Stephanie Whitehead – Morality in Arguing Both Sides

I found it intriguing while I was doing my research for my paper that George A. Kennedy cited Sophism as the true advocate for rhetoric in politics in his book A New History of Classical Rhetoric. He pointed out that, while other philosophers taught rhetoric and its uses and wrote handbooks on the subject, Sophists were the first to bring it into the political arena. The other philosophers felt that it was okay to argue both sides of an argument in a philosophical sense and as a past time but to do so in court was to not search for the truth. This they felt was truly against the point of court politics. People viewed using rhetoric in courts as dressing up lies and making the weaker argument the stronger. This was not searching for the truth of the matter, which most at the time felt was the true purpose and goal of politics, especially in court. Sophists however believed that there was no truth and as such people had every right to argue both sides of a topic.