ABSTRACT
The term emotional appeal is sometimes used in rhetoric textbooks with a negative connotation, as a form of fallacy, but that is misleading. Emotional appeal is by no means always, or even usually, incompatible with logical reasoning in argumentation. The most eloquent expressions of humanity throughout history have appealed to feeling as well as to reason: “Give me liberty, or give me death,” “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” “I have a dream.” Emotional appeal is acceptable and even admirable when it is fully warranted by the facts (either as generally agreed on or as established through evidence) and reasoned analysis of the situation; it only becomes fallacious when it becomes a substitute for a wellsupported argument and distracts attention from the weakness of a poorly supported one, as a form of evading the issue. It is often a tricky judgment call, however, to determine when an emotional appeal is justified and when it isn’t, and the ESBYODS principle comes strongly into play here, inclining us all to judge that such an appeal is justified whenever it is on our own side and fallacious whenever it is on the other.
