Justice and Society
Paper Instructions
In order to present an argument in a clear, concise, and persuasive way, you must follow a strong structure in the presentation of your argument. Below is the structure that you should utilize in your final paper.
For your paper, you should pick a topic that relates to justice (ie. a social problem regarding injustice) and present an argument on it in 5 pages (double spaced). Do not describe the topic, you must pick one side of the argument to prove.
Introduction
Introduce your topic in an interesting way and present your thesis in a clear way. In this presentation (and generally in philosophy) your thesis should be stated as: “In this presentation, I will argue that ___.” This makes your thesis explicit and clear to the listeners.
Definitions
Your topic is likely to use certain unique terms. You should define those terms at the beginning of your presentation so that you lock in one specific definition from the start and you clarify the meaning of your terms from the start of your paper. You can present this as: “In this presentation I will be using a few terms, and I will explain what I mean by them here.”
[unique_solution]
Examples of this are “By implicit bias, I mean bias that is present in individuals but they may be unaware of since they lie in their unconscious, but still influence their ways of thinking.”
Premises
This is the gist of your argument. You should present two or three reasons that flow into one another in order to lead logically and soundly to your conclusion (thesis). In high school, you probably became familiar with this part of your essay by knowing it as the body of your essay.
For example, if you’re arguing that we need schools to address implicit bias for an early age, we may have the two premises that (1) people acquire implicit biases from a young age and (2) children acquire most of their information at school, and schools are integral in shaping the mindsets of their students. These two premises, taken together with additional explanations, details, and evidence, lead to the conclusion that schools should address implicit bias in order to reduce its prevalence.
Rebuttal
The rebuttal section should raise and address the strongest possible counter argument (or two) against your argument.
For example, if we’re following the same argument as mentioned before, one may argue that parents and home life have a more serious influence on implicit bias than schools, so schools should not focus on addressing this serious issue. This is the counterargument. You could then refute the counterargument by explaining that while implicit bias certainly does seep into kids at home, schools still have a responsibility to address this issue so that the kids are not acquiring biases at school and also learn the tools to be critical of it at home and in other areas of their lives.
Conclusion
Conclude your paper by recapping your argument and the rebuttal. You should not just directly restate what you’ve said earlier in the argument; this should be a very clean explanation of your presentation. You should not bring up any new ideas or evidence in the conclusion.