so that the listener understands that they are not wholly arbitrary: The purpose of these supports is to make the listener understand the consequences of the action they are being commanded to do. Once they understand the command's consequences, they can determine whether or not obedience to the command will have desirable results. Second pattern analysis Stevenson's second pattern of analysis is used for statements about types of actions, not specific actions. Under this pattern, In second-pattern analysis, rather than judge an action directly, the speaker is evaluating it according to a general principle. For instance, someone who says "Murder is wrong" might mean "Murder decreases happiness overall"; this is a second-pattern statement that leads to a first-pattern one: "I disapprove of anything that decreases happiness overall. Do so as well." Methods of argumentation For Stevenson, moral disagreements may arise from different fundamental attitudes, different moral beliefs about specific cases, or both. The methods of moral argumentation he proposed have been divided into three groups, known as logical, rational psychological and nonrational psychological forms of argumentation. Logical methods involve efforts to show inconsistencies between a person's fundamental attitudes and their particular moral beliefs. For example, someone who says "Edward is a good person" who has previously said "Edward is a thief" and "No thieves are good people" is guilty of inconsistency until he retracts one of his statements. Similarly, a person who says "Lying is always wrong" might consider lies in some situations to be morally permissible, and if examples of these situations can be given, his view can be shown to be logically inconsistent. Rational psychological methods examine facts that relate fundamental attitudes to particular moral beliefs; the goal is not to show that someone has been inconsistent, as with logical methods, but only that they are wrong about the facts that connect their attitudes to their beliefs. To modify the former example, consider the person who holds that all thieves are bad people. If she sees Edward pocket a wallet found in a public place, she may conclude that he is a thief, and there would be no inconsistency between her attitude (that thieves are bad people) and her belief (that Edward is a bad person because he is a thief). However, it may be that Edward recognized the wallet as belonging to a friend, to whom he promptly returned it. Such a revelation would likely change the