically, when drawing the analogy between reproductive and therapeutic cloning, the author asserts that "there is widespread agreement as to the rightness of therapeutic cloning". While it is true that stem cell research is much more widely accepted than reproductive cloning, it remains very controversial.

Not all of these points may need to be raised in an evaluation of the text, but try to be aware of anything which is being used to convince you to accept the conclusion of an argument. An argument may employ all sorts of rhetorical devices and still be a good argument when they are stripped away, but a healthy

scepticism about the use of such techniques in arguments you read and hear will help to immunise you against the influence of bad arguments.

We will return to this text for more discussion, after establishing some further principles of argument evaluation.