Arguments from Fairness and Misplaced Priorities in Political Argumentation

Argumentation schemes are formal structures that are used to represent types of arguments that are prominent in natural language discourse. Recent research in argumentation studies has identified and investigated many of these schemes. The two types of arguments studied in this paper, found to be used during a pilot study of kinds of arguments used by the candidates in a recent Ontario provincial election, have not so far been formalized as schemes. We call them argument from fairness and argument from misplaced priorities. We formulate schemes for them, and analyze several examples of them from our corpus by means of constructing argument diagrams that fit the argument into the scheme.


Introduction
Argumentation schemes are forms of argument that capture stereotypical patterns of reasoning used by an agent, whether human or artificial, to an inferred conclusion based on a set of premises (Walton, Reed & Macagno, 2008).The kinds of arguments that are the focus of study in this paper are defeasible in nature.Argumentation schemes of this defeasible kind are especially useful to represent structures of human reasoning that cannot be analyzed as deductively (or even inductively) valid (Kienpointner, 1987).They can be equated with heuristics of the kind studied in cognitive science.Heuristics are "fast and frugal" devices of reasoning that are useful in arriving at a decision to proceed tentatively on a defeasible basis under constraints of time pressure and lack of complete knowledge (Gigerenzer et al., 1999).
The purpose of this paper is to present two new argumentation schemes not in the list of Walton, Macagno and Reed (2008) that were found in a research project on argumentation in media reporting on a recent election campaign in Canada.One problem was that several interesting cases of arguments found in the material did not fit any known schemes.In the project, we put forward the hypothesis that two new argumentation schemes had to be constructed in order to model these examples.The structure of one of the schemes, we found later, was well understood by Perelman (1982), as had even been recognized as a common form of argument by Aristotle.Our contribution was to model it in a format suitable for recent argumentation research.The scheme for argument from fairness is analyzed as a species of value-based reasoning (Bench-Capon, 2003) while the scheme for argument from misplaced priorities is analyzed as a species of priority-based reasoning (Prakken & Sartor, 1997).
Mochales Palau and Moens (2009) applied argumentation schemes to a corpus of texts of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights.The cases were annotated by three annotators under supervision of a legal expert to analyze legal argumentative texts.The aim of the project was to build a system for automatic detection and classification of arguments in legal cases.This technique of automatically detecting particular types of arguments in text using argumentation schemes is called argument mining.This kind of work in computational linguistics is very encouraging, but so far, we know of no empirical research that works with natural language texts of discourse outside the legal domain that attempts to identify particular arguments found in a natural language corpus by using argumentation schemes.As far as we know, ours is the first systematic attempt to use schemes of the types now widely used in artificial intelligence models of natural language argumentation to identify types of arguments in media reports of political argumentation used in an election setting.
Section 1 introduces the reader to our pilot study on kinds of arguments used in the recent provincial election campaign in Ontario, and to argumentation schemes commonly used in political discourse.This section also introduces the reader to the Carneades Argumentation System, a software system that has an argument mapping tool that can be used to build a visual representation of an argument.Such an argument diagram can display the structure of the argument, the premises and conclusions in it, and can display parts of the argument where an argumentation scheme has been applied.The argument diagrams provide a way of presenting the essential structure of each argument in a way that is easy for anyone to grasp.
Section 2 introduces the central argumentation scheme that is the focus of the paper, argument from fairness and shows how this scheme has already been recognized by Aristotle and Perelman.To give the reader a clear idea of the importance of argument from fairness, an example of its use in judicial decision-making is given.Sections 3 and 4 present and analyze the first two examples of argument from fairness from the corpus of arguments collected in the study on the Canadian election.Section 5 presents another type of argument that can be confused with argument from fairness, called argument from misplaced priorities.Section 6 gives an example of a borderline argument that readers might possibly be inclined to interpret one way or the other, and shows how to disambiguate the two schemes.Section 7 provides some conclusions to the paper.
As part of a current project studying political argumentation we conducted a pilot study of what kinds of arguments candidates in the recent provincial election in Ontario used.During the election period, September and October, 2011, our team collected about 250 arguments found in four leading newspapers.The aim of the study was to find out which kinds of arguments are most commonly used in the discourse of political election campaigns, or at least to take some beginning steps in designing a comprehensive study that would explore this question.Our pilot study was a way of testing the completeness of a given list of schemes and eventually coming up with a more comprehensive list of schemes that would be adequate for studying political argumentation.A secondary question we considered was whether some kinds of arguments were used more frequently than others in general and by some political parties in particular.The findings can be found in (Hansen & Walton, 2013).
Our method was to try to fit all the arguments we found into schemes by using a list of schemes that seemed fairly comprehensive and applicable from (Walton, 2006).This set of schemes is based on many analyses of examples of arguments collected from logic textbooks as well as examples of real arguments from everyday discourse, many from media reports of political argumentation.The list consisted of fourteen schemes plus a category of 'none of the above'.
After the collecting stage of the study was finished we turned to the analysis stage.Independently, we and four students tried to classify each argument collected as fitting one or another of these schemes.After group discussion we found that over one-third (37.1%) of the arguments collected did not fit any of the fourteen schemes on our initial list.This led us to supplement the list with some other recognized argument schemes (e.g., the practical reasoning scheme).Of the "no-fits" that still remained unclassified after the addition of other schemes, we noticed that some of them could be grouped together as being of the same argument kind.It was this discovery that has led us to propose the two new schemes that are the object of study in this paper.With our new expanded list of schemes we were able to classify all but five per cent of the arguments collected -an improvement of more than 30%.
One of the kinds of argument that recurred with significant frequency concerns the justice or injustice of policies or actions.A form of argument of this kind had been recognized by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) and more fully by Perelman (1980), and we discuss this version of it below and go on to introduce a scheme for the argument from fairness (or justice), and its variant the argument from injustice.A related but distinct kind of argument we also discuss is the argument from misplaced priorities and its proposed scheme.As the standard formalism used to represent and discuss the argumentation structure of each of the examples analyzed in the paper we will use the Carneades Argumentation System.
The Carneades Argumentation System is an Open Source software project that provides tools for argument mapping and visualization, argument evaluation, proof standards that determine burden of proof, and argument Accordingly, when it comes to the legal problem of elaborating rules of conduct determining obligations that are to be imposed on individuals who can be classified together in a certain way, the generally accepted principle of equality is that everyone who possesses characteristics that are stipulated by the law will be treated the same way (Perelman, 1982, 66).It is this general rule he calls the rule of justice, and it gives rise to what he calls the argument of reciprocity, which says that "if two terms are symmetrical and can be inverted without difficulty, we can claim that is it is necessary to equate the terms and that there is reason to apply to them the rule of justice which demands equal treatment" (Perelman, 1982, 67).
The problem with using the term 'equally' in the scheme is that equality is a highly contested concept in social and political philosophy (Gosepath, 2011).Yet we want to avoid building any particular political philosophy into the argumentation scheme from fairness.How can we reckon with the possibility that, as a matter of empirical fact, arguments from fairness in political discourse inevitably embody particular political or philosophical views, for the reason that that is how politicians argue?So why would any argumentation scheme for argument from fairness be politically neutral?Perelman (1980, 10) has a nice answer to this question.He states that he is looking for a formula of justice common to many different political conceptions of it, an underlying concept that can constitute a definition of what he calls "formal" or "abstract" justice.The common idea that we all agree on is formulated by Perelman in the following simple proposition: to be just is to be treated in an equal fashion.But then, he goes on, problems arise.Does everyone have to be treated in the same way, or do we have to draw a distinction?Every person advocates a different system in response to these questions, and the problem is that no system secures universal agreement.Some say that merits have to be taken into account, while others say that needs must be taken into account.Perelman (1980, 10) contends, nevertheless, that despite these political differences all are agreed that to be just is to give the same treatment to those who are equal with regard to one particular characteristic.We will avoid building any particular political philosophy or viewpoint into the argumentation scheme for argument from fairness by following Perelman's way of defining fairness as an abstract or formal notion.
