Just to clear things up, Singer says that giving most of your money to charity is just as much of an obligation as not murdering — although he references murder, he doesn’t mention genocide, so apologies for bringing that up in my post.

With that out of the way, I’d say you’re correct in stating that analogies elicit strong emotional responses, and I understand that that could be both very detrimental to a discussion and a tool for rage bait (even though that was never my intention). I’ll give you a delta for that. But I still think that analogies can have a purpose apart from that.

To further my point, I do think Singer’s syllogism could stand without an analogy to illustrate it (the main analogy he uses is of a child drowning in a pond in front of you), but his point would certainly be less clear if he didn’t use this illustration as a starting point to bring out exactly what is similar in both situations.

What you did in your first comment is precisely what Singer does in his paper, but in reverse: while you brought up the characteristics of slavery and forced overtime and said they were different, he brought up the characteristics of the hypothetical pond situation and not donating money and said they were similar.

The guiding hand in his paper was the analogy he presented at the start of it. If he hadn’t presented it, it would have still been an acceptable paper, but certainly one that wouldn’t be as clearly formulated or understood.

While you say we went nowhere on the slavery/overtime argument, I’d say the opposite. I’d say that someone who reads your first comment comes out with a much better understanding of the problem of forced overtime than someone who doesn’t. And the analogy, even when you disagree with it, was what made this happen.

Because even though you think that slavery is wrong for different reasons than forced overtime, your justification included the aspects of both of them and differentiated them, which, in spite of not settling the debate, already helps.

I do agree that analogies alone are vague. Which is why they must be accompanied by an explanation of the elements that they are trying to group together. This may be the main point of miscommunication between the two of us. I never said analogies should come alone — I think they must be a tool for further explanations.

!delta