Sometimes, an emotional appeal may seem necessary. Human beings are emotional. There is plenty of suffering and plenty of pain in the world, and emotional reactions are to be expected. Nobody can hold in everything all the time, we are not all stoics, we cannot just be expected to endure suffering without reacting to it.
But this is not about emotional reactions – this is about arguing about an issue on the basis of your emotions or the assumed emotions of others. We have seen this normalized in the recent years more and more. Anecdotal stories, appeals to how someone feels, diary-style observations that would be perfectly alright on a blog or personal web site are instead being normalized on news sites and in newspapers. One person’s story has to stand pars pro toto for an issue – but no longer necessarily with the reasonable assumption that this is indeed a correct representation of a social trend but may only be the perception of a few people. Not that this doesn’t matter, but as a strategy, it is deeply flawed. Solipsism reigns supreme.
Now, while your own emotions are certainly real and you have a right to your own feelings, basing your argument on them is probably not as effective as people may think. Emotional appeals may well be overestimated in their effectiveness. How do I know this is true? Look around you. Notwithstanding countless appeals to be more empathetic, more caring, more awake towards issues of social justice, people are turning away, decry an alleged “woke” agenda, vote for candidates that praise themselves for being anti-“woke”, for being unsensitive, for being “traditional” – i.e. for hiding their bigotry and callous uncaring behind the mantle of an idealized past where none of us had to care about individuals or groups we simply do not want to be bothered to care about.
Basically, there are probably three main objections against using emotional appeals instead of more systematic arguments:
- Emotions prevent logical reasoning: Emotional appeals cannot be criticized easily, because we associate emotionality typically (and sometimes falsely) with authenticity. Criticism of what seems to be a heart-felt position may seem unsensitive and makes the critic appear like a bad person. Unless we want to seem like an uncaring bully, we may simply choose not to engage and remain quiet in our criticism but keep it to be discussed later in a different, less emotionally charged context. This creates a feedback bubble for those who believe they have just made an impact with their emotional appeal: They may misunderstand silence for agreement and overestimate the support for their own opinions. For example, publicly will post all kinds of support messages on social media, even on their cars or on lawn signs supporting movements like “Black Lives Matter”, but privately, such support will not translate into actually support against structural racism. We can see this on other issues as well.
- Emotionality can be understood as manipulative: The older you are, the more you have seen some people using emotionality as a weapon, or even pretending to be emotional just to make a point. Once you have seen it being false, then once is enough. You simply cannot force people to share your pain, and if you are faking it, they will eventually catch on.
- Less people than you would think actually care about others. They will instead see emotionality and pain expressed as a sign of weakness. They may actually resent you for it. We can see this with how the media and voters treat female politicians: on the one hand, they assume women should be more emotional and more caring, and then they blame them if they actually act like that, or worse, if they don’t. No amount of vitriol amassed against even the worst men in politics comes close to that thrown against women.
How do we solve the problem? Effective politicians have always known that you need both a good human interest story and good data in support of it – the story is supposed to lure you in on an emotional level. Some may even claim to “feel your pain.” But after such a deeply transparent populist appeal, emotion will have to be sublimated and logic needs to take over as data is presented that transcends the individual particular interest. Ideally, as a third step you may also propose a well-worked out solution that provides a reasonable answer to the problem.
In short: Emotion is fine, but only as a first step; on its own, it is the weakest form of argument.
Erratic Attempts 