The Ethics of Rhetoric: A Personal Response

In regards to rhetoric, it is built entirely on the ethical appeal of each and every word a speaker chooses to include in his work. The ethics of which a speaker promotes or attacks are what turns an audience’s heads to and from the orator. With this in mind, the preparation of ethical appeal in a speech is the guiding factor in all oration. That being said, we can clearly come up with several different types of ethical appeals of various speech topics.

A few that immediately come to mind are wartime, political, commercial, and regional ethics in speech crafting. To begin, wartime rhetoric is all about how you discuss sensitive material. For example, the recruiting of soldiers must be done in a way that appears to the public as ethical when it comes to hiring people to kill our enemies. The ethics of this instance alone must tread lightly on sensitive terminology.

Another example comes from the current political rhetoric all around us. As voting time has approached, endless banners, flyers, bumper stickers, and television coverage can be seen anywhere from your front yard to your place of work. Political rhetoric is all about candidates choosing specific ethical approaches to play up their entire campaign to show themselves as genuine throughout the running. This is where a lot of politicians can fall short when they begin their work with one ethical approach but swap to another in a manner that makes them look fickle to their previous audience.