Rhetoric and Ethics in Global Organizations: Implications for Human Rights

This paper will explore the ethical implications of how global organizations utilize rhetoric and build narratives in human rights discourses as well as in other various international policy contexts. Attention to organizational rhetoric, in terms of the arguments conveyed to audiences and rhetorical strategies used to elicit adherence, raises ethical concern about the strategic purposes of “worthy talk.” Inquiry will follow the lead of legal scholar Douglas Parker who, in presuming that “most human relationships are manipulative in nature,” examines the ethical propriety of “rhetoric within a broader concept of manipulation” (1972, 69). Parker relies on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s seminal work The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (1969) in which the authors explain that “the theory of argumentation is the study of discursive techniques allowing us to induce or to increase the mind’s adherence to the theses presented for assent.” (1969, 4) In this regard, The New Rhetoric includes commentaries on an extensive array of strategies relating to quasi-logical argumentation, the structure of reality, relationships in the structure of reality, the dissociation of concepts, and the interaction of arguments. Sorting through Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s commentaries, Parker associates ethical propriety with manipulation that is non-exploitative. Specifically, the speaker’s rhetorical techniques to gain adherence from an audience can be regarded as non-exploitative if the following conditions (paraphrased here) are met: (1) Speaker and audience occupy the same plane (of general knowledge), such that the audience is capable of critical evaluation (72-73); (2) Rhetoric is calm, reflective, and reasoned rather than based on irrational emotion or deception (76); (3) Rhetoric is invited, and the speaker provides disclosure of her biases or interests (77); (4) Speaker does not abuse authority (78-82); and (5) Rhetoric does not depend on veiled threat—that is, the alternative use of a more loathsome form of manipulation (82). The first section of the paper will examine the rhetoric of global organizations related to various arenas of international concern and relies on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric (1969) to identify particular strategies of argumentation used within them. A second section will compare the argumentative strategies employed as well as their ethical implications within and among those arenas. In regard to the first, rhetoric will be analyzed within four “international arenas”—two of which (the development and the regulatory) correspond to areas of international policymaking, a third (humanitarian relief) constitutes a vital response component of disaster policy, and a fourth (human rights) either parallels what James Q. Wilson calls a contextual goal (1989, 129-134) that could be adopted by any organization or pursues a primary mission of human-rights advocacy per se. The paper will conclude by addressing attention to how organization discourses in the various policy/mission arenas impinge upon human rights advocacy in terms of: the variety of argumentative strategies used to justify alternative conceptions of human rights, argumentative strategies employed in the other (development, humanitarian relief, and regulatory) arenas that either reinforce or compromise rights advocacy, and the comparative moral weights of “principled ideals” versus “pragmatic action” rhetoric with human rights discourses in particular and global organizations in general