Evaluation Argument

Imagine that you need to get a job. It is probably a very easy thing to imagine, frankly, as most college students do have jobs of some sort. Many people take what jobs they can, or can tolerate, and make the best of it. But what if you could dictate, within reason, the parameters of the job you would like? What would it have?

Ideally, it would have flexible hours, since your schedule might change every semester, and there is no telling when you might want to devote your entire weekend to studying for that big Econ test, right? It would be nice if the pay were well over minimum wage, but you recognize you are not going to get $50 an hour or anything. It might also be helpful if it were close by, so the commute was not too bad – maybe you could even do it from home? Surely you would want the job to be something safe; working as a nightwatchman in an unstable nitroglycerin plant hardly sounds relaxing or conducive to studying. That might be another perk, actually – can you study at work? So much the better. Maybe you would rather not get too dirty, either, or end your shift smelling like something unpleasant, or be so exhausted physically you have no energy for anything else. Okay, well and good; now all you have to do is go find such a job.

At the same time you are looking for a job, someone is looking for the ideal employee. Maybe this is you in a few years? Anyway, what features would our notional hiring manager seek in an applicant? Somebody who will show up for the scheduled shifts on time, probably; someone who is likely to be rarely sick or call in to work; somebody who has reliable transportation; somebody capable of learning the work and doing it well; somebody with solid references, too, perhaps. And the manager is also likely to hire someone whose mind is on the work – the last person to have this job was always studying for Econ tests . . .

We live in a world awash in evaluation. Jobs get evaluated by prospective applicants; applicants get evaluated by prospective employers. Banks evaluate loan risks; high school students evaluate college or career possibilities; commuters evaluate cars; teachers evaluate students (and at least once a semester, the students evaluate the teacher . . .).

Yes, that is right: the method of the evaluation argument is the same as for the definition, the criteria-match. The important difference this time is that we are not concerned with creating a box on the world because we already have the box. All the stuff we are dealing with is in the box, so we just have to sort it. To put it another way, we know the President is the President, but the question before us is if this person is doing a good job of being the president.

For the sake of simplicity, the terms “good” and “bad” will be used throughout this discussion, but there are any number of valid ways to evaluate something. You could write of something that is efficient or inefficient, successful or unsuccessful, safe or dangerous, and so on.

Two other points to note here:

1) An evaluation might compare two things, but evaluation arguments are not “compare and contrast” essays, so you can only judge which thing is better to the extent it meets the criteria more fully or completely, and that requires making at least two evaluations, and depending on your instructor’s assignment, you may not have the scope for that. Be cautious about using language like “A is better than B.”^[1]

2) Students often want to slip into “should” language in an evaluation, like “Because this solution is so desirable, we should enact it right away.” That might be a good way (hey, that is an evaluation, too . . . oh, man there are boxes within boxes here . . .) to conclude your essay, when the time comes to suggest a next step or larger issue, but the focus of an evaluation argument must be evaluation, not proposal, which is where the “should” belongs.

So what does “good” mean, in our sense of it? Broadly speaking, “good” has both ethical and operational aspects. These things may mix, of course, and there may be overlap in your reasons, but they are distinct enough for us to treat them separately. Your instructor may ask you to make one kind of evaluation or the other, or may just leave it up to you, in which case you want to be able to create a plan. For the moment, we will start with the ethical considerations.

You might use “good” to mean a moral quality, like a “good person” or a “good cause.” To reduce a complex field down to a paragraph or two,^[2] we can think of ethics in terms of two schools of thought: principles or consequences.

“Principles” are guidelines which are often considered timeless, immutable, or beyond passing human flaws. Many principles stem from various religious strictures; the Ten Commandments, for example, are principles by which the people were supposed to abide. The so-called “Golden Rule,” often expressed as “do to others what you would have them do to you,” is another principle. They are the rules we are supposed to follow, and the instructions we need when faced with making a decision.