Following this approach any two things or treatments of persons being compared on the basis of equality need not be identical in every respect.They must be different in certain respects in order to be held to be equal in other respects.It is useful to see that variation of equality with 'respects' was also emphasized by Aristotle's treatment of justice.Aristotle distinguished between two kinds of equality, numerical and proportional.The distribution of goods or treatment of others is equal numerically when it treats them identically, for example by giving each the same quantity of goods or honor.The treatment of others as proportional refers to persons being treated as equal or unequal in certain respects (Nicomachean Ethics, 1131b17-1131b18).So Aristotle's notion of justice can be classified as one of proportional equality.It is this Aristotelian notion of proportional equality that can best be used in the scheme for argument from fairness.It fits with Perelman's approach in this regard.
According to Aristotle's theory (Nicomachean Ethics, 1131a10-113129), the notion of justice is based on a prior notion of fairness, which is in turn based on a prior notion of equality, and equality is based on the notion of proportionality.Aristotle even explains this notion of proportionality using a geometric diagram (Nicomachean Ethics, 1132b9-1131b11), but it also relates to his theory of the golden mean in ethics, a theory that views excellence and qualities of character and actions as meeting an intermediate between two extremes.The following quotation (Nicomachean Ethics, 1131a10-113129) gives the reader an idea of how his theory of justice and injustice work in outline.
We have shown that both the unjust man and the unjust act are unfair or unequal; now it is clear that there is also an intermediate between the two unequals involved in either case.And this is the equal; for in any kind of action in which there is a more and a less there is also what is equal.If, then, the unjust is unequal, just is equal, as all men suppose it to be, even apart from argument.And since the equal is intermediate, the just will be an intermediate.Now equality implies at least two things.The just, then, must be both intermediate and equal and relative (i.e. for certain persons).And qua intermediate it must be between certain things which are respectively greater and less); qua equal, it involves two things; qua just, it is for certain people.The just, therefore, involves at least four terms; for the persons for whom it is in fact just are two, and the things in which it is manifested, the objects distributed, are two.And the same equality will exist between the persons and between the things concerned; for as the latter-the things concerned-are related, so are the former; if they are not equal, they will not have what is equal, but this is the origin of quarrels and complaints-when either equals have and are awarded unequal shares, or unequals equal shares.Further, this is plain from the fact that awards should be 'according to merit'; for all men agree that what is just in distribution must be according to merit in some sense, though they do not all specify the same sort of merit, but democrats identify it with the status of freeman, supporters of oligarchy with wealth (or with noble birth), and supporters of aristocracy with excellence.
These remarks provide a background for a way of representing arguments based on premises that make claims about fairness and unfairness.Here there is no space for us to try to relate this Aristotelian approach to other philosophies of justice.Nor do we need to attempt to do this.All we need is enough of the structure of the Aristotelian approach to show how arguments from fairness and unfairness relate to notions of justice and injustice that are based on some prior notions of equality and inequality that can vary in the way indicated by Perelman when applying the abstract notion to individual instances of arguments.We are not necessarily endorsing the way Aristotle defines equality and inequality using his geometrical theory of the mean.
We propose a scheme of the following sort.φ is an action, or in some instances a general policy for action.α and β are agents or groups of agents.ψ is a different policy or action that is being considered or has been implemented as an alternative to φ.We call this scheme version 1 of Argument from Fairness.
Major Premise: If φ treats α and β equally then φ is fair (just).
Conclusion: φ should be carried out.
This first version appears to have a missing premise, and in section 3 it is discussed how to complete it.There are many counter-arguments that could be used to reply to the argument from fairness, but to help search for some points on which such an argument can generally be questioned, there are five basic critical questions matching this scheme.
CQ 1 : Are agents α and β of the same kind?CQ 4 : Are there special circumstances such that α and β should not be treated equally?
CQ 5 : Are there reasons supporting ?
