Katharina Stevens

Sometimes, instead of giving people a straightforward argument about what we think they should do regarding their personal lives, we instead tell stories about ourselves. We select these stories so that they are analogous to whatever it is that we want to address in the other person’s life, and so that they make the reasons we want to offer accessible to them. But we make it unclear whether we are intending to argue – or whether we just want to show that we can relate. In this paper, I show that according to received views in argumentation theory, such intentionally ambiguous enthymematic narrative arguments are straightforwardly bad arguments: They violate the Gricean maxim of manner and as such carry serious epistemic and moral risk. But I argue that once we account for all the applicable moral reasons, the picture becomes much more complicated. And it turns out that at least sometimes, arguments that violate the Gricean maxim of manner can be good arguments.

Sometimes, instead of giving people a straightforward argument about what we think they should do regarding their personal lives, we instead tell stories about ourselves. We select these stories so that they are analogous to whatever it is that we want to address in the other person’s life, and so that they make the reasons we want to offer accessible to them. But we make it unclear whether we are intending to argue – or whether we just want to show that we can relate. In this paper, I show that according to received views in argumentation theory, such intentionally ambiguous enthymematic narrative arguments are straightforwardly bad arguments: They violate the Gricean maxim of manner and as such carry serious epistemic and moral risk. But I argue that once we account for all the applicable moral reasons, the picture becomes much more complicated. And it turns out that at least sometimes, arguments that violate the Gricean maxim of manner can be good arguments.

Normative argumentation theory is a field dedicated to the normative study of argumentation in real-life contexts and to the development of norms meant to guide arguers in the attempt to argue well. Among argumentation theorists, there exist two widespread assumptions. First, the assumption that ideally, arguers ought to explore the reasons relevant to the topic of their interpersonal arguing without constraints. And second, the assumption that the norms of argumentation should be designed to contribute to the realization of this ideal. In this paper, I question those assumptions. I show that argumentative norms meant to realize the ideal of free exploration, freedom-to-explore norms, reliably clash with morally valuable standing norms that protect privacy, autonomy and legitimate authority. When they so clash, they generate epistemic and other morally relevant harms. I argue that normative argumentation theory ought to resolve this problem by acknowledging the potential legitimacy of standing norms even during argumentation. I show how such a change would impact fallacy theory with respect to the ad hominem and poisoning the well fallacies.

The interpersonal argumentative principle of charity is widely regarded as a legitimate norm for argumentation. Still, even a cursory look into the literature on argumentative charity reveals that charitable interpretations can easily become toxic. This means that it generates epistemic and moral losses by leading to distorting interpretations instead of preventing them, as the arguments for charity promise. This paper explores why argumentative charity becomes toxic and offers an attempt at identifying a kind of argumentative charity that fulfills the promises that make argumentative charity attractive. It does so by distinguishing three kinds of charity: Egocentric charity, which interprets the argument as strong from the interpreter’s point of view, emic charity, which interprets it as strong from the arguer’s point of view, and complex charity, which unites the two. Only complex charity can avoid toxicity.

INTRODUCTION AND CHAPTER 3 ARE OPEN ACCESS! This book offers a new approach to the theory of argumentation that conceptualizes argumentation as a fundamentally ethical activity whose norms are grounded in, and must be selected according to, moral reasons. Current normative approaches to argumentation do not treat ethics as an integral part of argumentation theory. This is at least in part due to a methodological commitment not to address internal states of the arguers, such as intentions and beliefs, which makes moral theorizing about argumentation difficult. This book presents three arguments for why ethics ought to be a central element in normative theorizing about argumentation. First, it shows that ethics is needed for providing normative argumentation theory with its foundation and for offering arguers reliable guidance for decision-making both about which norms ought to govern their arguing and how they should shape each argument they make. Second, it addresses some of the most persistent problems faced by currently dominant normative approaches to argumentation, most notably that they are only reliable under the assumption that unrealistic background conditions are fulfilled. Finally, it provides the groundwork for a systematic ethics of argumentation. It does so by showing how a function of argumentation can be justified via moral reasons and by providing the outlines for both an applied ethics of (meta-level) normative argument design and an applied role-ethics of object-level arguing. The Ethics of Argumentation is essential reading for researchers and graduate students in a wide range of disciplines-including philosophy, communication studies, linguistics, and rhetoric-who are interested in argumentation, critical thinking and social epistemology"-- Provided by publisher.

