Teaching rhetoric and teaching morality: Some problems and possibilities of ethical criticism

Allan Bloom's controversial book The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students2 has attracted popular attention to a position that already had been gaining currency among critics of American higher education. These critics charge that we educators are failing our students individually and our community collectively by failing to teach morality--by failing to attend to the role our disciplines play for students and practitioners in the formation of their character. But questions as complicated and momentous as whether education in a discipline should aim to develop moral character, how it should do so, and how it can do so without damaging the spirit and the skills of free inquiry are hardly such simple questions as they are often depicted, including by Bloom. This is especially true for a discipline so frequently accused of complicity with evil, or even inherent immorality, as rhetoric. Indeed the question of rhetoric's role in the formation of character presents a genuine dilemma, one that is often corrupted in the public controversies about moral education. On the one hand, professors of rhetoric have no apparent special training in such ethical issues, nor is it clear why they would have special obligations. One does not have to be Allan Bloom or the Carnegie Commission or even William Bennett to believe that all educators have some general obligation to influence their students for the better, but it is not clear why or how this should devolve in a special way on teachers of reading, writing and speaking. It could do so only if ethical issues were found to be somehow intrinsic to rhetoric itself, to what we must teach if we are to succeed in teaching rhetoric at all--intrinsic, perhaps, to its evolution as a discipline and a practice, or to one of its fundamental functions. But how can this be squared with our notions of rhetoric as a neutral instrument? On the other hand, contemporary rhetoricians have made it at least as clear that rhetoric has inescapable connections to human character, that these connections by their nature may be the objects of distinctively rhetorical inquiry, that such inquiry may sustain and extend critical discourse, and that it may produce knowledge, including moral knowledge. For as Kenneth Burke has taught us, rhetoric is essentially involved in "the definition of man," and admits of analysis in terms of those motives through which human characters are constituted and realized.3 Moreover, as Wayne Booth has explained, the formation of self occurs in a field of selves; we are made of, as we make, the company we keep.4 If our character is so significantly at stake in our rhetoric, then the process of understanding rhetoric better would seem to hold some possibilities for better understanding of character. Or put more practically: if character realizes and reveals itself significantly in rhetoric, the knowledge achieved in rhetorical education and the critical discourse arising from it may make some issues in the formation of our characters more a matter of our informed, free, ethically charged choice. But what does all this have to do with our alleged responsibility to inculcate a particular morality?