There are four general requirements a given argument in the text of discourse needs to meet in order to fit this scheme.The first is that there is some action or policy being considered or discussed.The second is that there are two sides to the discussion, meaning that there is a proponent who advocates the action or policy and an opponent who is against it, or doubtful about it.The third is that the proponent is putting the argument forward in order to support the action or policy.The fourth requirement is that the argument is meant to overcome reservations that might be held about the action or policy at issue.Thus if we have a case where somebody is calling some action or policy fair, that is not enough in itself to say that we have an instance of argument from fairness.It may be just a statement that the action or policy is fair.In order for there to be an argument from fairness to have been advanced, the fairness that is alleged has to be put forward as a reason for going ahead with the action, or adopting the policy that is being considered.
It is important to note that there is also a negative version of the same general form of argument.It could be called the argument from unfairness.It has the same structure as the argument from fairness, but it is an argument against the action or proposal being considered.
Conclusion: φ should not be carried out.
The critical questions for argument from unfairness are comparable to those for argument from fairness, except that it needs to be taken into account that the argument from unfairness is the negative version of the argument from fairness.
As above, there are four requirements for some discourse in a text to properly be classified as an instance of the argument from unfairness.The first is that there is some action or policy that is being considered or discussed.The second is that there are two sides to the discussion, meaning that there is a proponent and an opponent.The third requirement is that the proponent has advocated going ahead to carry out this action or implement this policy.The fourth requirement is that the opponent is attempting to argue against the proponent's argument by using this According to dual process theories in cognitive science, there are two systems of reasoning.The one that has been emphasized almost exclusively in traditional logic is a rule-based system that is conscious, calculative and slow.Heuristics are said to be "fast and frugal" in use of resources (Gigerenzer et al., 1999).The other system is automatic and fast.It instinctively jumps to a conclusion that is sometimes wrong, but that can nevertheless in many instances be justified as a tentative hypothesis under conditions of uncertainty and lack of knowledge, and even inconsistency in some instances.The fast system uses heuristics or rules of thumb that often work very well (Gigerenzer et al., 1999).They are extremely useful in arriving at a decision to proceed tentatively on a defeasible basis under constraints of time pressure and lack of complete knowledge.Trial and error, for example, is sometimes a better way of solving the problem than taking the time and economic resources needed to collect data required to arrive at a more definitive solution.
Defeasible argumentation schemes tend to fall into the category of heuristics.Their defeasible nature implies not only that they sometimes fail when applied in specific instances as arguments, but even that in some cases they can be used as instruments of deception to try to get the best of a speech partner unfairly (Walton, 2010).Argument from expert opinion is a case in point.In many instances, we need to rely on arguments from expert opinion, but this type of argument can also be used to appeal to authority in a dogmatic way to try to intimidate in order to suppress critical questioning of a dubious claim.What we are suggesting is that arguments from fairness are emotionally compelling because they represent a heuristic that we learn naturally and early in our development.As such, they have two sides.
In this paper, we are at the very beginning of the study of arguments from fairness.Our purpose is not to evaluate the examples we now proceed to study as being weak or strong, reasonable or fallacious.We are simply trying to find a means to identify them as distinctive types of arguments used in particular cases by studying some examples.

First Example of Argument from Fairness
This example appeared in the Globe and Mail on 30/09/2011 with the title 'Prison Guard Union Not Endorsing Ontario PC Chain-gang Plan'.Tim Hudak, the Progressive Conservative leader in the Ontario election, told reporters that he believes that correctional officers are in favor of a work program which would require criminals to perform manual labor for up to forty hours a week in exchange for some compensation.His opponents derided the plan, calling it a chain gang initiative.Hudak said at a press conference that we are just asking the criminals to do what every other hard-working Ontarian does, an honest day's work instead of spending the day working out to become better criminals.
In this case, three arguments were given in support of his work program proposal.The first is that correctional officers are in favor of the work program.The second is an argument from fairness.The argument is made that criminals should be treated in the same way as other citizens with respect to having to put in an honest day's work.
