Abstract

Abstract The key public health officials in the United States have been criticized for their work in the Ebola outbreak of 2014–15 by citizens, public officials, and health scholars from multiple disciplines. There are numerous grounds for these complaints, but underlying many of them was the perception of “failed leadership” that is here traced in substantial part to the embodiment of a positionality based in a presumed logos-based power instead of an ethos-based relationship between public health expert and public. Because any leader’s public ethos is dependent on the cultural ethos of audiences who promote them to leadership, this essay combines the Aristotelian topoi for ethos (goodsense, goodwill, goodness) and contemporary redefinitions of ethos as cultural-level phenomena (either “dwelling places,” ideologies, or ethical and cultural codes) to conceptualize ethos as the activation, rebuilding, or maintenance of relationships among different social positions: publics and institutions. The complexities of the Ebola epidemic—with its national and international dimensions and its partially faulty scientific grounding—make visible the predisposition toward positional gaps between publics and public experts regarding interests (eunoia) and goods (arête), with concomitant difficulties for the sharing of practical wisdom (phronesis). Aristotle was correct that such gaps cannot be bridged by logos, and the pervasive insistence on more logos as corrective therefore may contribute to public mistrust of all expertise.

Journal
Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Published
2019-06-01
DOI
10.14321/rhetpublaffa.22.2.0177
Open Access
Closed
Topics

Citation Context

Cites in this index (3)

  1. Poroi
  2. Rhetoric Society Quarterly
  3. College Composition and Communication
Also cites 30 works outside this index ↓
  1. 1. Much of the criticism regarding the response to the crisis in West Africa has focused on the World Health …
  2. 2. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Americans’ Ratings of CDC Down after Ebola Crisis, Gallup” November 20, 2014, http://ww…
  3. 5. For a summary of policies adopted by different agencies, see Tara Kirk Sell et al., “US State-Level Policy…
  4. 11. John C. McCroskey and Jason J. Teven, “Goodwill: A Reexamination of the Construct and Its Measurement,” C…
  5. 12. Carolyn R. Miller, “The Presumptions of Expertise: The Role of Ethos in Risk Analysis,” Configurations 11…
  6. 14. Isocrates, Antidosis; and Michael Leff, “Perelman, ad Hominem Argument, and Rhetorical Ethos,” Argumentat…
  7. 17. Clifford Geertz, “Ethos, World-View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols,” Antioch Review 17 (1957): 622–23.
  8. 20. The original debate about the merits of a "neo-Aristotelian" vs. "ideological" approach in contemporary r…
  9. Raymie McKerrow, "Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis," Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91-111
  10. Ronald Walter Greene, "Another Materialist Rhetoric," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21-24
  11. and Ronald Walter Greene, "Rhetorical Pedagogy as a Postal System," Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 434-43.
  12. 30. Judy Segal and Alan Richardson, “Introduction to Scientific Ethos; Authority, Authorship, and Trust in th…
  13. 37. Thomas B. Farrell and G. Thomas Goodnight, “Accidental Rhetoric: The Root Metaphors of Three Mile Island,…
  14. 48. Leah Ceccarelli, "Manufactured Scientific Controversy: Science, Rhetoric, and Public Debate," Rhetoric & …
  15. Jay D. Hmielowski et al., "An Attack on Science? Media Use, Trust in Scientists, and Perceptions of Global Wa…
  16. and Dan M. Kahan, "Climate-Science Communication and the Measurement Problem," Political Psychology 36 (supp.…
  17. 50. For research on the influence of such “parasocial” interactions via the mass media, see Edward Schiappa, …
  18. 51. Anne Kott and Rupali J. Limaye report the array of different voices in different sources: “Delivering Ris…
  19. 53. In addition to the literature cited above, see Lawrence J. Prelli, A Rhetoric of Science: Inventing Scien…
  20. 56. Jeffrey Schinske, Monica Cardenas, and Jahana Kaliangara, “Uncovering Scientist Stereotypes and Their Rel…
  21. 57. David C. Beardslee and Donald D. O’Dowd, “The College-Student Image of the Scientist,” Science 133 (1961)…
  22. and L. L. Rodriguez et al., "Persistence and Genetic Stability of Ebola Virus during the Outbreak in Kikwit, …
  23. 62. Erika Check Hayden, “Ebola Virus Lingers Longer than Scientists Thought,” Nature, September 13, 2016, 291–92.
  24. 67. Saul L. Miller, Jon K. Maner, and D. Vaughn Becker, "Self-Protective Biases in Group Categorization: Thre…
  25. Donghwan Yoon and Youn-Kyung Kim, "Effects of Self-Congruity and Source Credibility on Consumer Responses to …
  26. and Mariko Morimoto and Carrie La Ferle, "Examining the Influence of Culture on Perceived Source Credibility …
  27. 89. Wendy E. Parmet and Michael S. Sinha, “A Panic Foretold: Ebola in the United States,” Critical Public Hea…
  28. 90. Kott and Limaye, “Delivering Risk Information”; and Michelle Odlum and Sunmoo Yoon, “What Can We Learn Ab…
  29. 91. Brittani Crook et al., , “Content Analysis of a Live CDC Twitter Chat during the 2014 Ebola Outbreak,” Co…
  30. 92. Lisa Rosenbaum, “Communicating Uncertainty—Ebola, Public Health, and the Scientific Process,” New England…
CrossRef global citation count: 9 View in citation network →