14.4 Speaking Ethically and Avoiding Fallacies

When we consider ethical behaviour in the workplace, it’s worth revisiting the topic of persuasion so that we can address how not to persuade. In other words, how can we avoid manipulating someone in professional situations so that they don’t later feel like they were taken advantage of?

In the context of communication, manipulation is the management of facts, ideas or points of view to play upon people’s insecurities or to use emotional appeals to one’s own advantage. Though emotional appeals were part of the rhetorical triangle discussed earlier, they cross the line into manipulation when motivated by an attempt to do something against the best interests of the audience, which expects that you treat them with respect. Deliberately manipulating them by inciting fear or guilt is unethical. Likewise, deception is unethical because it uses lies, partial truths, or the omission of relevant information to deceive. No one likes to be lied to or led to believe something that isn’t true. Deception can involve intentional bias or the selection of information to support your position while negatively framing any information that might challenge your audience’s belief.

Other unethical behaviours with respect to an audience such as a workplace team include coercion and bribery. Coercion is the use of power to make someone do something they would not choose to do freely. It usually involves threats of punishment, which get the intended outcome, but results in hatred towards the coercing person or group. Bribery, which is offering something in return for an expected favour, is similarly unethical because it sidesteps normal, fair protocol for personal gain at the audience’s expense. When the rest of the team finds out that they lost out on opportunities because someone received favours for favours, an atmosphere of mistrust and animosity—hallmarks of a toxic work environment—hangs over the workplace.

Eleven Unethical Persuasive Techniques

Though you may be tempted to do anything to achieve the result of convincing someone to act in a way that benefits you and your company or organization, certain techniques are inherently unethical. The danger in using them is that they will be seen for what they are—dishonest manipulation—and you’ll lose all credibility rather than achieve your goal. Just as we have a set of DOs for how to convince someone effectively in a decent way, we also have a set of DON’Ts for what not to do.

In Ethics in Human Communication, Richard Johannesen (1996) offers eleven points to consider when speaking persuasively. Do not:

1. Use false, fabricated, misrepresented, distorted or irrelevant evidence to support arguments or claims
2. Intentionally use unsupported, misleading, or illogical reasoning
3. Represent yourself as an “expert” (or even informed) on a subject when you’re not
4. Use irrelevant appeals to divert attention from the issue at hand
5. Ask your audience to link your idea or proposal to emotion-driven values, motives, or goals to which it is unrelated
6. Deceive your audience by concealing your real purpose, your self-interest, the group you represent, or your position as an advocate of a viewpoint
7. Distort, hide, or misrepresent the number, scope, intensity, or undesirable features of consequences or effects
8. Use “emotional appeals” that lack a supporting basis of evidence or reasoning
9. Oversimplify complex, multi-layered, nuanced situations into simplistic, two-valued, either/or, polar views or choices
10. Pretend certainty where tentativeness and degrees of probability would be more accurate
11. Advocate for something that you yourself do not believe in

If you tried any of the above tricks and were found out by a critical-thinking audience, you risk irreparable damage to your reputation personally and that of your company.

Though you might think that the above guidelines wipe out most of a marketer’s available techniques, in fact, they leave plenty of room for creative argument following the model for persuasive argument outlined in Chapter 8. After all, the goal of any such argument in a professional situation is to achieve a mutually beneficial result, one where both you and your audience benefit by getting something you both want or need in a free and honest exchange. Your audience will appreciate your fair dealing as you build your credibility or ethos.

Avoiding Fallacies

Logicians (experts on logic) have long pointed out a set of rhetorical tricks, called fallacies, that fraudsters use to convince others of an argument that has no merit on its own. Though these fallacies are typically deceptive in nature, they still manage to convince many people in ways that undermine their own interests. Whenever you see anyone resorting to these tricks, you should probably be suspicious of what they’re selling or getting you to support. To be ethical in the way you present arguments in professional situations and steer clear of being held under suspicion by a critical audience yourself, avoid the eight fallacies explored below in Table 14.1.

^{Table 14.1 | Logical Fallacies to Avoid}

Avoiding such false logic helps strengthen your own argument by compelling you to stay within the bounds of sound argumentative strategies.