Arguing about public issues: What can we learn from practical ethics?

Abstract

As most rhetoric teachers know from experience, arguments about controversial issues slide easily into disputes with an ethical edge. In Writing Arguments, John Ramage and John Bean note that the line between ethical arguments ... and other kinds of disputes is often pretty thin. Even issues that seem involve straight-forward practical values, Ramage and Bean explain, turn out have an ethical (352). And the ethical dimension is especially strong in controversies that involve not simply disagreements but deep conflicts, such as the kinds of topics that are found in many controversy-oriented anthologies. For example, Robert Miller's The Informed Argument (4th ed.) has units on gun control, AIDS in the workplace, sexual harassment, immigration policies, culture and curriculum, and freedom of expression. Thayle Anderson and Kent Forrester's Point Counterpoint (2nd ed.) includes units on the wilderness, funeral practices, advertising, sex differences, bilingual education, obscenity, and the internment of Japanese residents during World War II. These kinds of topics involve serious disputes about what practices we should permit, whose rights we should protect, which are most important, which policies are fairest, etc. Recognizing that controversial issues often invite ethical arguments, some textbook authors have begun discuss principles of moral philosophy and methods from applied ethics, specifically as a way for students tackle disputes with an ethical edge. For example, Ramage and Bean include a section titled An Overview of Major Ethical Systems, in which the authors present the Utilitarian focus on consequences, the Kantian ethic of principles, and finally a comparison and integration of these approaches. The reason for knowing about these different ethical systems is that they provide strategies for examining controversial issues, such as capital punishment. In another textbook-the fifth edition of Writing and Reading Across the CurriculumLaurence Behrens and Leonard Rosen include a unit on Business Ethics, including essays that discuss moral theory as well as some cases for analysis. As stated in the Instructor's Manual for the text, the authors included this unit in order to introduce freshmen the subject of ethics . . . offer models for making ethical decisions; provide cases upon which students can test those models; and raise difficult, debatable questions about values (71).