The third argument is that it is better for criminals to spend the day working than for them to spend the day "working out to become better criminals".There has also been an opposed argument put forward by opponents of the plan who called it "a chain gang initiative".Since this expression sounds highly negative, it is part of an argument against the work program proposal.
This example has been analyzed using the argument diagrams shown in figure 3 to see how the argument from fairness, as we have configured it so far, fits into the sequence of argumentation.Argument from fairness is indicated by an f in a node.
The ultimate conclusion is the statement that the work program should be carried out, shown in the text box at left in the middle.Each argument that relates to this conclusion is shown by a node containing a plus or a minus sign.
An argument that has a plus sign in its node is a pro argument, an argument that supports the conclusion.An argument that has a minus sign in its node is a con argument, an argument that attacks (attempts to refute) the conclusion.For convenience in order to discuss the example, each argument has been labeled with the number, A1, A2, and so forth.
As soon as we analyze the argument in this way, a problem about the argumentation scheme for argument from fairness is revealed.This problem is for us to figure out a way of determining which part or parts of the chain argumentation as presented in figure 3 should be taken to fit the scheme for argument from fairness as we have configured it above.Two candidates suggest themselves.One is argument A4, while the other is argument A2.A third possibility is that it is the combination of A4 and A2 that best represents the structure of the argument from fairness.If this third possibility is the best approach, we need to reconfigure the scheme for argument from fairness to make it more complex.arguing that criminals are to be treated like other citizens, the argument seems positive.However, if we are arguing that other citizens ought to be treated like criminals, the argument seems negative.What we see here then is that the argument from fairness works best when it argues for giving some group with less preferred status privileges enjoyed by a comparable group that has a more preferred status.We don't want to be equal to people who are in less preferred circumstances than ourselves.Generally we want to be equal to people who are at least perceived to be in more preferred circumstances than ourselves.
One way to deal with this problem is to bring the first critical question into play: are agents α and β of the same kind?Are criminals and other citizens of the same kind?This question is hard to answer straightforwardly.Both criminals and other citizens are human agents.Both are citizens.In many respects they are the same kind.However, in some respects they are not the same kind.Presumably, criminals are not equal to other citizens who have not been convicted of a serious crime, because these other citizens have rights that criminals lack.So answering this critical question can be a bit tricky.But this example brings out the importance of this critical question.One proposal would be to emphasize its importance by removing this critical question and inserting it as a premise in the argument from fairness.This way of proceeding may generally be reasonable in some instances.It has been shown in the literature on argumentation and artificial intelligence that critical questions can be represented as additional premises of an argumentation scheme.This procedure is explained in (Gordon, 2010).
These remarks suggest a scheme of the following sort, which we will call version 3 of the argumentation scheme for argument from fairness.
Premise 1: Agents α and β are of the same kind.
Premise 4: If φ is fair, then φ should be carried out.
Ultimate Conclusion: φ should be carried out.
Version 3 of the scheme eliminates the need for the first critical question, leaving only the four remaining critical questions matching the scheme.Premise 1 brings the tricky question of whether the two agents are the same kind into the foreground, instead of leaving it in the background as a critical question.This might make the argumentation scheme for argument from fairness easier to apply, because it needs to be considered right away when analyzing an argument.It may be, however, that other examples will show that this premise has still been formulated in a way that is not adequate to deal with the kinds of problems suggested by this example.It may be that the two agents need to be of the same kind in some particular respect that needs to be specified in order to make the scheme work.

Second Example of Argument from Fairness
This example appeared in the Globe and Mail on 16/09/2011 with the title 'PCs Slam Liberals over Ontario Energy Ads'.In the ad, a party release of the Progressive Conservative party attacked what the Conservatives take to be taxpayer-funded ads that supported the Liberal campaign and were paid for by the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association.It was alleged that the OSEA had received millions of dollars in provincial funding, and had spent $200,000 of that money on television ads praising the province's funding for the green energy sector.The text of the argument is quoted below.It could be called the unfair funding argument.
