Public Address and Moral Judgment: Critical Studies in Ethical Tensions

Public Address and Moral Judgment offers a critical look at the ways in which public address can enact moral codes, articulate moral judgments, and manifest ethical tensions. Each chapter carefully examines specific examples of public address for their moral dimensions, exploring how public address functions to articulate and express the ethical tensions of its time and context.

The contributors highlight important and often different ways that public address works to expose problematics in ethical tensions - problematics of language and imagery, metaphor and character, genre and definition. The authors are also mindful of the tenuous relationship that exists between rhetoric and morality, between situated public address and a society’s ethical foundations.

The essays in Public Address and Moral Judgment, on topics ranging from WWII propaganda to the civil rights rhetoric of President George H. W. Bush to the photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison, consider the powerful role of public discourse in the constitution of a moral code for the American people.