The dark comedy Thank You For Smoking (2005) focuses on how lobbyist Nick Naylor uses crafty rhetorical tactics to promote the interests of Big Tobacco, and portions of this film can serve as an effective introduction to the distinction between rhetoric and sound argumentation. Shortly after the opening credits, we see Naylor appear on a daytime talk show called “The Joan Show” where the primary topic is whether cigarette smoking is responsible for a teenager getting lung cancer. Naylor uses a range of rhetorical tactics to get the audience on his side, but the reasoning that underlies his arguments is actually quite weak. As a result, this clip demonstrates that persuasive argumentation is not synonymous with good argumentation
Most students who enroll in lower-level philosophy courses are familiar with the concept of arguing with someone else, but few are familiar with how philosophers use the term “argument.” Even fewer are likely to know the criteria that distinguishes a good argument from a bad argument. Many will think that a good argument is one where the speaker “wins” by verbally outwitting their opponent.
This clip provides one way of helping the students understand why this is not the way we assess arguments in philosophy.
Before playing this clip, I instruct students to pay careful attention to how Naylor reasons. What strategies does he use to defend his viewpoint? What seems to be his primary goal in the conversation? Do you think his reasoning is good? After the clip concludes, I give them a minute or so to jot down any lingering thoughts they have, and then we discuss it. Usually, to give them a little more material to work with, I include another short clip from the film where Joey and his son have a hypothetical debate about what flavor of ice cream is the best.
After viewing these two clips, almost all students will agree that Naylor is a charismatic and quick-witted speaker, but most will have an intuitive suspicion that something is not quite right with what he’s saying. Some will even identify the informal fallacies he commits, such as a red herring or appeal to emotion.
Inevitably, someone will mention that Naylor seems to view the point of arguing as proving your opponent wrong.
That observation helps explain why he rarely makes an argument that directly supports his position. Rather than bring up the scientific research on the link between cigarette smoking and cancer, Naylor would rather attack the character of those who oppose smoking (committing an ad hominem in the process). Rather than discuss nutritional facts or other factors relevant to different ice cream flavors, he goes on a tangent about how he supports having freedom with respect to choosing ice cream flavors.
I use these amusing clips to teach the students two important lessons. First, the point of arguing in my classroom is to learn the truth (or at least get closer to it than we were before). In this respect, arguing is a cooperative venture rather than an adversarial one. We do not challenge others’ ideas or claims just to prove them wrong or to humiliate them, and arguing is not a competition with winners and losers.
In other words, I do not want my students to argue like Nick Naylor.
Second, whether or not an argument is persuasive does not indicate whether it is good or bad. It would be nice if good arguments were always persuasive and bad arguments were never persuasive, but it just does not work that way. Most students, even those with no prior exposure to philosophy, will have had the experience of recognizing a persuasive argument as dubious, but they may not have reflected on what this means regarding how we assess an argument’s quality.
This exercise in distinguishing between good arguments and persuasive-but-bad arguments could be useful in Introduction to Philosophy and other courses where students are being exposed to philosophical reasoning for the first time. In my own introductory courses, I tend to show these clips and conduct the corresponding exercise near the beginning of the semester. I think it’s important to convey that the point of our philosophical arguments is not just to convince others that we are right (or that our opponents are wrong); we are pursuing true answers to some very difficult questions. Discussing Naylor’s argumentative tactics also sets the stage for subsequent course material about how to craft good arguments and avoid fallacious reasoning.
These clips could also be useful in an Ancient Philosophy course as part of a larger unit on the distinction between sophistry and philosophy. Should a person like Nick Naylor be regarded as a modern day Sophist, or are there important differences between how Sophists like Protagoras and Gorgias reasoned and how Naylor reasons? Is there something morally wrong with engaging in sophistry? Presenting these questions (and similar ones) using a modern illustration like Naylor’s public appearances might prompt some deeper or more nuanced reflection of the subject from students.
I imagine other readers will think of even more creative uses of this material in their classrooms. Wherever they are put to use, my hope is that these clips from Thank You for Smoking provide an engaging way for instructors to introduce their students to the differences between good arguments and bad arguments.
Trevor Hedberg
Trevor Hedberg is a postdoctoral scholar at The Ohio State University. His research primarily focuses on issues in applied ethics, and he is the author of The Environmental Impact of Overpopulation: The Ethics of Procreation (Routledge, 2020)
Hmm….
We may be confusing noble theory with the real world of the human condition here. It seems to me that most of the time speakers at every level of training are trying to prove something as being right. And if everyone already agreed with the point being made, the speaker wouldn’t be making the argument. Thus, the speaker is in effect trying to prove someone else wrong. Hedberg is trying to prove something right too, and by doing so implying that someone else is wrong.
Hedberg makes the case that arguing is a cooperative venture, not a competitive one. Ideally yes. In reality, rarely. It might be more accurate to say that we compete with varying degrees of grace.
Here’s an experiment which might help illustrate my point. Imagine a philosophical environment, either professional or amateur, where all indications of identity were removed. Imagine that there was no way to tell who had said what. No names, no screen names, no indication of authorship of any kind. There would be no way for professionals to boost their careers, and no way for amateurs to boost their egos. There would be no way for anybody to win by demonstrating that somebody else is wrong. No way to compete.
Such a philosophical environment would likely collapse within a week.
Finally, those of us who were born to make arguments might keep in mind that to a very substantial degree no one is listening. The real world of argument is just like this blog, everybody wants to have their say, and typically won’t make the time to hear what the other fellow is saying. It’s like this all over the world of philosophy, everybody is writing, not many are reading.
And even if we were listening, and even if the arguments were carefully crafted along the lines that Hedberg suggests, even if they were sound rational arguments, it still has limited impact upon the real world. To a very significant extent, we humans don’t really listen that much to reason, but instead to authority and pain.
Evidence: The highest ranking intellectual authorities of our culture consistently ignore the most pressing existential threat to the survival of modern civilization. And so we ignore the threat too, because they are the experts, the authorities, and so they are what we listen to.
And when the pain comes we will listen to that instead, because pain trumps authority.
This is my argument. I am right, and somebody else is wrong. Welcome to the real world.