To Persuade or Not: Ethical Concerns of Utilizing Rhetoric

There is no purpose to this image; I just liked it. Now, there, you’ve been tricked by the image into thinking this has something to do with the story. I perhaps persuaded you to look at this, out of curiosity; you wondered what this lovely dandelion on a tastefully out-of-focus background has to do with rhetoric. The answer is nothing. I lied to you.

We no longer have a choice.

Plato hated rhetoric because it could be used against the innocent user. He claimed that the widespread teaching of the art of speechcraft would result in horrible misinformation, dishonesty, and a widespread plague of speakers attempting to manipulate others for their own gain. And he was right.

He was right! But you cannot have only the good or only the bad in any situation. With the negatives come the incredible stories and poems and songs that people have created over the ages, the amazing works of rhetorical art. With those downsides come the power to persuade people to help themselves, to persuade them to do good.

Humans can and will seek to control each other, though that is not of course an innate state of being. Corporations dominate directive media, and infiltrate social media. Politicians use rhetoric to control the masses. There is no escaping it; rhetoric used at all times, every day of the year, in every possible manner, to influence the way the average person thinks.

The world is incredibly complex. To navigate it, the average person must learn to understand the nuances of the thousands of different directions they are receiving each day.

Learning even a little bit of rhetoric will make people more able to resist the commands of corporations and dissect the sweet-sounding promises of political figures. Understanding language will help people think critically about the world in which they dwell, the structures and institutions built out of shapes that could be letters that could be words that could be thoughts.

It is simply necessary now, for anyone who wishes to navigate this world. We no longer have a choice; we must all learn to understand rhetorical devices in their many forms. The trickier the landscape, the more training one requires to walk safely through it.

Gorgias argued that it was the responsibility of the speaker to avoid misleading their audience. Perhaps he simply could not fathom the depths to which people will purposefully misinform others? I can’t be sure. It’s certain that he did not understand exactly what people would be able to do nowadays, the types of audiences that could be reached. The Athenians would be unable to comprehend the ability of our modern media to touch such vast audiences, of our emotionally unclear text-based communications. Not only do speakers blatantly disregard Gorgias’ directive to only speak true information to their audiences, they sometimes have absolutely no control over how their words are interpreted — they can’t even convey the tone they wanted to, if it’s over text.

So, ethically, where does this leave us? In a completely different game than before. It’s like comparing cricket and Pong; the only similarity is that there is a ball involved, being hit. The field is completely different, and the goals of the game a complete mystery if considered by the counterpart.

It does not matter if we want to adhere to the ethics of the Athenians (which, considering what else they considered acceptable and unacceptable, is probably a bad idea anyways). We cannot; we no longer have a choice.