Ethical Argument Peer Review

Essay #3: Ethical Argument Peer Review

Essay Written By: Shelby Marsh

Essay Title: “The Unresolved Debate: Gay Marriage Legal or Not?”

1.      Thesis: Because the definition of marriage is between a man and a woman, it is immoral for us to legalize gay marriage because it will affect our future and open up options for things like polygamy and incest. Overall, when an institution is made flexible the institution is weakened.

a.      Criteria: “Procreation is very vital to our society because we need to keep the planet populated. It is very evident that same sex marriages would not be used for procreation because it is impossible for a man and man or woman and woman to procreate.”

“[…] allowing gay marriage would only further shift the purpose of marriage from producing and raising children to adult gratification.”

Match: “We all know the story of Adam and Eve, and God created two separate genders for a reason.”

(New Living Translation, Genesis 2:24)

b.      Criteria: “Gay marriage being legalized would devalue the very concept of marriage because marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman and any other variation simply makes marriage seem cheap and meaningless.”

“If gay marriage is legalized all over the United States, it could cause people to lose their reverence for marriage itself and even fewer people will get married.”

Match: “Statistics show that marriage benefits society.”

“Men benefit from marriage because single men have almost six times the probability of being incarcerated as married men and married men tend to be more

involved in the community and service organizations.”

“Women benefit from marriage because wives are 30 percent more likely to have better health than single women of the same age.”

c.       Criteria: “If gay marriage were legalized, it would mean that children are legally deprived from birth of a mother or a father.”

“To take a child away from having a male and female role model is wrong and would affect that child for the rest of their lives.”

Match: “A 2012 study by the University of Texas found that children raised by at least one gay or lesbian parent had more problems later in life than children raised by heterosexual couples, including poorer mental and physical health, poorer relationships and lower income.”

d.      Criteria: CONCLUSION (No more criteria-match paragraph)

Match:

2.      Do all of the author’s criteria/match arguments provide compelling support for his/her thesis? An argument in the body of the paper may look reasonable in isolation-but is it actually relevant to the author’s thesis?

-          I think the author has all the necessary basic ideas behind the main point of this essay. But the problem that I found that was present in all paragraphs (to some aspect at the least) is that the evidences do not really connect to the thesis. The biggest unrelated evidence occurs in the third paragraph. All the evidences present in this paragraph seems to act as an answer to the question “Is getting married better or staying single better?” Rather than to propose an ethical argument of straight marriage versus gay marriage.

3.      Will a skeptical accept this writer’s criteria? Identify any areas where the writer needs to argue for his or her criteria explicitly.

-          As mentioned above, I think the writer should spend the most time editing and revising the third paragraph, because as of now it does not sound too convincing that gay marriage should not be legal. Overall, the connection between the thesis and the evidences are present, but it can be made much stronger then right now.

4.      Will a skeptical accept the general weighting of this writer’s criteria? For example, a writer who weighs the principle of social welfare more heavily than the principle of keeping within the federal budget may have difficulty persuading an economically conservative reader. Here, the writer would need to defend the weighting of his/her criteria in terms would appeal to this audience.

-          Although I do think the criteria for B sounds aggressive (through the usage of the words “cheap” and “meaningless”), I definitely think criteria A and criteria C is very strong and convincing.

5.      Will a skeptic accept the writer’s criteria but reject his or her match argument(s)? Might readers challenge the writer by showing he/she has cherry picked examples or evidence? Will they provide counterexamples or counterevidence? Identify matches that the reader can reasonably challenge.

-          The evidences shown in this essay suggest that the author might have “cherry picked” some evidences. For example, because it is a fact that this country was built upon Christianity and the teachings of the Bible, using Bible as supporting evidence is a very good start. But stating that gay couple’s children are inferior in every aspect to straight couple’s children seems a little cherry picked evidences to me; it is likely that there is at least one child of gay couple that is succeeding than other usual children of straight couple. Once again to emphasize, the third paragraph’s evidences do not connect the argument to the thesis, so those should be revised.