By taking issues at their face value and accepting logical arguments without contextual evidence, you cannot accept the full breadth of a situation. However, the point of Smith’s appeal to logic is to convey to his audience how logical arguments can be twisted to suit the agenda of the speaker. Of course, the idea of eating a child and thinking of them as “nutritive meat” is absurd. He uses the fact that there would be high-quality meat gained from eating a fat child and implies that the benefits would outweigh the costs because of how cheap the meat would be. On the surface, he makes a convincing argument for this. He uses facts and statistics to confirm this point. An example of a logical argument used in his essay is “I believe no Gentleman would repine to give Ten Shillings for the Carcass of a good fat Child, which, as I have said will make four Dishes of excellent Nutritive Meat (Smith, Paragraph 14).” He argues the case for the Irish children to be used as food.
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