The PC party issued a release Friday morning slamming the ads, saying: "While Ontario families are struggling to make ends meet because of Dalton McGuinty's tax grabs and skyrocketing hydro bills, today Ontario families learned they are also footing the bill for Dalton McGuinty to funnel millions to an organization-the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association-that is running ads in support of the Liberal's re-election campaign." This argument is a complex network of argumentation to disentangle.It seems to involve two separate arguments.
One is based on the allegation that a political party is using government funds collected from taxpayers to support an organization that is running ads in support of the government party's re-election campaign.This kind of activity may be illegal.Certainly it is unethical.The other argument is basically an argument from fairness.This argument states two basic claims.One is that Ontario families are struggling to make ends meet because of high taxes imposed by the government.The other is that the government is spending millions of dollars to support an organization that is running ads in support of their re-election campaign.These two allegations, when put together,

Argument from Misplaced Priorities
This example appeared in the Globe and Mail on 13/09/2011 with the title 'Tim Hudak Pledges to drain Ontario's Red Tape Swamp'.In the example, NDP (New Democratic Party) leader, Andrea Horwath, accused the other two parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, of practicing "groundhog politics" in which those parties' leaders "pop up once a day and hurl insults at each other instead of focusing on issues such as youth employment".At a training center funded by the Liberal government, she said, "You shouldn't have to wait until you are in your 30s for your first full-time job".The argument could be analyzed as the following set of premises and conclusion.
The other two party leaders hurl insults at each other instead of focusing on important issues such as youth unemployment.
Youth unemployment should be a more important priority than hurling insults at the other party leader.
This behavior shows misplaced priorities.
Therefore the groundhog politics of the two party leaders should be rejected.This argument could be analyzed in other ways, by going into more depth of analysis.For example, Howarth also appears to be arguing that her party is focused on more important issues, and that therefore the leader of her party is more suitable to be elected than the leaders of the other two parties.This situation is similar to the argument shown in figure 3, where the ultimate conclusion, shown at the left of the argument diagram, states that this action is unfair to Ontario families.But it does not show the ultimate conclusion of the argument, which can be viewed as an implicit statement saying that you, the person to whom the argument was directed, should not vote for the party who is responsible for this unfair action.There is always a choice when analyzing an argument how deeply one should go in inserting implicit premises or conclusions.
The situation is the same in this example.It is a simple example of argument from misplaced priorities, and is therefore a good example to use to illustrate this type of argument.But it could be analyzed more deeply by putting in a final implicit ultimate conclusion stating that the rejected argument from misplaced priorities is a reason why the person to whom the argument was directed should not vote for either of these parties.Instead, the message is that the person to whom the argument was directed should vote for the NDP.
The argumentation scheme for the argument from misplaced priorities can be expressed in the following general structure.
Premise 1: There is some prior argument or position π that shows evidence of a priority ranking P 2 > P 1 .
Premise 2: The ordering of the priorities should be that P 1 > P 2 .
Ultimate Conclusion: Therefore π should be rejected.
Note that the structure of this argumentation scheme is that of a chained argument.First there is an interim conclusion, and then there is an ultimate conclusion based on this interim conclusion.The interim conclusion could be omitted, arguably, since the second and third premises already demonstrate that the priorities are misplaced.Adding the interim conclusion merely makes the rationale of the argument more explicit.It can be put in or not as the user wishes.
In order for an argument used in a given case to qualify as fitting the scheme for argument from misplaced priority, it has to meet several requirements.One is that the argument has to be opposed to a prior argument or position put forward by one party in a discussion.Another is that this prior argument or position has to show evidence of a priority ordering.In the simplest, and it appears the most typical case, there are only two priorities, but it is possible that in some examples yet to be found there can be more than two involved.Another is that the argument or position has to be held to be based on a comparative weighing of these priorities.Another is that the argument makes the claim that the priorities in the prior argument are misplaced.That is, the responding argument claims that the prior argument has got the priorities the wrong way around.