Ideally, you follow the principles, even if the result is undesirable, because doing so is the right thing to do. If you only do what you profess as right when it is easy or useful, you are showing all the bravery of being safely out of range. During World War II, pacifists and conscientious objectors were often imprisoned, fined, fired from their jobs, and accused of giving passive aid to the fascists, but many of them stuck to their resistance because of sincerely and deeply held religious or moral principles. Followers of the non-violence of Gandhi or MLK, Jr. often suffered terrible violence inflicted against them, but they maintained their discipline, maintained the moral high ground, and today are remembered as heroes.

“Good,” then, would mean a principled position, held with a stalwart spirit.

On the other hand, sometimes those results are a problem. While there are any number of ways to approach this dispute, we might be able to say that when your principles cause problems for you, it is entirely your moral right to endure, if you so choose; but when your principles cause problems for other people, that gets complicated very quickly. There was a famous situation in 2006 in a US Senate race from Delaware. One of the candidates had said she would never lie – unlike those venal career politicians who lied all the time, according to her. We can agree that lying for selfish ends is wrong in principle, but are there ever any good lies? A reporter asked her, “If this were 1940s Poland, and the occupying Nazis were hunting down all the Jews in the area, and you knew there was a Jewish family hiding in the barn across the street, what would you say?” She responded, “I will not lie.” Maybe you admire her commitment to honesty, but most voters found that position too removed from the real human cost, and it was a contributing factor for her losing the election. Therefore, another way to think of “good” is by “consequences.”  This school of thought evaluates the correctness of an action not by how closely it hews to a possibly abstract principle, but by the impact it has afterward. What is the result or effect of this action? What are the consequences?

This mode of thinking is often associated with John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, and Utilitarianism – you have heard of this as “the greatest good for the greatest number.” While this phrase is often misunderstood to mean whatever the majority wants, it is better to think in terms not of wants but needs. Let us imagine a classroom with twenty students in it. Normally, under a principled system, we would recognize that we could not merely take a vote to throw that annoying guy out of the room. But suppose there was a student in the room who had a highly infectious, life-threatening disease – like bubonic plague. If the student stays, everyone in the room might become ill. In that case, while it would violate that student’s “right” to stay, we could decide it would be best if that student were removed. The need of the greater number to avoid sickness is a more desirable consequence than treating everyone equally. In a famous formulation, Garret Hardin wrote an essay called “Lifeboat Ethics,” which uses the metaphor of a lifeboat to suggest that if you can save people by getting them into the boat, you should, but when the boat threatens to become overloaded it endangers everyone in it, so the prerogative changes to preserving what can be saved – even if it means keeping others out of the boat.

A consequences-based ethical system probably will still not allow you to knock a man down and take his sandwich, but if you could demonstrate some real need – not just being “hungry,” but perhaps having a starving child, and the man can easily get himself another sandwich, there might be more moral gray area there.

“Good,” then, would mean the results of a choice leading to more desirable outcomes.

Your evaluation argument does not need to include an explicit moral component, however, and if you choose to go a different way, you are most likely to create an evaluation based in operational terms. You may recall from the definition argument that “operational” means how the thing is used, and the evaluative sense is similar. Here, we are concerned with the smooth functioning of something. If we leave the ethical considerations behind, we can talk about a “good” assassin as one who does well what assassins are supposed to do. That would admittedly be a strange case, and most things you evaluate – like cars or laptops or dogs – probably do not have an explicit moral angle.

If you need to review the steps for creating criteria-match, please scan back to the section on definition argument; because much of the actual mechanics is the same, we will not rehash it all here, but there are some important differences in coming up with the criteria, so we will begin there.

The Criteria

In the definition argument, your criteria, whether reported or stipulated, served to limit a category of things. Here, in the evaluation argument, we can assume the category, at least the general category. What you must do first when creating evaluative criteria, though, is to limit your argument to the smallest relevant category. What does that mean? Imagine the category “car.” Even within a definition that excludes things like dune buggies or souped-up golf carts, “cars” is still a massive category. Lots of cars. You have heard of the cliché, “apples to apples, not apples to oranges”? By creating smaller categories, you avoid the implications of treating very different kinds of cars in the same way. A Hyundai Elantra, a Porsche, and an Escalade are too different and any evaluations between them would have to be hedged with so many exceptions and caveats it would hardly be worth it.

