Critical Analysis Of Pablo's Argument

Critical Analysis of Pablo’s Argument On 7 November 2009, Pablo Enrique Zevallos posted a link to his Facebook page concerning the distribution of H1N1 vaccines to Wall Street employees.

1

Pablo claimed that this distribution was “unbelievable” and “it [was] more outrageous to hear a defense of it”. Prior to making these remarks, Jack Gibbons had made a comment that was apparently sarcastic, although Pablo mistook it as a serious response and promptly retorted Jack’s comment. After Pablo had expressed his contempt at what was going on, Benjamin Harland decided to get involved and called Pablo out for being a “typical liberal”. A somewhat malicious conversation soon arose between the two – this 1

All pictures are retrieved from http://www.facebook.com/posted.php? id=661915093&share_id=171347962086&fragment=share_footer171347962086&comment s#share_footer171347962086.

conversation covered topics like human nature and the definition of newsworthy. At this point, I felt the need to step in and present some objections to Pablo’s argument in a more proper manner, hence my writing this critique. My primary objection concerns Pablo’s usage of “human nature”. To the left is Pablo’s mention of human nature. From what he wrote, I gather that Pablo assumes some aspects of human nature: “try[ing] to get what [one] want[s] if [one] can”, “hav[ing] more than one partner”, ‘kill[ing]”, and “hav[ing] Huntington’s Disease”. Putting the axiom that “to assume is to mak an ass out of you and me”2 aside, Pablo disregards the definition of human nature. This definition is “the psychological and social qualities that characterize humankind, esp. in contrast with other living things”3 – Pablo’s point of Huntington’s Disease is irrelevant because that, as he himself mentioned, is a genetically dominant trait. In other words, it has little to nothing to do with “psychological and social qualities” that humans possess. Furthermore, Pablo is terribly vague overall in using the term, “human nature”. He does not cite any particular influential perspective concerning the aforementioned human nature, such as philosophical naturalism, the

2

Abrahamic

view,

polytheistic

animistic

notions,

or

pantheistic

This phrase was mentioned at some point by Dr. Keller, the governing authority on what is sensible and what is not. 3 From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/human+nature.

spiritual traditions, astrological beliefs, or Platonism, Marxism, and

Freudianism

schools

of

thought.4 Towards the end of his post, Pablo diverges into morality by asking if “the fact that these things are part of human nature make them right” – by using “right” in his post, Pablo makes another assumption that any reader of this thread accepts the Catholic notion of what is (morally) “right”; coincidentally, Pablo happens to be a Catholic himself. Another fault I discovered in Pablo’s argument was when Ben brought up Morgan Stanley’s donation of vaccines to Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian. Pablo claims that the company gave the vaccines

to

“their

own

hospital”,

http://childrensnyp.org/mschony/newborn-immuniz.html

as

presenting evidence

of

“their [giving vaccines to their] own hospital”. Ben rebutted this with a passionate and sincere albeit biased response that the hospital was in fact a children’s hospital, and that the company’s name was only mentioned in the hospital name because of a large donation the company made – not because the company owned the hospital. Pablo then compares Ben’s argument to a “straw man”. Pablo misuses the term “straw man”, as Ben is not presenting 4

For further reading, please consult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature from where this list was derived.

a fallacy that is irrelevant to the discussion.5 Finally, Pablo claims that “giving vaccines to your own hospital is about as newsworthy as a teacher giving a test - it happens all the time”. Again, Pablo misuses vocabulary here as “newsworthy” is defined as “of sufficient interest to the public or a special audience to warrant press attention or coverage”6. While the example of Morgan Stanley may not be of sufficient interest to Pablo, it is definitely of sufficient interest to the public because the public presumably desires to know where vaccines are or have been so that they know they aren’t missing out. In this sense, Ben’s example is indeed “newsworthy” – in fact, it did receive press coverage.7 Moreover, Pablo compares a hospital receiving vaccines from a large donor to a teacher administering a test. The two situations are completely different, and the teacher-test analogy is by and far the most irrelevant thing in the conversation. Provided with this fact, one could accuse Pablo of using a straw man, as this part of his argument clearly meets its criteria.8 I felt compelled to write this discourse because Pablo’s arguments were quite bad on all fronts. He drifted off topic, and many of his claims held no water at all. The teacher-test analogy had zero to do with the hospital5

This statement is valid as Pablo is arguably ignorant (although I won’t be discussing this aspect about him in particular), and Ben’s example of Morgan Stanley is relevant to the discussion because the discussion is about Wall Street companies receiving vaccines before people who need them – Morgan Stanley is a company affiliated with Wall Street, and the children who visit that hospital do in fact need the vaccines as much as if not more than everyone else. 6 From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/newsworthy. 7 Morgan Stanley’s vaccine donation is mentioned in http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2009-11-05-businessees-swine-flu_N.htm. 8 This criteria is "a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic”. Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man.

vaccine issue, and the presentation of human nature was absolutely beside the point. On top of this, Pablo’s rhetoric was clumsy throughout the conversation. He needed to think much harder and to work harder at his argument, as he is much smarter than this conversation suggests. He should meet with me, and then he must scrap this argument entirely and compose a revision.

Final Grade: