Reference no: EM133222951

The following italicized passages are from Joan Didion's short essay, "On Morality." I've removed portions of the text so that the ideas in the original essay pop more for you.

At midnight last night, on the road in from Las Vegas to Death Valley Junction, a car hit a shoulder and turned over. The driver, very young and apparently drunk, was killed instantly...I talked this afternoon to the nurse who had driven the girl to the nearest doctor, 85 miles across the floor of the Valley...The nurse explained that her husband, a talc miner, had stayed on the highway with the boy's body until the coroner could get over the mountains from Bishop, at dawn today. 'You can't just leave a body on the highway,' she said. 'It's immoral'...It was one instance in which I did not distrust the word, because she meant something quite specific...[O]ne of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties...If we have been taught to keep our promises-if, in the simplest terms, our upbringing is good enough-we will stay with the body, or have bad dreams...

There is some sinister hysteria in the air out here tonight, some hint of the monstrous perversion to which any human idea can come. 'I followed my own conscience.' 'I did what I thought was right.' How many madmen have said it and meant it? How many murderers?...

Except on that most primitive level-our loyalties to those we love-what could be more arrogant than to claim the primacy of personal conscience?...You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing-beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code-what is 'right' and what is 'wrong,' what is 'good' and what 'evil'...

Of course we would all like to "believe" in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes...It is all right [to do that] only so long as we remember that all the committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures...do not confer on anyone any virtue...[W]hen we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen.

(Source: Didion, Joan. "On Morality." Slouching Towards Bethlehem. New York; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 230-39.)

Using what you know about arguments from the course material, try to reconstruct/interpret the argument discernible in the passages I've assembled, above. Try to reconstruct the argument as thoroughly and as charitably as possible. Supply implicit premises, if you think there are any. Flag any rhetorical effects the argument might be resting on, if you think there are any. If you detect ambiguity in a premise, then spell out the different possible ways the premise might be understood.

Walk your reader through your choices as you reconstruct the argument: explicitly indicate why you are choosing to reconstruct it/interpret it the way you are.

Once you've reconstructed the argument, explain whether you think it works as an argument or not and why. Do its premises, as you've made sense of them, support its conclusion? What is the argument's conclusion anyway (this is one of the first things you should try to sort out)? Are its premises acceptable, or are there problems with them (maybe you think there are reasons to reject one or more of the premises)?

*If you're confused about what is involved in reconstructing/interpreting an argument, the author of our textbook does a helpful job of reconstructing an argument at the end of Chapter 3.

*It's important to note, too, that there can be different, equally plausible and equally smart ways of reconstructing an argument, especially if the argument as it is expressed is a little bit opaque (and Didion's is definitely on the opaque side!). Two people in this class who made very different choices about how to reconstruct the argument could both earn an 'A.' The important thing is that you demonstrate excellent knowledge of the course material through your reconstruction.