If, however, you qualify your category like “car for a college student,” or “car for a busy family of five,” now we are to exclude most members of the category “car” right away, saving us a lot of work. Remember you must have an arguable claim, so avoid something like “Michael Jordan was a good pro basketball player.” It is also important that you do not refine your smallest claim down too far. You can choose “good car for a college student,” but I suppose the literal smallest category would be “good car for me, Student Studentson.” That is too small, largely because there can be no meaningful rebuttal to it, since no one is really in a position to gainsay what you are looking for in a car. You must still think in terms of categories, just smaller ones. If you feel that “good car for a college student” does not take into account where that college student lives, you probably could add “good car for a college student who lives in Minnesota” as that would still apply to many cases but be specific enough to produce useful criteria.

Now that you have the smallest relevant category, the second step is to determine the purpose or function of members of that class. What is a member of that class supposed to do? A teacher is supposed to teach, a student is supposed to learn, a monkey is supposed to . . . monkey, I guess, so everything has a purpose.  These purposes or functions are the criteria – the warrant – of your evaluation argument. We could use our above example, “good car for a college student” to try out some purposes.

The function of a good car for a college student is to:

• • Be reliable and dependable
  • Get good gas mileage
  • Be safe
  • Have room for books and other school supplies
  • Be easy or affordable to repair

There might be other criteria, of course, but these will suffice for starters. As your criteria are your warrant, explaining why these make the list becomes your backing. Why, for instance, is good gas mileage important? Beyond being good for the environment by using less fuel, it means having to gas up less often, which means saving money, which is something most college students have in short supply. You do that for all the criteria. Some of them, like “safety,” might not require a lot of backing, as no reasonable person is going to seriously question why any car should be safe, exactly, but you would need to think about somebody who might question why it needs to make this list; have an answer and some support ready to go. Other criteria, like “room for books” or “affordable to repair” need to be explained and defended a bit more, maybe, but the important thing to remember is that you must have made some sincere effort toward backing all the criteria.  

As with your definition criteria, it is important and useful to rank-order the criteria so the readers know which are the most important and so you have a means of deciding if your matches are mixed, some yes and some no. And also like your definition criteria, you can label any of the purposes as accidental, necessary, or sufficient. Those terms take on slightly different implications for an evaluation argument, but the broad strokes are still the same. An accidental criterion may or may not be present, and it is the accumulation of them which determines an argument. A necessary criterion must be present – perhaps we could say that it is necessary that a car for a college student be reliable, since suffering repeated breakdowns and missing classes and tests, etc., would be very bad. A sufficient criterion is enough to make Car X a good car for a college student – maybe being reliable is enough, regardless of any other consideration, or maybe the car should be cheap in the first place, money being something most college students do not have lying around in piles, and if it is cheap enough, it is good enough.

The process of the creation of the criteria is similar in another way, too, because you must develop positive criteria that explain what a good Y is supposed to do. There can only be a limited number of things a Y is supposed to do, but there is an infinite number of things that Y is not supposed to do. In other words, you cannot create the criteria for “a bad Y” because “bad” means not doing what X is supposed to: “bad” equals “not good.” Entertain for a moment the notion of all the things a teacher, for example, is not supposed to do. There is no end to that list, right? A bad/not good teacher might spill chili on students’ homework; make snarky comments about students’ haircuts; wear short, tight cut-offs to class; fly into insane rages; forget names; suggest Mongolia is a fictional place; insist this is the year the Dallas Cowboys win it all and grade you on your adherence; and so on forever. Keep your criteria for purposes positive and narrow; do not attempt to create negative criteria.

