Slavery is Good? - Using Pro Slavery Arguments to Teach Logical Fallacies

I have always been fascinated by logic and fallacies.  Being able to decipher good and bad arguments is important for a person to learn in order to make good decisions.  Buying a car, voting, how to invest money, and what values you stand for can all be swayed by good or bad arguments.  Being able to sift through the rhetoric and get to the meat of the issue is important for all citizens.

I've tried to do this with editorials in the newspaper, but the complexity of the issues sometimes goes over the students heads.  Therefore, the impact of the fallacies is hard to determine.  Also, if I attack an article for its fallacies, students will feel I am trying to push them to disagree with the author.  This isn't always the case, but I try not to let my personal views get too much attention in these discussions.  The purpose is to try to get the students to find out what is important to them and how they stand on issues.

Slavery is an issue that we can agree is bad.  But there were people in the 1800s that defended the institution of slavery.  This intrigued the students, so we found some pro slavery arguments from then.  I've linked some of these at the end of the article.

How can you defend slavery?  If it is so wrong, what kind of tricks were they using to try to sway people's minds?  Do people use these tricks on us?  How can you respond to these fallacies?

We found some common tricks used in these arguments.  Attacking the opponent, using threats, trying to scare people, using moral authority, slippery slope fallacies, domino effect, appeal to tradition, and outright lies were used to get people in their side in this debate.

I had them read the arguments, decide how the author was trying to persuade, and come up with a response to this person.  I made it clear I was not trying to convince them that slavery is a good thing.  But if people can convince people that slavery is OK with fallacies, could they be used to convince us about something we know less about?

How do we combat fallacies?  How do we not get fooled?

Know stuff!  The more we know about many different things, the less likely we will fall for misinformation.  The southerners tried to assure the northerners that slaves had it great in the South.  "The factory workers in the north are the real slaves!" Many believed them.  The Northerners lack of knowledge hurt them.  Sometimes we take people at their word because we have no knowledge to combat it.  Knowledge is the most powerful weapon we have against people trying to fool us.

Let's use Social Studies to teach our students to be thinkers.  The goal of the class is to develop good citizens.  Individuals who can think for themselves and make good choices are required for our country to continue to thrive.

George Fitzhugh
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h3141t.html

calhoun
http://www.stolaf.edu/people/fitz/COURSES/calhoun.html

tise
http://www.ralphmag.org/tise.html

mcduffie
http://gorospeg.tripod.com/civilwar/pages/forslavery.html

dew
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/archive/resources/documents/ch15_03.htm

http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html#commonsense

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/rhetological-fallacies/