Argument 170 【六人行小组8.5】by odie

odiehereUID: 2502172

TOPIC: ARGUMENT170 - For the past five years, consumers in California have been willing to pay twice as much for oysters from the northeastern Atlantic Coast as for Gulf Coast oysters. This trend began shortly after harmful bacteria were found in a few raw Gulf Coast oysters. But scientists have now devised a process for killing the bacteria. Once consumers are made aware of the increased safety of Gulf Coast oysters, they are likely to be willing to pay as much for Gulf Coast as for northeastern Atlantic Coast oysters, and greater profits for Gulf Coast oyster producers will follow.
WORDS: 416          TIME: 00:32:00          DATE: 2010/8/5 17:54:32
With purely speculative evidence and illogical reasoning, the statement has come to the conclusion that new technologies to kill oyster bacteria will result in higher price of the oysters. Some of the problems that I found in the statement are listed as follows:
To begin with, the argument has committed the "After This, Then, Because of This" fallacy by specifying the cause of the high price of northeastern Atlantic Coast (AC)oysters as the harmful bacteria in Gulf Coast (GC)oysters. Simply because the increasingly greater discrepancy between prices of oysters from two areas came after the detection of bacteria in GC oysters cannot guarantee that the bacteria is the only cause for this trend. There is a need to look for other possible factors that have made the GC oysters less popular, or that have made the AC oyster more popular. Besides, has the price of oysters from areas other than the above two affected their prices? Therefore, the exact reason for the price trend has to be determined before further analysis can be done.
But even if the bacteria IS the major factor cause the price trend, new technologies to kill the bacteria may not help alter the trend, as expected by the arguer. Will there be side-effects with the bacteria-killing procedure that may affect consumers' health? Will the adoption of the technologies boost up the cost of GC oyster selling? No research into the above two issues has been reported in the statement, so that the effect of the discovery of the technology on oyster price is unclear.
However, if the technology has been proven to be safe and consumers generally accept the technology, it is not certain that the price of GC oysters will rise to the current level of the AC oyster price. One possibility is that the AC price will be lowered to exactly the current level of GC, because AC will lose its advantage over GC. Another possibility is that, AC may still be more popular because of other elements, e.g. the Atlantic Coast is regarded as less affected by pollution, the nutrition contained in the AC oysters is proven to be higher, or simply, the AC oysters are more delicious.
As a result, before more evidence can be given to prove that the killing of bacteria is safe and is essentially the best and major way to make the GC oysters more popular, I will regard the argument in the statement as poorly supported.