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.