Hello, dear friend, you can consult us at any time if you have any questions, add WeChat: daixieit

PHILO103 – 23G: Assignment 2

Here is a letter to the New Zealand Herald about criticism of the new National-led government’s move to repeal the previous government’s anti-smoking legislation in order to pay for tax cuts.

[Ayesha Verrall was Health Minister in the previous (Labour) government.]

A matter of choice

So Ayesha Verrall is disgusted National “aims to fund its tax cuts through enabling more children to start smoking”. Under the Labour Government vaping was widely touted as a way to quit smoking, and that it was not for children.

But Labour with its lax laws around vaping actually enabled young children to start vaping and consequently become addicted. Pot, kettle comes to mind.

We all have a free choice and whether a person starts smoking or, as we’ve seen, vaping, that’s entirely their choice.

LK, Warkworth

You may find it helpful to read this article from The Guardian, to understand more about the context of LK’s letter:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/27/new-zealand-scraps-world-first-smoking-generation-ban-to-fund-tax-cuts

Note that the Guardian article is just background: the argument that you are assessing is the one contained in LK’s letter to the Herald. You will have to think about what the main conclusion is and what premises are supposed to lead to it: you may have to omit irrelevant material, rephase what’s there, and/or add unstated premises.

Instructions

Write an argument assessment report of LK’s main argument. That is, follow the steps below in order to reconstruct the main argument and assess it.

Your argument assessment report should have the following sections:

1. Reconstruction of the argument in standard form.

2. An explanation of that reconstruction. This should give a justification for the details of the final reconstruction, including the reason material was omitted, phrasing, any implicit premises added, and other features of your reconstruction.

3. A description of the structure of the argument (including an argument tree diagram).

4. A determination of whether the argument is valid or strong (or neither), and why.

5. An assessment of the truth of the premises. This should include your justification for determining them to be true or false.

6. A final determination of whether the argument is sound, cogent, or neither, and why.

When you reconstruct, you will need to extract the main argument from the text. Not all parts of the text will be relevant: look for the main points. There are examples of what argument assessment reports look like on Moodle. Note that not all sections of your report will be of equal length, and it is not necessary to devote equal attention to each matter within a section. You should give deeper discussion to what is interesting or controversial. Length of good reports vary widely, but as a rough guide, if you haven’t written at least two double spaced pages, then you probably haven’t gone into enough detail.