Critical Analysis of Pablo’s Argument

On 7 November 2009, Pablo Enrique Zevallos posted a link to his

Facebook page concerning the distribution of H1N1 vaccines to Wall Street

employees.

Pablo claimed that this distribution was “unbelievable” and “it [was] more

outrageous to hear a defense of it”. Prior to making these remarks, Jack

Gibbons had made a comment that was apparently sarcastic, although Pablo

mistook it as a serious response and promptly retorted Jack’s comment. After

Pablo had expressed his contempt at what was going on, Benjamin Harland

decided to get involved and called Pablo out for being a “typical liberal”. A

somewhat malicious conversation soon arose between the two – this

1
All pictures are retrieved from http://www.facebook.com/posted.php?
id=661915093&share_id=171347962086&fragment=share_footer171347962086&comment
s#share_footer171347962086.
conversation covered topics like human nature and the definition of

newsworthy. At this point, I felt the need to step in and present some

objections to Pablo’s argument in a more proper manner, hence my writing

this critique.

My primary objection concerns Pablo’s usage of “human nature”. To

the left is Pablo’s mention of human nature. From what he wrote, I gather

that Pablo assumes some aspects of human nature: “try[ing] to get what

[one] want[s] if [one] can”, “hav[ing] more than one partner”, ‘kill[ing]”, and

“hav[ing] Huntington’s Disease”. Putting the axiom that “to assume is to

mak an ass out of you and me”2 aside, Pablo disregards the definition of

human nature. This definition is “the psychological and social qualities that

characterize humankind, esp. in contrast with other living things”3 – Pablo’s

point of Huntington’s Disease is irrelevant because that, as he himself

mentioned, is a genetically dominant trait. In other words, it has little to

nothing to do with “psychological and social qualities” that humans possess.

Furthermore, Pablo is terribly vague overall in using the term, “human

nature”. He does not cite any particular influential perspective concerning

the aforementioned human nature,

such as philosophical naturalism, the

Abrahamic view, polytheistic or

animistic notions, pantheistic

2
This phrase was mentioned at some point by Dr. Keller, the governing authority on what is
sensible and what is not.
3
From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/human+nature.
spiritual traditions, astrological

beliefs, or Platonism, Marxism,

and Freudianism schools of

thought.4

Towards the end of his

post, Pablo diverges into morality

by asking if “the fact that these

things are part of human nature make them right” – by using “right” in his

post, Pablo makes another assumption that any reader of this thread accepts

the Catholic notion of what is (morally) “right”; coincidentally, Pablo happens

to be a Catholic himself.

Another fault I discovered in Pablo’s argument was when Ben brought

up Morgan Stanley’s donation of vaccines to Morgan Stanley Children's

Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian. Pablo claims that the company gave the

vaccines to “their own hospital”, presenting

http://childrensnyp.org/mschony/newborn-immuniz.html as evidence of

“their [giving vaccines to their] own hospital”. Ben rebutted this with a

passionate and sincere albeit biased response that the hospital was in fact a

children’s hospital, and that the company’s name was only mentioned in the

hospital name because of a large donation the company made – not because

the company owned the hospital. Pablo then compares Ben’s argument to a

“straw man”. Pablo misuses the term “straw man”, as Ben is not presenting

4
For further reading, please consult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature from where
this list was derived.
a fallacy that is irrelevant to the discussion.5 Finally, Pablo claims that

“giving vaccines to your own hospital is about as newsworthy as a teacher

giving a test - it happens all the time”. Again, Pablo misuses vocabulary here

as “newsworthy” is defined as “of sufficient interest to the public or a special

audience to warrant press attention or coverage”6. While the example of

Morgan Stanley may not be of sufficient interest to Pablo, it is definitely of

sufficient interest to the public because the public presumably desires to

know where vaccines are or have been so that they know they aren’t missing

out. In this sense, Ben’s example is indeed “newsworthy” – in fact, it did

receive press coverage.7 Moreover, Pablo compares a hospital receiving

vaccines from a large donor to a teacher administering a test. The two

situations are completely different, and the teacher-test analogy is by and

far the most irrelevant thing in the conversation. Provided with this fact, one

could accuse Pablo of using a straw man, as this part of his argument clearly

meets its criteria.8

I felt compelled to write this discourse because Pablo’s arguments

were quite bad on all fronts. He drifted off topic, and many of his claims held

no water at all. The teacher-test analogy had zero to do with the hospital-
5
This statement is valid as Pablo is arguably ignorant (although I won’t be discussing this
aspect about him in particular), and Ben’s example of Morgan Stanley is relevant to the
discussion because the discussion is about Wall Street companies receiving vaccines before
people who need them – Morgan Stanley is a company affiliated with Wall Street, and the
children who visit that hospital do in fact need the vaccines as much as if not more than
everyone else.
6
From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/newsworthy.
7
Morgan Stanley’s vaccine donation is mentioned in
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2009-11-05-businessees-swine-flu_N.htm.
8
This criteria is "a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert
attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention
away from the argument and to another topic”. Taken from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man.
vaccine issue, and the presentation of human nature was absolutely beside

the point. On top of this, Pablo’s rhetoric was clumsy throughout the

conversation. He needed to think much harder and to work harder at his

argument, as he is much smarter than this conversation suggests. He should

meet with me, and then he must scrap this argument entirely and compose a

revision.

Final Grade: