If a speaker unscrupulously directs his/her effectiveness solely to persuading, he/she is at most half fulfilling his/her rhetorical claim to action: because he/she also wants to appear morally credible. This book establishes a new branch of philosophical ethics: rhetorical ethics.

If rhetoric is the theory of the effect of an utterance, then rhetorical ethics is the theory of the moral handling of that effect. The thesis of the present book can be reduced to this short formula. The legitimation for this lies in the ambivalence of rhetorical power, because what is useful to the speaker can damage the audience if he/she only persuades them without also wanting to respect and convince them.

The aim of this book is a philosophical reflection on the orator's claim to action, whose persuasive interest is undoubtedly legitimate, but which must also be morally credible to the audience. First of all, the author deals with the ambivalence of the oratorical effect between avoidance of physical violence and generation of new psychological violence, which establishes culture. Next, a rhetorical concept of action and a rhetorical model of ethics are developed on the basis of cultural theory, as well as reflections on the rhetorical doctrine of goods, the rhetorical norms of morals and virtues. The book is rounded off by the interpretation of two sample speeches, which are intended to illustrate the proposed ethical model in practice.