14 Arguments of Value
What Is Evaluation?
Evaluation arguments are a category of arguments concerned with assessing and judging the quality, value, nature, or worth of something. At their core, these arguments make claims about whether a given person, thing, concept, action, or phenomenon is good or bad, desirable or undesirable, ethical or unethical, valuable or worthless, and so on.
Evaluations require establishing clear criteria and standards by which the subject of evaluation will be scrutinized and appraised. The arguer puts forward a evaluative claim or conclusion, supported by reasoning showing how well the subject meets or violates the stated criteria and why those criteria are important measures of quality or worth.
There are two main types of evaluation arguments: ethical and categorical.
Ethical Evaluations
Ethical evaluations argue about what is morally right or wrong. They rely on fundamental assumptions about the foundations of moral reasoning.
Note that sometimes ethical evaluation claims masquerade as policy claims. On its surface, the claim “People shouldn’t lie” is a claim of policy because it’s asserting that something shouldn’t be done. However, it’s very abstract and also quite easy to rephrase as “Lying is wrong” without changing the meaning. It can be useful to experiment with different ways of stating the same claim to be sure you’re classifying your claim correctly. In particular, remember that policy claims are concrete and practical, while ethical evaluation claims are likely to be more philosophical or abstract.
Deontological vs. Consequentialist Ethics
Deontological ethics focuses on judging the morality of an action based on its adherence to moral rules or duties. It holds that some acts are intrinsically right or wrong, regardless of their consequences. Deontological principles are moral absolutes like “Don’t lie,” “Don’t steal,” and “Keep your promises.” From this view, morality flows from rationally understanding and obeying these inviolable rules. With claims based on deontological ethics, you have to provide grounds showing that subject does/does not violate the ethical principle and provide backing for the principle itself. For example:
Claim: Downloading pirated software is unethical.
Reason: Because it is stealing.
Grounds: [Evidence/explanation explaining why downloading pirated software should be considered stealing]
Warrant: People should not steal.
Backing: [Evidence/explanation showing why people should not steal]
Consequentialist ethics, instead, evaluates the morality of actions solely by their consequences and outcomes. The moral rightness is determined by the results and real-world effects, not based on predefined rules. A common consequentialist principle is utilitarianism – judging acts as moral based on whether they maximize overall human (or sentient) wellbeing and minimize suffering.
Claim: Factory-farmed meat is unethical.
Reason: Because it causes harm to the environment.
Grounds: [Evidence/explanation showing that factory-farmed meat causes harm to the environment]
Warrant: We should not cause harm to the environment.
Backing: [Evidence/explanation showing why we should not cause harm to the environment]
The warrants here reflect different ethical principles – a deontological rule against stealing, and a consequentialist focus on minimizing harm. However, you’ll probably notice that even consequentialist ethics ultimately rely on certain underlying principles about what constitutes harm.
Writing Ethical Evaluations
When constructing an argument involving ethical evaluation, you must carefully unpack and justify the moral principles and philosophical assumptions underlying your position. You also need to recognize potential objections critics may raise based on alternate ethical perspectives. For instance, a consequentialist may object to a deontological argument by questioning whether following the rule really leads to the best real-world outcome. Respectfully engage with these differing viewpoints and explain why your ethical approach is more coherent, justifiable, or better addresses the nuances of the specific situation.
If you are making a consequentialist argument, you will also need to provide evidence for your causal claims; see the chapter on Arguments of Fact for more information about that.
Categorical Evaluations
In a categorical evaluation, you assess whether something is a good or bad example of its category. You are likely already familiar with this kind of argument! Whenever you read product reviews before you buy something, you’re engaging with categorical evaluations. You also run into these when you read reviews of books, TV shows, movies, or video games.
The basic claim structure is: “X is a good/bad Y.”
Examples:
The Honda Civic is a good compact car.
Amazon is a bad corporate citizen.
The X term (the Honda Civic, Amazon) is the subject of evaluation. The “good” or “bad” is the value term. And the Y term (compact car, corporate citizen) is the category. Categories can be quite broad (e.g. “institution,” “product”) or more specific (e.g. “compact sedan,” “tech company”). The same thing can be evaluated across multiple relevant categories. You’ll need to give careful thought to which category is most appropriate for your purposes. Although you don’t have to explicitly compare the subject of your evaluation to others in the same category, that is implicitly what you are doing, so your category needs to be broad enough to contain more than just the one thing you are evaluating, but narrow enough that one could reasonably make comparisons across items in the same category.
