Abstract

The 1970 National Developmental Project on Rhetoric proposed that rhetorical invention be conceived as an architectonic art of rhetorical reasoning. Subsequent studies of rhetorical reason have not been conducted satisfactorily: First, present conceptions lack coherence; second, such scholarship tends to be so academic that it is not accessible to the very practitioners who would most benefit from it; third, attempts at restoring classical rhetorical doctrine are generally too conventional to address adequately the dilemmas of contemporary society. ;This study begins by defining rhetorical reasoning as the heuristic faculty that precedes the act of argumentation and issues in praxis. The study goes beyond definitional matters to conceptualize rhetorical reason by analyzing the reasoning processes implied in actual bioethics consults. Ethics committees often use casuistic methods to resolve moral dilemmas. Transcripts of ethics committee discourse constitute case studies that show how rhetorical reasoning guides casuistical inquiry. The resultant methodology systematically demonstrates how the classical rhetorical concepts of topics, stasis, and maxims combine with phronesis to manage the particulars that abide at the heart of a difficult moral case and to help expose the issue at stake. Managing particulars is a necessary step in rendering sound judgment in a moral dilemma, and demonstrative reasoning is ill-suited to such an enterprise. This conception of rhetorical reasoning emphasizes the discovery aspect of rhetoric, whereas conventional ones emphasize invention. The former implies that rhetoric is a means of discovering knowledge; the latter that it is a means of transmitting knowledge only. These findings should hold significance for those who find that hypothetico-deductive methods are of only limited value in their work, practical ethicists, and, of course, students of rhetorical invention