The Match

Once you have narrowed your Y term to the smallest relevant category and determined the purposes of members of that class, you are now ready to match your chosen specific X term to the purposes/criteria. Just as with the category, do not over-refine your X into something hyper-specific. It should be a specific, yes, but a specific like “a 2011 Hyundai Elantra” and not “the 2011 Hyundai Elantra my neighbor is selling with the primer-colored driver’s side door, the after-market cassette deck, and 97,312 miles.” Again, there will not be any appreciable counter-argument to something so particular, and that will basically leave you arguing against the void or making up straw man rebuttals. Most of the opposition you would find would be to the make/model anyway, so the value of drilling down much further is diminished. Now, if “mileage” is one of your considerations, one of your criteria, knowing how many miles the car had on it would be helpful, but you could accomplish the same thing by setting a benchmark and simply saying, “A good car for a college student would have less than 125,000 miles on it.” Explain why that number, of course, and thus assure solid backing.

You will match your X to the first purpose/criterion and ask how well X does that thing. If your first criterion is “reliable and dependable,” now you determine how closely a 2011 Hyundai Elantra is those things. What is the typical service record? How long do they last? What does AAA have to say, or the American Society of Auto Mechanics? This part of the process is the creation of the grounds, the evidence supporting your reasons. If your second criterion is “gets good gas mileage,” the reader would first need to know what “good mileage” means to your argument. Maybe you use some standard from the US Department of Transportation or Commerce or the EPA that says, “a better than average MPG for all cars is 24 and up.” Does the average 2011 Hyundai Elantra get 25 miles to the gallon? If so, you have grounds proving your match is valid. If not, then it is not a match. If your third criterion is “safe,” what does the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration say? What is the survival rate of rollover accidents? Of collisions? What does the IIHS say? What evidence can you gather to prove this match?

If your fourth criterion is “roomy enough for books and supplies,” then you need to be able to assess how much room the 2011 Elantra has – books do not take up that much space, really, but maybe you are taking an art class? Maybe your Chemistry professor has asked you all to build those baking soda volcanoes, and you have to transport it. Is an Elantra going to be able to do that? What is the cubic space of the interior? Explain why you are matching yes or no, and then provide a sufficient quantity of grounds to prove the spaciousness (relatively) of the Hyundai Elantra.  Just to finish the set, if your fifth criteria was “easy and affordable to repair,” now is the moment when you trot out your evidence that the Elantra is not an exotic car and prove that the average repair shop would be able to service the car without vast expense or waiting weeks for replacement parts.

If a 2011 Hyundai Elantra does all the things a “good car for a college student” is supposed to do, then you are justified in claiming it is, in fact, just such a good car. Before you start combing the classifieds, though, you must address rebuttal.

The Rebuttal

Because the method of Evaluation is essentially the same criteria-match as Definition, the primary work of the Conditions of Rebuttal will be similar, too. It is possible to imagine an opponent who disputes your criteria/purposes for a “good car for a college student.” We did mention cost and mileage, but notice that neither was actually in the criteria. Why not? Surely those are important? Assuming you left them out for good reasons – and not merely for the sake of convenience or brevity – explain those reasons to preempt such rebuttal. Maybe you read an article extolling the virtue of WiFi-enabled cars – with so much need for so much internet, that must be important, yes? You might allow that it would be a nice perk, sure, but it does not rise to the level of your criteria; it would be more of a luxury, you argue.

It is also likely some opponent might grant your purposes but dispute your match to the 2011 Hyundai Elantra. Yes, “safe” is important, but the Elantra isn’t safe because it is made primarily from fiberglass, and the “crumple zones” are not sufficiently dense, so in a collision or rollover, the car is likely to be seriously mangled. Defend your match; rely on your previous grounds, or find new evidence to bolster what has already been said.

A third element you must consider is someone who has some other, as yet unaddressed or unforeseen, objection. Take the contrary argument seriously; represent it fairly; concede strong points if you must, and then deal with the objections by demonstrating they are wrong or do not apply. Do not leave your opponents with the last word, as that pattern has the rhetorical effect of giving them a boost, but be sure your readers are left with your competent dismissal of the opposition. Rebuttal is a significant portion of any argument, so take it seriously and think of it as a way of expanding and deepening your claims.

There are some problems that evaluation arguments present. In the first place, you will want to think about the possibility of what is called mitigation. A “mitigating circumstance” means that something unusual or otherwise noteworthy is impacting your match of X to Y. You might think of this as an “excuse,” but it is a real sort of thing.

