Aristotelian Arguments in Practice

Arguing often has a bad connotation, and I disagree with this notion; arguing well is the art of articulating a thought effectively to another party. I feel I’ve articulated myself well throughout life, but as with anything in life, there is room to improve and make your efforts more effective. Arguing well is key to avoiding miscommunications, and getting your point across clearly and respectfully; I feel this is especially necessary in controversial topics, or issues of ethics and morality. In situations where I would have to pitch contentious ideas or difficult sentiments, learning how to properly appeal to my audience helps me better communicate with them. I think this is especially true in communicating with patients about treatment options, diagnoses, or news they may be troubled to hear.

In the Fall of 2018, I took an amazing course called SAEL 200, which stood for Social Advocacy and Ethical Life. The class is designed to teach various methods of arguing topics, controversies, and issues. One of my favorite concepts that the class taught me was Aristotle’s principals of Ethos, Logos, and Pathos, representing credibility, logic, and emotion respectively. To apply this learning, our professor showed us a piece of literature that is considered highly unconventional yet equally as effective. Our assignment was to read Vaclav Havel’s 1990 New Year’s speech to the people of Czechoslovakia, and write an essay about his usage of ethos, logos, and pathos. In my essay, I aimed to illustrate the Aristotelian principals Havel used throughout. One example that particularly stood out to me was him telling his people that for decades, “statesmen and political leaders did not look or did not want to look out of the windows of their planes”. This profound statement came only three paragraphs into his address; in his first paragraph he says he doesn’t intend to lie about Czechoslovakia’s false prosperity, and Havel does not hold back in candidly telling the audience that past leaders wouldn’t acknowledge them. This resonated with me because my mother instilled a tremendous value of honesty in me; Havel demonstrated to me how honesty is not only an important character trait, but also a powerful tool in conveying a message. Havel’s audience was severely disillusioned, and the candid truth was needed for them to break through the fog to see reality, and I learned that similarly powerful Logos yields great utility in conveying a point to an audience that would otherwise be unreceptive, apathetic, or firm in their position. Later Havel uses Pathos to uplift the audience, which I feel was effective after his consistent honesty established strong ethos. After writing this essay, I was better able to identify how the Aristotelian principals, as well as better apply them to my own writing to further enhance my ability to make a compelling argument.

Artifact A: Third page of the essay showing the Aristotelian principals

The same semester I took SAEL 200, I received a mysterious invitation to interview and audition for one of my school’s oldest organizations, a literary society whose members called themselves Euphradians. The group’s purpose is to develop one another’s oratorical skill, as well as critical thinking regarding literature, art, and debate. My audition required a brief speech, and that was all the instruction I was given. Knowing that I had to stand out from other nominees, I chose to blend my basis in science with my new knowledge of Aristotle’s principals to create an unique argumentative topic . I chose a common science cliché, and put an unconventional spin on it; gene editing, but as a means to cure Malaria. My goal was to examine the morality and ethical implications of this concept, and furthermore present the topic with effective argument tactics.

Malaria is an abhorrent disease that ravages many regions of the world, particularly Western Africa to an extent that it is a normal part of life for individuals living in those regions. When considering the countless number of men, women, and children exposed to the disease, prevalence rates of the disease are astronomical, as are the mortality rates. I began my speech with various statistics to establish logos, aiming to show the severity of the disease in a quick and candid way. I then asked the members listening how they would act if they had a way to stop the disease fairly rapidly; this decision seems simple enough, but I wanted to delve into pathos more through explaining the complexities of the decision. A protein known as CAS-9 found in bacteria has given scientists the ability to make edits to genomes on small but meaningful ways. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) technology combined with CAS-9 has allowed researchers to change a mosquito’s genes so that they are unable to carry, and by extension transmit malaria. Without hosts or means of transmission, the disease would be crippled, and the health outcomes of Western Africa would significantly improve. This pathos appeal makes the genetic modification of mosquitoes seem like a no-brainer, but playing devil’s advocate to myself, I followed up with a harsh logos appeal to demonstrate the apodictic safety concerns of the technology. Gene editing in laboratories is a controlled setting, and would have a very hard time accounting for real-world environmental factors such as circadian rhythms, climate, or even a mutation that occurs with 0.001% probability. These factors paired with genetic editing enable potential risks that millions of mosquitos are likely to experience at some point. When the edited mosquitos are released into the wild and subsequently proliferate, a 0.001% chance of unforeseen mutation extrapolated over many millions of mosquitos leads to a handful mosquitos with genetic error contributing their improper genomes to their offspring. The error could be harmless, or it could be disastrous; if all mosquitoes went sterile, the food chain would be disastrously impacted, or alternatively, the mosquitos would become able to transmit Malaria (or a different disease) more readily than before. With the numerous uncertainties that could make the situation better or much worse, this level of unpredictability is unacceptable when large populations will be caught in the middle. Thus, I argued that it is unethical to use this technology now without it being fully tested.

Artifact B: Concluding paragraph of my speech to the Euphradian Society

Arguing well is important to communicating well in life, and I connected the lessons SAEL 200 taught me to effectively delivering my audition speech to the Euphradians. You can speak to any audience, but speaking to them in a way that deliberately appeals to Ethos, Logos, and Pathos is what I feel helped me stand out. These skills are also important to my future goals of being a doctor, as science has a heavy basis in morality and ethics, and being able to connect the two is imperative. This could be exampled by a doctor advocating for a particular treatment option to a patient’s family, whom are apprehensive to the treatment even though the doctor knows the science behind it will work. The doctor has to use their Ethos (credibility) to convey why they are confident in the procedure (Logos), and why it will help the patient’s health improve so they can get back to their loved ones (Pathos).