Douglas Walton’s dialectical theory of argumentation, developed in a swath of papers and several monographs, most central of which are The New Dialectic and, co-authored with Eric Krabbe, Commitment in Dialogue, is one of the most thoroughly developed, detailed and fruitful theories of argumentation available. But Walton’s dialectical theory of argumentation is valuable not only as a comprehensive framework. It also contains important insights fit to illuminate and answer questions that arise outside of his framework and that he may or may not have intended to address. Here, I will sketch how Walton’s concepts of dialogue types and dialogue shifts, which allowed him to build a highly original fallacy theory, can be used for constructing a method of argument-evaluation from a moral perspective. Walton has the goal of making it possible to evaluate argumentation without needing to attempt a determination of the arguer’s intentions, which he thinks would require too much psychological speculation. It may seem that the moral evaluation of argumentative behavior requires exactly this. However, I argue that Walton’s method of grounding argument evaluation in the goals of argumentative dialogues can be adapted by identifying moral goals of argumentation associated with harm avoidance and respect for dignity. This makes it possible to determine whether argumentative behavior is desirable or undesirable from a moral point of view without needing to inquire into an arguer’s intention. Crossing that line is only necessary if we want to determine whether moral blame should be put on the arguer.

This chapter argues that the theory of judicial interpretation standing behind Wil Waluchow’s philosophy of judicial review can best be understood with the tools of rhetorical argumentation theory. Waluchow directs supreme court judges to use a common law approach when they decide constitutional cases, but he is aware that constitutional precedent will not always be sufficient to determine the required decision in a case. If this happens, judges should turn to their Community’s Constitutional Morality (CCM) and decide according to it. CCM is determined by analyzing the moral commitments a community has made through its legal and political actions and formulating them into a coherent whole. I argue that the construction of CCM follows the same process as the construction of idealized audiences which are utilized in rhetorical branches of argumentation theory to evaluate reasoning. I then go on to develop the rhetorical theory of judicial reasoning that, I believe, should stand behind Waluchow’s approach to judicial review.

ABSTRACT Argumentation theory tends to treat the distinction between intentional and unintentional fallacies—sophisms and paralogisms—as unimportant for the evaluation of argumentation. The article author believes this is so because argumentation theory tends to be focused on the epistemic functions of argumentation and fallacious arguments pose the same threat to the production of epistemic goods whether they are intentional or not, so the distinction is not needed for the epistemic evaluation of argumentation. This article argues that argumentation has a special connection to respect for autonomy, one that enables it to also produce distinctly moral goods. Sophisms, but not paralogisms, spoil these goods. Worse—sophisms produce potentially continuing moral harms, while paralogisms do not. Therefore, the paralogism/sophism distinction should be reintegrated into argumentation theory’s evaluative toolbox.

Humility holds a modest but important place among the judicial virtues. But in spite of its growing popularity, it does not yet have a place on the ‘central judicial virtues’ lists. This paper provides an argument that judicial humility, especially institutional judicial humility, should be considered a necessary judicial virtue at least in common-law jurisdictions. This is because it is a necessary ingredient in precedent-based decisions that are fully justified from the point of view of the law and of political morality. Further, while it is sufficient that individual judges make decisions that a humble judge would have made, the judicial community must in fact be humble in order to produce fully justified common-law decisions – humility is therefore necessary as a community-virtue.

This chapter discusses slippery slope arguments that are used in the context of common-law precedent. The slippery slope argument is often treated as a fallacy. Nonetheless, using or answering slippery slope worries in legal decision-making is conspicuously common. And not only that: several authors have remarked that slippery slope arguments can often be valid, even strong, in the context of legal precedent. In this chapter, I investigate why this should be so. It is argued that there is a special type of slippery slope argument, the precedent slippery slope. Understanding its mechanism reveals why slippery slopes are so strong in the context of precedent.

Arguments involve, at minimum, attempts at presenting something that an audience will take to be a reason. Reasons, once understood, affect an addressee’s beliefs in ways that are in some significant sense outside of their direct voluntary control. Since such changes may impact the well-being, life projects, or sense of self of the addressee, they risk infringing upon their autonomy. We call this the “autonomy worry” of argumentation. In light of this worry, this paper asks whether one ought to seek an addressee’s consent before arguing with them. We first consider the view that arguing of any sort and on any topic requires consent. However, such a view is extreme, and we reject the general requirement of consent because argument contains its own internal permission structure. We find, however, that this permission structure is not always operative, and that consent may nonetheless be morally required in certain kinds of cases.

Abstract:In this paper, I show that certain parts of constitutional texts can plausibly be thought of as having a meaning that changes and evolves on its own. This idea is widely rejected, especially but not only by a group of legal theorists who subscribe to a theory of constitutional interpretation called originalism. In a recent paper, the originalist Lawrence Solum has defended the so-called “fixation thesis”, according to which the meaning of the constitutional text is fixed when it was first enacted and does not change later on. Solum rejects the idea that the meaning of the constitutional text might evolve because he cannot identify a plausible way in which any text could have an evolving meaning. I argue that there are such texts and offer folk-fairy-tales as an example. I then go on to present reasons why constitutions can plausibly be considered to be texts that, like fairy-tales, change their meanings independently.

ABSTRACT One way in which we may be able to legitimately determine the norms that will guide our arguments is by using meta-dialogues. Unfortunately, situations where meta-dialogues are actually needed are also often situations of power inequality so that arguers may feel that it is too risky to attempt initiating a meta-dialogue. I argue that argumentative smothering is a high risk here, and that we therefore cannot rely on meta-dialogues to solve the problems of determining argumentative norms.

