RT Article
T1 Reason as a Nexus of Natural Law and Rhetoric
JF Journal of business ethics
VO 59
IS 3
SP 247
OP 257
A1 Maciejewski, Jeffrey J.
LA English
YR 2005
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1785623907
AB Although the pages of Journal of Business Ethics have hosted an ongoing dialogue on the ethics of rhetoric and persuasion, the debates have been unable to account for the underlying morality of the human propensity to engage in rhetorical discourse as a part of living in society. In this paper, I offer natural-law ethical theory as a moral paradigm in which to examine rhetoric. In this context, I assert that rhetoric services reason, which in turn services our dispositions or inclinations that are one ideological foundation of natural-law theory. As rhetoric affects the apprehension of these dispositions it subsumes a related morality in which rhetorical endeavors can be seen as “natural”. So endowed, I believe that this conception of rhetoric offers a number of philosophical and practical implications, one of which is a new way to assess the morality of commercial manifestations of rhetoric such as spin and the use of puffery in advertising.
K1 Reason
K1 Law
K1 spin
K1 natural puffery
K1 Persuasion
K1 Advertising
K1 Rhetoric
DO 10.1007/s10551-005-3437-5