I recently gave a talk on ethics at the Professional Speechwriters Association international conference at the George Washington University, and a few days later talked about ethics at an event in DC co-hosted by Emerson College and the Blanquerna Center for Global Communication in Barcelona. Preparing for both reinforced my view that in ethics there are no rules, only decisions.
My students in the political communication program in the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University quite reasonably want to know what the ethical rules of advocacy are. They have rules for data analysis, writing, and editing. There are rules and rubrics for assignments, resumes, and networking. So what, they ask, are the ethical rules? My students aren’t alone. Critics have been raising ethical questions about persuasion since ancient Greece.
The short answer is that I don’t know. That’s also the long answer.
In his 2024 book, The Philosophy of Translation, Damion Searls wrote, “there are no rules, only decisions.” Here Searls was talking about fealty to the text, balanced with the intent of the author, the nuances of language, the expectations of the reader, and more. He wrote that when Glenn Gould plays Bach, we hear Bach but we also hear Gould. Where the dead composer should end and the living pianist and audience begin is up to Glenn Gould.
I think the same is true of political communication.
Politics isn’t about facts, it’s about what to do with them. Politics isn’t about what something is, it’s about what something means and what the best path forward is. As the legendary political communication scholar Murray Edelman wrote, “if there are no conflicts over meaning, the issue is not political, by definition.” Politics is more like translating than reporting. It’s interpreting, it’s taking what’s there and giving it life and direction.
Some decisions are obvious. For example: don’t lie, don’t attack someone because of how they look or sound, how they pray, or who they love. Those aren’t interesting decisions. The interesting decisions are things like, “when does spinning turn to lying?” “where does persuasion end and manipulation begin?” “what are the ethics of framing - both what something is and is not about?” “what are the ethics of agenda setting - talking about one topic at the expense of another?”
These decisions should not be made blind or on the fly. You should make these decisions intentionally, deliberately, thoughtfully.
Some context:
These new debates are very old just with new toys.
In Plato’s dialogue Protragoras, the sophist for whom the dialogue is named, claimed to teach people the “art of politics” - something Socrates spent a lot of time trying to prove couldn’t be done and that the attempt could “poison the soul.”
In the Gorgias, Plato, via Socrates again, worried that a compelling speaker who didn’t know anything about medicine would be more persuasive than a boring doctor.
In the Phaedrus, the sophist explained that “...what a budding orator needs to know is not what is really right, but what is likely to seem right in the eyes of the mass of people who are going to pass judgment: not what is really good or fine but what will seem so; and that it is this rather than truth that produces conviction.”
This is all between 399 - 347 BCE.
In about 95 CE, the Roman orator Quintilian worried about “hack advocates” - his words.
Much closer to our time, in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” George Orwell complained that “In our time, political speech and writing are largely in defense of the indefensible” and is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” In the same essay, he wrote “The word Facism has no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings that cannot be reconciled with each other.”
Second verse, same as the first.
Some things to consider:
Your ethics in speechwriting or political communication should be the same as your ethics in business, your family, and the rest of your life. You have ethics that you apply, not separate fields with their own sets of rules.
Democracy is about debate. The whole point is that we don’t know the best thing to do next, so we have to argue about it and come to what is hopefully a good conclusion. Therefore your communication should never foreclose debate. If there is no debate, there is no democracy.
Some things to do:
Revisit why you chose to go into politics or advocacy. If you aren’t in those fields, revisit why you chose to be who you are in the world. Spend time rediscovering first principles. What is the rock upon which you build your life?
Write down one or two reminders on a post-it and put it on your computer. What is your touchstone? What is the phrase or mantra? The check-in? The imagined conversation? Who are you trying to make proud or not let down?
Then decide, act, reflect, repeat.