Reflective Blog Post #1

I’m still struggling with how I want to define rhetoric for myself, but I know I want to synthesize ideas from each of the theorists we’ve read so far. I want to incorporate both the Sophists’ thoughts on the accessibility of absolute truth and a more Platonic approach to universal ethical right and wrong. While I agree there are some absolute truths that aren’t available to people and our perception of the world is always going to be impacted by our senses, I don’t think that makes these perceptions wrong or flawed. As long as we’re aware that we’re influenced by a multitude of outer and inner sources, our observations can be valid even if not necessarily objective. I also believe the best strategy for finding solutions to problems is a combination of the Sophistic doctrine of kairos (RT, 24) and the concepts of transcendent unchanging laws. While it’s almost always necessary to consider the situation in which a decision is being made, we also must consult the ethical facts of a situation. As with the examples in “How Many ‘Rhetorics’?”, there are some situations that are morally wrong regardless of the situations they are in. But there are some moral judgements we make based on what is “expedient at the moment” (24) – for example, every couple of years there’s a big scandal over human consumption of dog meat. Eating a dog is seen by many Americans as morally wrong, even as we eat pigs, chickens, and cows in massive amounts. So we’ve taken the “transcendent truth” of “it’s morally wrong to eat companion animals” and applied it to only the animals we personally find companionable. It’s expedient in the moment for us to make this distinction, even though it’s not based in a real universal truth. We need to look critically at why we’re making the distinction and what factors influenced our arrival there.