The scheme for argument from misplaced priorities is a form of criticism of an opponent's argument based on the premises that the opponent's actions suggest a commitment to one proposition on the basis of a priority to it over another proposition.The argument is that this balancing of commitments is based on a misplaced priority, meaning that the opponent has a priority backwards compared to how it should really be placed.Basically it says that this party has his priorities wrong, therefore you should reject his argument (position).This example appeared in the Toronto Star on 14/09/2011 with the title 'Hudak Still Intends to Make Sex Offender Registry Public'.In the example, the Progressive Conservative leader, Tim Hudak, reaffirmed his plan to make the provincial sex offender registry public if he won the election.Even though the Ontario police went on record as being against this idea, Hudak said he would make the registry public so that parents can know where sex offenders are living in their communities and can take responsible action to protect themselves and their children.He put his argument in the form of a rhetorical question: "our right to security for kids, should it come ahead of the right to privacy for child predators?"This argument balances one right against another, and puts a priority on one.By this means, anyone who is opposed to the candidate's view is being put in a position of having allegedly placed his opposition on misplaced priorities.
A key list of the propositions used as premises in the argument, and that contains the ultimate conclusion at the bottom, can be drawn up as follows.In addition to the explicitly stated premise of the argument, it will be useful for us two insert two implicit premises that are relatively uncontroversial.An enthymeme, in current usage, is an argument that has one or more premises, or possibly a conclusion, not explicitly stated in the text, but that needs to have these propositions explicitly stated, to extract the complete argument from the text.Sometimes enthymemes are described as arguments with missing premises, but they can also have missing conclusions that need to be filled in before the structure of the argument can be properly understood and analyzed (Walton & Macagno, 2009).In the key list below, two implicit premises have been inserted.

Key List for the Child Predators Example
If parents can know where sex offenders are living in their community, they can take responsible action to protect themselves and their children.
Implicit premise: A public sex offender registry would enable them to know where sex offenders are living in their community This argument has put the right of privacy for child predators ahead of the right to security for children.
Implicit Premise: Making the sex offender registry public would violate the privacy of child predators.
Implicit Premise: Violating the rights of privacy of child predators would be unfair to the child predators.
Putting the right of privacy for child predators ahead of the right to security for children is a misplaced priority.
Therefore the sex offender registry should be made public.
The sex offender registry should be made public.
Violating the rights of privacy of child predators would be unfair to the child predators.
This argument puts the right to privacy ahead of the right to security for children.
Putting the right of privacy for child predators ahead of the right to security for children is a misplaced priority.

-m
If parents can know where sex offenders are living in their community, they can take responsible action to protect themselves and their children A public sex offender registry would enable them to know where sex offenders are living in their community.The argument can be visualized as shown in figure 5, where the node containing the notation pr represents the argumentation scheme for practical reasoning.According to this way of analyzing the example, the ultimate conclusion, the statement that the sex offender registry should be made public, appears at the far left of the diagram.At the top we have a pro argument supporting this conclusion.The pro argument is based on two In studying how schemes fit argumentation found in a real text discourse in some communication event like a newspaper editorial, there are basically three reasons why more than one scheme will fairly often fit a given argument.The first is that a given argument found in a text of discourse can be analyzed at different levels of depth, depending on how many implicit premises and conclusions are added in.The second reason is that there can be nesting of a subtype of argument into a more general type of argument.An example of this sort commonly found in analyzing political discourse of the kind found in elections is the borderline between instances of argument from inconsistent commitments and the circumstantial ad hominem argument.The circumstantial ad hominem argument takes this form: 'my opponent has shown by his arguments and actions that his commitments are inconsistent; therefore he does not have a trustworthy character (for example it might be alleged that he is a hypocrite); therefore his argument should be rejected'.The argument from inconsistent commitments merely points to an inconsistency in the opponent's commitments, but does not go so far as to attack the opponent's character based on this claim of inconsistency.What we have here is an instance where one type of argument, represented by an argumentation scheme, is nested within another more complex type of argument which also has an argumentation scheme.This kind of case often proves to be a difficulty when it comes to identifying the argumentation scheme in a given case.The reason is that the character attack part of the argument is often implicit, based on implicature and innuendo.Therefore it may be a matter of interpretation whether the argument should best be classified as a circumstantial ad hominem argument or only as an instance of argument from inconsistent commitments.
