Rhetorical Ethics

Porter asserts that rhetorical ethics does not provide the type of concrete answers that any legal framework would accommodate, but that it does provide guidance and procedures for making informed decisions in our day-to-day activities. Rhetorical ethics "has to do with questions about human relations as they are constructed and maintained through acts of discourse" (xiv). Moreover, rhetorical ethics deals with the intersubjective: ethics are not a moral code, but "a set of implicit understandings between writer and audience about their relationship. . . . [Ethics is] a mode of questioning and a manner of positioning. That questioning . . . always involves mediating between competing principles and judging those principles in light of particular circumstances. It is, in a word, kairotic" (68-69).

Main Page | Porter's Previous Work | Guiding Questions | Rhetorical Ethics | Internetworked Writing | Internetworked Classroom | Shaping a Future Ethics Table of Contents | Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7