Rhetoric and Persuasion Check

The ethics of persuasion

To persuade someone is to attempt to change their mind, and few acts are at once so ordinary and so morally charged. We persuade our friends to see a film and our governments to change their laws; we are persuaded, in turn, by advertisers, campaigners and algorithms that know more about our habits than we do ourselves.
The classical tradition offered a reassuring account of this activity. Rhetoric, on Aristotle’s view, was a neutral art: the ability to see, in any situation, the available means of persuasion. Its moral quality depended on the ends to which it was put. A skilled speaker could defend the innocent or excuse the guilty, and the fault, in the latter case, lay not with rhetoric but with the speaker.
This account, however, tacitly presupposes a rough equality between speaker and audience: a speaker addressing citizens who could, in principle, see what the speaker was doing and answer back. Modern persuasion increasingly violates that condition. When messages are tailored to individuals on the basis of data they do not know has been collected, and delivered at moments chosen to coincide with their vulnerability, the audience is no longer in a position to scrutinise the means being used on them.
One might reasonably construe the central ethical question, then, as one not of technique but of transparency. A vivid story, a striking statistic or a powerful metaphor is not in itself suspect. What matters is whether the person being persuaded could, if they wished, recognise the attempt and evaluate it on its merits. The apparent paradox — that the most effective persuasion may be the least ethical — dissolves once we see that effectiveness achieved by concealment is not, in the end, persuasion at all, but something closer to control.