Jim Vickrey

Alabama Voices

As a retired professor of argumentation, debate and rhetoric, who’s read and heard good and bad arguments in the course of teaching and heading organizational units of universities, as well as practicing appellate law, I cannot help myself. In the face of confronting the sites and sounds of poor argumentation, I have to respond. Take the cases of some recent “Alabama Voices” columns. Please.

The two most prominent rhetorical deficiencies tying “voices” transcripts to one another are their over-dependence on undefined terms on and their over-reliance on unstated, unproven assumptions. Consider the latter first, for the former is included within it.

Perhaps the most common example of over-reliance on unstated, unproven assumptions, a characteristic of countless letters to the editor as well, is the pro-life advocate’s assumption – without any proof whatsoever – that the abortion of a multi-celled, human entity at any stage of gestation, by whatever name, always involves the killing of a “human being” and a violation of the criminal laws against manslaughter and/or pre-meditated murder. As any serious student of the issue comes to realize in the course of studying it, that is not so, because the unproven premise hidden within the assumption is that “life begins at conception,” the current position of the Roman Catholic Church. For much of the past two millennia, however, that has not been the Church’s position and neither has it been the consensus view of other, Protestant churches; moreover, it was not and still may not be the view of the common law of England and America.

Until only relatively recently, the rule of thumb of church and court has been that moral and constitutionally based, protectable human life begins at “quickening,” the point in gestation at which fetal movement may be objectively detected. As the abortion debate heated up during the past half-century or so, that rough approximation gave way to doubt and extremists wanting advantage on the issue of abortion itself began to find favor with the unscientific, completely unproven and unprovable assertion that “life begins at conception,” suggesting that it had the virtue of certitude, unlike “quickening,” which varied from person to person.

What’s the problem? There is, in fact, no known or knowable “moment of conception,” or even undisputed agreement on what “conception” is. It is a process that takes hours, sometimes as long as a day before the first cell division occurs after a sperm enters an egg and no one ever knows when it occurs. That’s why it’s all be impossible for a woman and her OB-GYN to determine, much less agree on, when she became pregnant. Ask any physician WHEN any one of his patients became pregnant. He cannot tell her or you. Out goes the desired certitude. But, even if that were not so, the assumption doesn’t get one very far down the argumentative track.

Even if we all agree that “life begins at conception,” not much has been decided. We can no more define the “life” of that ubiquitous statement than we can define the “death” of the patient at the other end of the spectrum of life without vital signs.

More and more legal jurisdictions seem to be relying upon cessation of brain activity as the death marker, but it is not fool-proof – and consider this: If the quality of brain activity is the best indicator of life’s ending, then why does it not suffice as the best indicator of life’s beginning? Why doesn’t “life,” moral and constitutionally protected life, begin at the on-set of meaningful brain activity?

But, there’s a more common problem characterizing so many of the “argumentative voices” I keep hearing and/or reading. It is one of the oldest deficiencies in argumentation; yet, it is one of the easiest to fix: over-dependence on undefined terms. That problem is reflected in the discussion above. One of the best examples of it seen here and on another issue was exemplified in an Oct. 24 Advertiser op-ed column purportedly, ironically, defining “socialism,” a favorite term of a presently popular Democrat running for President, who calls himself an adherent but who does not meet classical definitions of the term.

The vast majority of political advocates in our land are as against socialism as they are against sin; but, the one is just as undefined and unclear as the other, and yet they use the terms and its various cognates too loosely to be clear, cogent or compelling. In the above-mentioned column, the author uses variations on the term almost a dozen times in the course of building up to his apparently intended climactic definition, which turns out to be a substitution of one “devil term” for another. In this case, whatever socialism may be it is bad because it is really just “liberalism,” another presently “devil term” in these parts (it didn’t used to be so). Both words MAY refer to bad things we MAY want to avoid but that is not so simply because they are called by those names.

Putting aside the proffered claims of the advocate that anything that might reasonably be labeled “socialistic” or “liberal” is per se bad (on what grounds?), the careful reader/listener must not miss the argumentative tactic in use here and in use throughout argumentation in our society: Pretend to define terms while, in actuality, re-arranging them and defining other words instead, thereby advancing the argument not one whit. What is needed is a straight-forward definition of “socialism” and it is not synonymous with “liberalism”; it is rather the name of an economic system, as are “capitalism” and “communism.” Such economic systems can be conjoined with a variety of types of governments, which are separate conceptualisms. In classical economic terms, for example, “socialism” is an economic system in which the “means of production” (major manufacturing) and related activities (mass media, medical services, transportation and the like) are owned and operated by the government.

Just because government in the U.S. provides “social security” and a variety of social services to its citizenry at national, state, and local levels – not to mention interstate highways, a standing army, and all the rest – does not make the form of government “socialism.” One might say, I suppose, that it is showing “socialistic tendencies,” but a form of “socialism” it is not.

If such distinctions were well and wisely made more often, our political debates would be easier to follow and we would be less often led down “rabbit trails” to nowhere, which leave us not only lost, but as confused as ever about the subject of our rhetorical chases. Such clarity does not end disagreement, but it does make clearer what the disagreements are really about, thereby giving us more informed opportunities to address them.

Jim Vickrey, a retired professor of argumentation, debate and rhetoric and a former university president, writes from Montgomery.