Ethics of Rhetoric (Joy/Campbell essays)

Through his essay "Why the Future doesn't need us", Bill Joy shows a lot about rhetoric. He shows every one of the rhetorical appeals. He uses Ethos by explaining his accomplishments to his reader so that the reader trusts his authority due to the his experience in the field of technology. He uses pathos when he give the example of many innocent people dying because of the creation of the nuclear bomb, which give the emotion of sadness and regret for what our country did. He uses logos by putting facts together and statistics, such as "technology is advancing at a staggeringly rapid rate", and coming up with the conclusion that technology is advancing so fast that soon robots will out number humans. Rhetoric is interesting because you can be arguing about the most illogical things and still create a good, convincing argument. It is interesting how Joy is able to weave his good argument, technology should be used and developed carefully, with his bad, robots will take over the world. One argument has a certain amount of validity whereas the other is nonsense. In this way rhetoric is only a tool but always leads to a well formed argument, even though it is not necessarily a good argument. Rhetoric does not have to be used correctly for it to function correctly. Because of this, more of the ethics of writing is upon the author, and on the process of rhetoric. Ethical writing leads to a proper use of Rhetoric, writing to argue a valid point. Whereas, using rhetoric improperly to argue for arguments sake is unethical.