Morality and Gay Rights Discourse Essay - 2620 Words

Morality and Gay Rights Discourse When Aristotle discussed the material premises of enthymemes as being important in rhetoric, he was prescient of the kind of appeals that would be tendered by opponents in the discourse over gay rights issues long after his time. Smith and Windes express the nature of this conflict accurately when they write, â€Å"symbols expressing fundamental cultural values are invoked by all sides† (1997: 28). Similarly, Sarah S. Brown describes the participants in a â€Å"struggle to stake out symbolic positions of good and to frame their side in terms of morally powerful conceptions of right and wrong† (2000: 458). Fascinatingly, she suggests, â€Å"even people with deeply conflicting opinions appeal to the same moral†¦show more content†¦To begin with, however, we turn back to enthymemes. Terrence Cook (1980) identifies eight categories of standards that are referred to in the justification of political appeals – prudence, tradition, the supernatural, (human) nature, law, public opinion, prestige suggestion, and ideals. He writes, â€Å"Sometimes standards are implicit in myths or metaphors, symbolizations which are more than decoration when they tap through concretization of otherwise cold cognitions† (516). In fact, he may be referring to the power of fundamental, (almost) universally accepted principles that are woven into the constitutive ‘myths’ and stories of social realities. Only tacit allusion to these principles is required to trigger them within an audience and engage that audience in their own persuasion. Certainly, this is the phenomenon that Brown (2000) encounters when she notices how opposing factions of the debate surrounding same-sex parenting each make claim to the same value-laden concepts in their arguments. For example, both â€Å"pros† and â€Å"cons† reference the utmost importance of family, believe that human rights are indispensable, and share â€Å"a conception of prejudice as irrational and unjustified opposition to something, even using the same words to describe it: hateful, judgmental, ignorant† (449). The substance of their arguments, then, consists of each party attempting to load this â€Å"shared moral language† with definitional information that favors their opinion.Show MoreRelatedThe Ethics Of Foucault And Today1166 Words   |  5 PagesPhilosophy 28 June 2015 The Ethics of Foucault and Today Ethics has been studied from different spectrums throughout time whether political or moral based, a collective or individual effort, philosophers have studied theses values based on what is right and wrong. One thinker who is not commonly seen as a philosopher but referred to in countless works is Michel Foucault. 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