Distinguishing Categorical Evaluations from Causal Claims
It’s important to distinguish evaluative claims from causal claims about effects or consequences. For example, “social media is bad for you” is not a categorical evaluation because “for you” is not a coherent category to evaluate. An evaluative claim needs to have a clear subject category, such as “Scrolling social media is a poor way to spend leisure time.” With this example, “way to spend leisure time” is a category. We know it’s a category because we can easily identify other things that fit into it (reading, watching TV, sleeping, exercising, socializing, etc.). All of that aside, however, if your category is that abstract, it can be difficult to create a strong argument, especially if you’re trying to shoehorn a causal argument into a categorical evaluation structure. You’re often better off making a claim where the category is a bit more concrete and understandable.
The Criteria-Match Pattern
Categorical evaluations follow a criteria-match pattern:
- Criteria: Establish criteria for what constitutes a “good” example of the category. (Note that it’s helpful to avoid thinking about your specific subject of evaluation when you do this! You’ll want to create criteria that encompass all the possibilities for the category.)
- Match: Evaluate how well the subject matches those criteria
For example, criteria for a “good compact car” might include affordability, fuel efficiency, and safety ratings. You would then assess how well a particular model like the Civic meets those standards.
The criteria effectively function as the argument’s warrants, so developing detailed, relevant criteria and being prepared to back those criteria is crucial.
When drafting:
- First, determine your ideal criteria for the category before considering the specific subject you are evaluating. List 4-7 criteria to complete the sentence “A good Y is/has . . .” (Yes, you will do criteria for a “good Y,” even if your claim is ultimately going to be that your subject is a “bad Y.”)
- Separately analyze how the subject matches each of these criteria.
- Prioritize and lead with the criteria that best support your overall claim. (If your claim is “X is a good Y,” you will focus on the criteria that X matches well. If your claim is “X is a bad Y,” you will focus on the criteria that X does not match well.)
- Set aside any criteria that don’t match your claim to address separately in a rebuttal section (see the chapter on Argument Structures).
Criteria-Match and Toulmin
The criteria-match pattern aligns well with the Toulmin model of argument:
Claim: X is a good/bad [category]
Criteria = Warrants
Match analysis = Reasons
By establishing criteria first, you’ve essentially already mapped out the warrants underlying the reasons that will support your evaluative claim. Consider the previous example of “Amazon is a bad corporate citizen.”
Some criteria for what make a good corporate citizen might be:
- A good corporate citizen effectively compensates for its impact on the environment.
- A good corporate citizen does not focus only increasing profits.
- A good corporate citizen engages in ethical business practices.
- A good corporate citizen treats employees fairly.
The match analysis for this might read:
- Amazon does not effectively compensate for its impact on the environment.
- Amazon focuses only on what improves profits.
- Amazon engages in unethical business practices.
- Amazon does not treat employees fairly.
If we approach this from a different direction by writing our claim and reasons as enthymemes, we can see how the criteria listed above are the same as the warrants generated by the enthymemes:
- Amazon is a bad corporate citizen because it doesn’t effectively compensate for its impact on the environment.
- A good corporate citizen effectively compensates for its impact on the environment.
- Amazon is a bad corporate citizen because it focuses only what improves profits.
- A good corporate citizen does not focus only shareholders and increasing profits.
- Amazon is a bad corporate citizen because it engages in unethical business practices.
- A good corporate citizen engages in ethical business practices.
- Amazon is a bad corporate citizen because it does not treat employees fairly.
- A good corporate citizen treats employees fairly.
The advantage of starting with the criteria instead of the match is that you may identify criteria that aren’t consistent with your argument. Very few things are entirely good or entirely bad, so acknowledging the good qualities in something bad, or vice versa, is important for a fully developed evaluation.
For example, what if one of my criteria is “A good corporate citizen contributes to important causes”? Amazon does do that, so that criterion contradicts my overall evaluation of them as a bad corporate citizen. I need to address that in my argument, but if I only brainstormed reasons Amazon is bad, I wouldn’t have thought of it, and my argument would be weaker.