Talking Points for pp. 1 - 49

Socrates:
(1) "the unexamined life is not worth living"
(2) Important for 3 reasons
(a) insisted on doing the right thing regardless of consequences
(b) ethics is a matter of pleasing God
(c) ethical behavior requires active social involvement, whether as a teacher, civic leader,
or social critic

Plato:
(1) considered the founder of philosophy
(2) philosophy is a matter of discovering and pursuing truth
(3) and Socrates held that teachers have a responsibility to instill both ethical values and
rhetorical arts in their pupils
(4) ethics and rhetoric are closely tied, but ethics comes first
(a) the ONLY purpose of rhetoric is to serve ethics
(5) ethics is metaphysical and idealistic
(6) "to know what virtue is"

Aristotle:
(1) ethics ultimately stems from the divinely ordained nature of things
(a) practical affairs -> the ethical course of action had to be determined in a debate
(2) ethical judgements have to be rhetorically argued in order to reveal the intrinsic goodness of
the differing sides and to allow one to prevail
(3) ethics is the study of what is involved in good actions
(4) ethics is a subject that does not allow hard and fast answers, like mathematics does
(5) ethics is about what is sought for its own sake - goodness itself - and not for the sake of
something else such as money or success
(6) Doing the right thing for its own sake
(7) Virtuous -> the disposition to seek after the good
(8) humans are creatures of habit; therefore, habitually virtuous by deliberating about the
ethical and behaving accordingly
(9) does not declare absolute rules
(10) ethics is not metaphysical or idealistic
(11) "The object of our inquiry is not to know what virtue is, but to become good men"
(12) Ethics in technical communication would not have to do with technology itself but rather
with our decisions about how and when to use it

Nobel and the Nobel peace prize?

(13) moral wisdom must be combined with practical wisdom in order to yield ethical action
(14) ethics cannot be reduced to politics or the law because it must guide us when the law or
political rules are silent or in error

The Sophists: (The Lawyers?)
(1) are no absolutes and that communication is immensely powerful precisely because it shapes
minds, hearts, values, and decisions
(2) values are relative because they depend on circumstances
(3) rhetoric is only a skill, a collection of techniques that could be readily acquired by anyone
(4) ethics and rhetoric are closely tied but rhetoric comes first
(a) rhetoric allows the negotiation and persuasion that defines social values
(5) rhetoric and its techniques are quite separate from ethics

Kant:
(1) emphasizes duty and respect for others, regardless of personal consequences
(2) ethical theory is based on a sense of duty, which is important both for what it is and for what
it is not
(3) all humans are endowed with a sense of moral reason
(4) From this obligatory nature of ethics derives the fundamental importance of duty as the
responsibility to carry out these directives regardless of anything else, solely because it is the
right thing to do
(5) fundamental ethical principle, the categorical imperative: "Act as if the maxim of your action
were to become by your will a universal Law of Nature."
(6) Theory of duty is founded on the radically autonomous free will and its capacity to choose
otherwise and on its reasoned self-persuasion not to choose otherwise. It is duty based in
freedom. Whereas, we usually think of a duty as an onerous burden and a limitation of our
freedom.

Feminist Ethical Thinkers:
(1) cornerstone of ethics -> genuinely caring relationship

Hegel:
(1) values are arrived at socially
(a) by forces that were working to preserve their own self-interest
(2) modern "rehabilitator" of the sophists

Perelman:
(1) our language is our values
(2) Persuasion amounts to a process of social negotiation, ratification, and propagation
(3)

Burke:
(1) values are worked out socially and rhetorically rather than received from on high
(a) rhetoric worked to shape value judgements

Weaver:
(1) Values come before our discourse rather than stemming from it

Rationalists, social constructionists, and other theorists have shown that all language use entails ethical values and cannot do otherwise

Mark Wicclair and David Farkas:
(1) distinguish ethics from relativistic, self-interested approaches, the law, and religion
(2) humanistic approach to ethics -> how to be "a good human being"
(3) 3 ethical principles
(a) goal-based (e.g. utilitarianism)
(b) duty-based (e.g. Kantian ethics)
(c) rights-based