are bereft of instincts that allow us to know or be anything im-mediately. Even self-knowledge or “self understanding has the structure of ‘self-externality.’” A “detour” is required to acquire this knowledge, an act of mediation through the other—the phoros of an analogy, the vehicle of a metaphor, the second term of a ratio, the relationships we maintain with other human beings. In some cases we initiate this process of identity construction; in other cases we find ourselves selecting or resisting choices offered to or foisted off on us. In the latter case, rhetoric plays a particularly crucial role insofar as it “is not only the technique of producing . . . an effect, it is always also a means of keeping the effect transparent” (Blumenberg 435-36). This second capacity, the ability to interpret effects on ourselves as well as to produce effects on others, that makes mastery of rhetoric particularly crucial for our students at this moment in history when so many forces are at work conjuring up dysfunctional identities for them and marginalizing perfectly functional ones in the process.
Ethics and Argument
The model of identity that prevails in rhetoric, insofar as it stresses human agency and choice, ensures the centrality of ethics to our enterprise as well. As philosopher Charles Taylor has noted “selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably interwined themes” (3). We have failed to take proper account of this connection, he goes on to argue, mostly because of moral philosophy’s fascination with “defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life” (3). The good life, as that concept is understood by Taylor, is fundamentally social insofar as the self is fundamentally a social construct. I am who I am by virtue of my relationships with other humans and happiness cannot be understood apart from those relationships. It is a vision that flies in the face of those visions equating happiness with pleasure or maximization of utility, or, in the case of the rugged individualist, with complete self sufficiency. Unlike the neo-classical economists’ model of the good life, a model that dominates the American popular imagination, social benefit is not an accidental byproduct of individual greed. For a social benefit to have ethical or rhetorical significance, it must be a product of intention. The good life is, in Kenneth Burke’s homely phrase, “a project for ‘getting along with people’” (Attitudes 256). Getting along with each other entails the collective identification of those “particular lived values that unite us and inform the institutions we cherish and wish to defend” cited by Stanley Fish. There is no universal standard that will dictate those values and institutions—or, more precisely, none of the various standards claimed by their adherents to be universal are universally subscribed to—hence the need to articulate them and work out the differences among them through the only means short of force we have to achieve this end—argument, or as some philosophers prefer, “conversation.”
So long as one sees ethics not just in terms of individuals making the right choices, but also in terms of a society determining what options individuals have to choose among, and institutionalizing those choices through collective action, the study of rhetoric is tantamount to the study of ethics. That said, anyone who has taught argument will recognize the fundamental linkage between the two pursuits. Ethical questions arise out of all sorts of arguments, even some that seem at first glance far removed from sphere of ethical thought. The question is not whether we should attend to the ethical dimension of argument, the question is how best to go about teaching ethics in an argument class. Later on we will talk about ethical arguments per se when we discuss a theory of argument types known as stasis theory. We will talk about ethical arguments, that is those whose major claim constitutes an ethical judgment, as a special sort of evaluation argument and utilize some of the language traditionally used by philosophers when determining the “content of obligation” in a given circumstance and laying out systematic means for reaching ethical decisions. But at this point, we are talking much more broadly about the relationship between ethics and rhetoric. In what follows we will be concerned about the common features of ethical and rhetorical reasoning and about the ethics of arguing.
One way of underscoring just how much rhetoric and ethics have in common is to consider the question of where ethics might best be taught in a curriculum. The process of making a case for teaching ethics in a writing course focused on argument, makes eminently clear just how closely related the two pursuits are. Traditionally of course, ethics has been taught at the college level either in philosophy courses devoted to the consideration of ethical theories, their history and application, or in the case of some religious institutions in religion classes focused on practical application of religious principles and beliefs. Charles Taylor has pointed out some of the limitations of ethics at it is taught in philosophy courses insofar as it focuses on the “content of obligation” rather than the figuring out what a good life might entail. In pursuing various “thought experiments” built around moral problems, philosophers tend to help students understand the limitations of extant moral theories more clearly than they help them define for themselves a life worth living. Because writing courses in argument have no obligation to “cover” any particular set of moral theories, we are free to offer students the opportunity to pursue their own definitions. One of the most effective ways to start a conversation among students about their own notion of the good life—as opposed to the way that various philosophers have defined that notion—is to have them discuss Ursula LeGuin’s wonderful short story, “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas.” LeGuin’s Omelas is an imagined utopian realm where it would seem the good life, by all the traditional measures, has been achieved. The only problem is that the continued bliss of the entire community is dependent on the continued suffering of one child who is kept in a basement and must never be shown any kindness. Every child in Omelas is told about the suffering child sometime between the ages of eight and twelve. Those who subsequently “walk away”—much to the puzzlement of the narrator—have apparently decided that the enormous quantity of bliss enjoyed by the society does not justify the suffering of one child. Their choice in turn reflects a belief in the parliamentary nature of identity, the belief that it is relational rather than essential, and that hence all who live in Omelas and know of the child’s plight are implicated in its suffering and their ostensible good life is as flawed as their selfhood.
These days, of course, philosophy courses are far from the only place where the growing demand for ethics instruction is being met. As an alternative to philosophy courses, many disciplines today offer their own ethics courses emphasizing recurring ethical issues in the field and canons of behavior derived from the standards of the profession. However well intentioned such courses and however clearly they constitute an acknowledgment of the need for ethics instruction within the academy, they are, we would argue, problematic sites of ethics instruction precisely because there is no fundamental connection between the imperatives of the discipline and ethical imperatives. Moreover, whatever overt instruction in ethics students might receive in such courses must be balanced against tacit forms of ethical instruction they are likely to receive in other courses in their major. Like the obligatory “chapel” attendance that students at many church-affiliated liberal arts colleges chafed against throughout the last century, such courses have an unfortunate tendency to strike students as at best a quaint nod to moral correctness and at worst a distraction from their “real” courses of study.
Take the field of business, for example, a field that has most publicly taken it upon itself to emphasize ethics in recent years, thanks to a number of highly publicized business scandals. Given the regnant economic theories in America today, students are quite likely to be taught, directly and indirectly, in many different courses overseen by many different people, that markets are wiser than human agents. If one wishes to make a prudent decision about the possible consequences of a policy, one is advised to study the performance of the market in similar situations in the past. If one wants to know what has worked and is working, the only verdict that really counts is the one delivered by the market. A “fair” price, thus, is whatever the market will bear, while a “fair” wage is the least the market will allow one to pay. If one is in a position to fiddle the market a bit, allowing one to charge higher prices and pay lower wages, so be it, those sorts of adjustments are built into the market system, and as such are no more blameworthy than holding penalties in professional football. Against the backdrop of this near providential regard for the omniscience of markets, a single
