Monday, November 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/05/magazine/the-singer-solution-to-world-poverty.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
So I had to read this article for my College Writing II class and I was wondering what you guys thought about it. A lot of the follow up questions to the article were about agreeing with the author and I couldn't get myself to decide one way or another. It's a long article but it's pretty interesting. What do you think?
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That is a long article. Maybe it could have been shorter and less light a book and more like a newspaper article. But who I am to tell a NYT writer how to write. I think he is exploiting that story and actually advertising the problems. But I think if we are detecting fallacies, that there are parts that appeal to the masses, or appeal to the people or whatever. Do you see that?
ReplyDeleteI couldn't help but blog about this too. I thought it was also an Appeal to Vanity - as in 'You don't want to be like [x people] so you should do [y]'
ReplyDeleteI agree with what both of you said. It definitely seems like ad populum indirect, playing on the reader's emotions, kind of like a guilt trip. I also agree with the appeal to vanity. He is definitely pushy about making you feel like you should be donating everything above $30,000.
ReplyDeleteThe appeal is to compassion and empathy, not vanity, and this appeal is not, I think, fallacious.
ReplyDeleteThere are serious problems with Singer's famous argument, but figuring out what they are is a bit more difficult than identifying a simple fallacy. I think it's a great challenge to all of us, and helps us think more seriously about our life choices.
I agree that it is a challenge. It was a really interesting topic to think about. It really made me question what I actually believe and what my morals are. It's not the easiest thing to think about.
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