The Ethics of Rhetoric is the Rhetoric of Ethics: Refusing the Call to Codification

Recent calls for a statement of ethics for RHM research claim that a statement is needed in order to have a "place at the table" for collaborative medical research. I argue two problems exist with this call. First, the motive for creating a statement reflects criticism of rhetoric's epistemic and ethical virtues raised by Dilip Gaonkar and Plato, respectively. Second, ethics statements do not adequately address the range of research practices found in transdisciplines like RHM. Drawing from RHM scholarship and my own experiences, I argue that these criticisms are unfounded and that RHM's ethical value is found in our analysis and criticism.