This entry discusses precedents. A precedent is created when a decision to φ is made under a certain set of circumstances such that, if a relevantly similar set of circumstances were to occur, there would be a prima facie duty to make the corresponding decision. The entry engages with two puzzles surrounding the normative force of precedents. First, it discusses two options for the basis of this normative force: (1) the possibility that it stems from a general principle that like cases must be treated alike and (2) the possibility that it must be based on additional reasons each time. Second, it discusses two options for the determination of a specific precedent's scope: (1) that precedents establish rules so that all those cases that fall under the rule are governed by the precedent, or (2) that precedents are applied via analogical comparison, so that all relevantly similar cases are governed by the precedent.

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the debate about the strawman fallacy. It is the received view that strawmen are employed to fool not the arguer whose argument they distort, but instead a third party, an audience. I argue that strawmen that fool their victims exist and are an important variation of the strawman fallacy because of their special perniciousness. I show that those who are subject to hermeneutical lacunae or who have since forgotten parts of justifications they have provided earlier are especially vulnerable to falling for strawmen aimed at their own positions or arguments. Adversarial argumentation provides especially fertile ground for strawmen that fool their own victims, but cooperative argumentation is no fail-safe protection from them either.

In this paper I argue for a pro tanto moral duty to be charitablein argument. Further, I argue that the amount of charitable effortrequired varies depending on the type of dialogue arguers areengaged in. In non-institutionalized contexts, arguers have influ-ence over the type of dialogue that will be adopted. Arguers aretherefore responsible with respect to charity on two levels: First,they need to take reasons for charity into account when deter-mining the dialogue-type. Second, they need to invest theamount of effort towards charity required by the dialogue-type.

Some authors argue that the rule-of-law ideal gives judges a prima facie duty to provide a determinate formulation of the precedent’s general norm in all their precedent-opinions. I question that claim. I agree that judges have a duty to decide their cases based on reasons and that they should formulate these reasons in their opinions. I also agree that formulations of general norms should be the goal of common-law development and that judges have a duty to contribute to the realization of this goal. However, I argue that judges may sometimes do so better if they do not provide a determinate formulation of a general norm in their opinion. Often, judges may not feel confident that they are able to formulate a good general norm for their precedent decision, even if they believe that their decision is both correct and justifiable through argument. In this case, various reasons speak against providing a determinate formulation of a general norm, including rule-of-law reasons.

The passage of time influences the content of the law and therefore also the validity of legal arguments. This is true even for charter-arguments, despite the widely held view that constitutional law is made to last. In this paper, I investigate the reason why the sanctity-of life argument against physician assisted suicide lost its validity between the Supreme Court decision in Rodriguez v. British Columbia in 1993 and Carter v. Canada in 2015. I suggest that a rhetorical approach to argument evaluation is the best basis for a satisfying explanation.

Feminist argumentation theorists have criticized the Dominant Adversarial Model in argumentation, according to which arguers should take proponent and opponent roles and argue against one another. The model is deficient because it creates disadvantages for feminine gendered persons in a way that causes significant epistemic and practical harms. In this paper, I argue that the problem that these critics have pointed out can be generalized: whenever an arguer is given a role in the argument the associated tasks and norms of which she cannot fulfill, she is liable to suffer morally significant harms. One way to react to this problem is by requiring arguers to set up argument structures and allocate roles so that the argument will be reasons-reflective in as balanced a way as possible. However, I argue that this would create to heavy a burden. Arguers would then habitually have to take on roles that require them to divert time and energy away from the goals that they started arguing for and instead serve the goal of ideal reasons-reflectiveness. At least prima facie arguers should be able to legitimately devote their time and energy towards their own goals. This creates a problem: On the one hand, structures that create morally significant harms for some arguers should be avoided—on the other hand, arguers should be able to take argument-roles that allow them to devote themselves to their own argumentative goals. Fulfilling the second requirement for some arguers will often create the morally significant harms for their interlocutors. There are two possible solutions for this problem: first, arguers might be required to reach free, consensual agreements on the structure they will adopt for their argument and the way they will distribute argumentative roles. I reject this option as both fundamentally unfeasible and practically unrealistic, based on arguments developed by theorists like Krabbe and Jacobs. I argue that instead, we should take a liberal view on argument ethics. Arguers should abide by moral side constraints to their role taking. They should feel free to take roles that will allow them to concentrate on their argumentative goals, but only if this does not create a situation in which their interlocutors are pushed into a role that that they cannot effectively play.

If circumstances were always simple and all arguers were always exclusively concerned with cognitive improvement, arguments would probably always be cooperative. However, we have other goals and there are other arguers, so in practice the default seems to be adversarial argumentation. We naturally inhabit the heuristically helpful but cooperation-inhibiting roles of proponents and opponents. We can, however, opt for more cooperative roles. The resources of virtue argumentation theory are used to explain when proactive cooperation is permissible, advisable, and even mandatory – and also when it is not.