Imagine a scenario in which a baseball coach and the team’s general manager are debating the fate of their shortstop.  “He was terrible last year,” says the GM. “We should cut him.” “No, no,” says the coach, “his mind was elsewhere last year because his mom was sick; his wife was cheating on him with the catcher; he had injured his wrist on his glove hand; and he refused to admit he might need glasses. But now his mom is better; he and his wife are in counseling and the catcher’s been traded; his wrist is healed; and we got him some contacts. He’ll be back to his old self in no time. We should keep him.” What the manager is doing here is offering mitigation to explain why the player was so poor last year – things were not normal. Mitigation is an attempt to justify an aberration that might skew the evaluation. If it is possible there could be mitigation in your evaluation, you should be alive to it, likely to be addressed in rebuttal.

A second special consideration is usually called the problem of cost. We thought about this a little bit when we talked about the ideal car for a college student. Since college students usually do not have oodles of money lying about, just waiting to be spent, the perfect (or at least “good enough”) car is going to be less expensive rather than more, on balance. If you found a car that met all your criteria, but it was out of your price range, then it does not really matter how nice it would be to drive.

Around the world today, we have a problem with garbage, with waste, trash, refuse, call it what you will. Even some of the solutions we have to problems, like nuclear power instead of fossil fuels, cause other problems, because nuclear waste is highly dangerous for several lifetimes, and we cannot keep stuffing it in caves in Nevada forever. What will we do with the mountains of trash that are slowly choking our planet? What would a good solution to the problem of trash be? We do not have robots like Wall-E to stack it up for us, so we must think of something else. Why not load it onto rockets and fire those rockets into the Sun? It would be final – none of that trash is escaping the Sun’s gravity or heat to just hang around the solar system. Assuming the rockets did not explode over Texas or Florida and made it out of Earth’s gravity, it would be a safe solution. Complete, clean, safe – what is the problem? The cost is the problem. According to NASA, it currently costs about $10,000 to send one pound of payload into space. They are hoping to bring that down to mere tens of dollars in another thirty years or so, but until then it is thousands of dollars per pound. Do you know how much trash we would need to jettison into the Sun? Our friends at the EPA suggest that in 2018 the US alone produced 292.4 million tons of garbage (about five pounds per person per day, if you can imagine. That is $50,000 just for you, for today’s trash). A little back-of-the-envelope math tells me . . . oh, wow, that is a lot of money. In fact, to send the world’s garbage into space would cost more money than exists, so that idea, no matter how “good” it is otherwise, is a non-starter.

A third special problem is presented in the event you are trying to choose between options or you are making the case for this Thing over that Thing. One of the common ways to frame this is to think of “what is common” vs. “what is ideal.” Again, “ideal” sounds nice, but it often comes with problems we must address. There is an expression that has it, “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” and that means we cannot spend our whole lives and all our energies waiting for the perfect answer, when many good answers are already available. An issue that captures this conundrum well is the debate over a good “sex ed policy for public schools.”

After George W. Bush became president in 2001, his administration announced they would only provide federal matching funds – something countless schools count on to fund non-core classes – to school sex ed programs that were teaching “abstinence only.” As the name suggests, this approach basically says to students: Do not have sex. The Bush Administration said they were going to spend the money in this way, as was their prerogative, because it is ideal that teens do not have sex. When Barack Obama became president, in 2009, his administration announced they would fund school programs that were teaching “abstinence first.” As you might have guessed, this tactic says to students: Do not have sex – but if you are going to have sex, here are the things you need to know. Obama’s Department of Education, as was their prerogative, based their decision on the reality that teens were having sex, so they needed to be prepared.

Which program is better? And how to decide?  You may have to construct criteria that do address this question of common vs. ideal; if so, you must give some thought to which virtue you want to prioritize and be ready to explain and defend your course of action.

Organization

If we want to look at the overall organization of an evaluation argument, it might look something like this:

If you enjoyed learning about criteria-match arguments, very good. If you are looking forward to a change of pace, well, then that moment has arrived.