Ethics and Professional Persuasion

Book excerpt: Examining the applied media ethics question of professional persuasion, this special double issue resulted from a colloquium and conference on allowable ethical limits of deception in professional persuasion. Participants were invited to reason their way toward a threshold that would define acceptable deception for a professional persuader in pursuit of favorable market and public opinion conditions for a client. As a whole, this issue covers a broad range of views and expressions of opinion that often come close to defining the threshold between morally acceptable and morally outrageous persuasion.