Humans are incredibly irrational. If you want to talk them into stuff, it's a lot more effective to appeal to their irrational feelings than to appeal to reason - even if you're trying to convince them to do the rational thing.
Believing that reason trumps emotion in human decision-making is itself demonstrably irrational. (And yes, this means the people who think they're being reasonable are probably wrong.)
Now, a question... is an appeal to emotion, in itself, unethical/dishonest? If that's what you believe, then you really need to defend that with a strongly reasoned argument.
So if an appeal to emotion can act in the best interest of the person you are trying to convince, if your motives are pure and the results beneficial, is it a good act? And interestingly, if you refuse to use emotion to convince someone of something beneficial to them, is that in itself unethical? There's a strong argument that it is.
I think that emotions, feelings, and reason are all pretty good tools for humans to use with other humans. The real problem is that we are less and less dealing with people in-real-life face-to-face interaction.
In the last few hundred years there has been a huge increase in what some call super-stimuli where humans are now out of their evolutionary element and are responding poorly. Amplified voice, radio, TV, motorized transport, telephone, internet, video calls, social media, credit cards, a smartphone in your pocket that can do all sorts of crazy things (take pictures or video, contact anyone on earth, let you go into more debt to get a hamburger, etc), foods from refined sugar to trans fats, refined and artificial drugs from liquor to fentanyl. Couple this with the rise of the scientific study of human psychology and the advertising and PR industries, its pretty amazing the we are functioning at all. I wonder what the number of minutes the average American spends each day interacting with each other face-to-face. Not much and less every year.
An honest appeal to emotion done by a person face-to-face with your best interest at heart, great. Not what one really is getting these days.
So? Proving that empirically proving something is not sufficient to get past people's objections does not prove that TCR or whatever is right. You first have to prove (but in a respected way) that say TCR works, and then you can discuss the objections.