Ethical persuasion

Ethical persuasion concerns the moral principles associated with a speaker's use of persuasion to influence an audience's beliefs, attitudes, intentions, motivations, or behaviors. An ethical speaker may endeavor to:

The ethics of persuasion in professional media fields such as journalism have received some academic attention. Baker and Martinson present a five-part test which defines the five principles of truthfulness, authenticity, respect, equity, and social responsibility (i.e., the importance of the common good). Thus, the TARES test serves as a metric of a speaker's adherence to some ethical principles in professional persuasive correspondence. Fitzpatrick and Gauthier ask several questions of their own to evaluate the ethics of persuasion:
 * 1) Explore the audience's viewpoint,
 * 2) Explain the speaker's viewpoint, and
 * 3) Create resolutions.


 * 1) For what purpose is persuasion being employed?
 * 2) Toward what choices and with what consequences for individuals is persuasion being used?
 * 3) Does the persuasion contribute to or interfere with the audience's decision-making processes?

Relatedly, the ethics of rhetoric is concerned with a person's ability to resist the temptation of helping themselves by harming others. Another instance of unethical persuasion would be to use persuasion for personal gain without the knowledge of the audience.