The third reason why more than one scheme can fit the same argument is simply the existence of vagueness, ambiguity, and other features of natural language discourse that very often necessitate postulating more than one interpretation of a given argument.Indeed, it is a common strategy in political argumentation to try to exploit vagueness and ambiguity legal way open for plausible deniability at some future time.

Conclusions
There is a reason why these two particular schemes, the argument from fairness and the argument from misplaced priorities, appear to both apply in some instances.Arguments from fairness are often based on premises about rights and values, and these types of cases tend to be ones involving priorities, for example priorities of values.Hence these two schemes are closely connected, and it is not too surprising that both of them could be involved in a single case.Still, we can ask whether one fits the tax breaks case better than the other.
In the tax breaks example, the argument from fairness leaps off the page as soon as one reads this text discourse and one is aware that there is an argumentation scheme for argument from fairness.Nevertheless, as shown above, applying the scheme for the argument from misplaced priorities does not really do a bad job of giving a helpful analysis of the argumentation in the case as well, and there seemed to be no decisive grounds for ruling it out.We leave it as an open question whether the one analysis is arguably better than the other one.
We propose that these two schemes ought to be added to the list in (Walton, Reed and Macagno, 2008, chapter 9), but there remains the question of whether the taxonomy used by Walton, Reed and Macagno contains related argumentation schemes that can be applied to satisfactorily capture the examples.Fairness is a value, so it could be argued that the existing scheme for argument from values already does the job of dealing with this group of examples.Another suggestion is that there might be a rule to the effect that we should be fair, so it could be argued that argument from fairness is a species of argument from a rule to a case.A third suggestion is that the examples of argument from fairness might be seen as resting on a definition of the term "fairness".On this basis it might be argued that argument from definition to verbal classification is sufficient to do the job.
We don't think that the third suggestion works, for the reason that all of the key terms in all of the argumentation schemes need to be defined, or at least clearly articulated for the users, and therefore any of these schemes could equally well be taken to represent argument from definition to verbal classification.We don't think that the second suggestion works for the reason that simply making a general rule to the effect that we should be fair does not provide sufficient guidance to judge what course of action is fair or not fair in a particular case in as explicit and helpful a way as using the scheme for argument from fairness.
We have put forward argumentation schemes representing argument from fairness and argument from misplaced priorities and have defended the claim that these two schemes fairly represent the arguments that we found in our data and analyzed in this paper.As well as presenting the two schemes, we have set requirements for identifying each of these types of arguments based on data in a given text discourse that can be helpful to aid users in the task of determining whether the argument they are confronted with fits one of these schemes.
The point has been made that argument from fairness, or argument from justice as it should be called in law, is an important subject for further study in the field of legal reasoning.Of course this point was fully realized and advocated by Perelman (1982).But now we are in a better position to more usefully apply the scheme to legal cases.As an example, we considered Popov v Hayashi (Popov v. Hayashi 2002WL 31833731 (Cal. Superior, Dec. 18, 2002)), a case that has become a benchmark in artificial intelligence and law.(Note 2) (Wyner, Bench-Capon and Atkinson, 2007), the issue concerned which fan had ownership rights to a home run baseball hit into the stands by Barry Bonds.As shown in our analysis, although there were arguments on both sides on the issue of which party should be held to have possession of the ball, after examining all these arguments in much detail, Judge McCarthy in the end decided that any award to one party would be unfair to the other.He concluded on the basis of argument from fairness that each party had an equal and undivided interest in the ball, and ruled that its monetary value should be divided equally between them.

CQ 2 :
In what respects are α and β equal?CQ 3 : In what respects are α and β different?
Figure 3.A

+prFigure 5 .
Figure 5. Diagram of the child predator argument For this reason, the argument only works, or at least works best, if it goes one way.If we are