Ethical persuasion

Ethical persuasion is a human being's internal ability to treat others with respect, understanding, caring, and fairness in order to understand themselves and others. There are three phases of ethical persuasion and they are:

1. Explore the other person's viewpoint.
2. Explain your viewpoint.
3. Create resolutions.

The ethics of rhetoric is mainly concerned with morality and a persons ability to not be tempted in certain instances into helping themselves by negatively impacting others, or just as unethical to use persuasion to increase personal gain without the knowledge of the audience.

For example, in any organization, where the clients, without any technical knowledge, are motivated by self-direction, set goals which are very difficult to reach than they had initially imagined. If one encounters such clients, his/her first ethical obligation is to engage the client in a detailed discussion about feasibility. Here, Ethical Persuasion involves exploring alternatives and a review of the merits and demerits of the decisions.

Foundations for arguments

According to Richard Weaver the main components of a persuasive argument stem from three different argument types.

Genus - based around the “nature” of things and their general attributes

Similtude - concerns using associated ideas and principals

Circumstance - includes neither one of these philosophies and does not concern individual values or beliefs, but rather necessity and immediate logic.