Category: Rhetoric

…progress is not inevitable. It’s the result of choices we make together. And we face such choices right now. Will we respond to the changes of our time with fear, turning inward as a nation, turning against each other as a people? Or will we face the future with confidence in who we are, in what we stand for, in the incredible things that we can do together?

Barack Obama, 2015 State of the Union

As Aristotle would have advised, Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address last night was a deliberative speech in the grand style. Not a statistical deluge of policy particulars, but sweeping language about future problems. He reassumed the persona of law professor, but certainly one of the large lecture hall or the legislative chamber, not of the seminar table or the forensic court.

When Obama read the above quotation, perhaps on account of this professorial demeanor, I began to consider his speech in light of some of the political philosophy I’ve been reading with my Columbia students over the past two years. My sense is that several thinkers would view Obama’s understanding of democratic progress differently: on the one hand, someone like Plato might see such change as unstoppable slippage into tyranny, and on the other hand, someone like Hegel (or maybe even Smith) might see it as a kind of genuine progress that we only appear to choose at all.

Immediately preceding Obama’s consideration of progress here, he lists some of its elements: economic recovery, health care reform, the mass legalization of same-sex marriage, and others. It’s worth considering whether and how we choose to make the specific political and cultural changes the president speaks of. In what sense are these changes actually chosen at all? In what sense is Obama’s State of the Union itself merely der Geist seiner Zeit?

On Monday, 3 Quarks Daily posted their annual philosophy prize, judged this year by John Collins at Columbia. The top prize this year goes to “Slow Corruption,” written by Vidar Halgunset. As Collins puts it, the “immediate topic is the recent public debate in Norway over the selective abortion of fetuses diagnosed with Down’s syndrome,” but there’s a second thread in the essay that approaches a topic that I’ve been thinking about a lot during my recent work on ancient rhetoric. It concerns “what we ought to debate publicly, and how we ought to discuss it,” a topic at the intersection of rhetoric and ethics.

In Halgunset’s original essay, he argues that “the question [concerning Down’s syndrome and selective abortion] is not what would be so terrible with a society without Down’s syndrome, but rather what would be so terrible with a society without people with Down’s syndrome,” but here he ends his discussion: “To be honest, I would prefer to stop here. I don’t fancy addressing this topic.” It’s not that Halgunset is not able to consider the next steps in his ethical reasoning; instead, even entertaining the discussion is an ethically questionable activity.

Collins recalls a similar sentiment expressed by an academic colleague: “Don’t you think there are situations in which it is simply indecent to deliberate at all?”

I’ve been thinking recently about the tension between having the ability to deliberate and choosing to deliberate. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle underscores the importance of deliberation: it allows one to choose between compelling alternatives, and choosing well sits at the center of ethical behavior. But deliberation is a matter not just of philosophical treatises. It also motivates a lot of ancient educational thinking, particularly as it relates to disputatio in utramque partem, an argument made on each side of an issue. As Carneades demonstrated in his embassy to Rome in 155 BC, master rhetoricians can persuasively argue both sides of a case: one day, Carneades argued for a traditional Roman understanding of justice, and the next day, argued just as persuasively against it. This ability to deliberate on any position is the pinnacle of ancient rhetorical training.

But this kind of hypothetical argumentation—taking up both sides of an issue as a display of rhetorical skill—is not devoid of ethical content itself. There are moral problems with “arguing both sides of the question” when we consider slavery, human trafficking, or genocide. And virtuosic rhetoric, as the mass graves of the early twentieth century remind us, can have serious ethical implications. If you could masterfully argue against justice as Carneades did, would you really want your listeners to believe you? There are lots of complex issues here: freedom of expression and the aims of education come to mind immediately. And Halgunset’s essay raises questions about the importance of audience: public deliberative oratory is different from, say, the quasi-forensic argumentation of a graduate seminar in philosophy, both in audience make-up and (relatedly) in the ethics of deliberation.

If nothing else, we should be careful to separate the educational goals of disputatio in utramque partem—a useful exercise for developing logical and rhetorical fluency—and a radical suspension of ethical judgment where both sides of an argument are considered equally valid. The ability to persuade and the willingness to deliberate does not require one to abandon moral judgments. And indeed, one might deliberate about whether one should deliberate at all in certain circumstances, a kind of self-restraint that Aristotle himself might encourage.