One of the praises of the orator is that he can persuade...

One of the praises of the orator is that he can persuade audiences upon topics on which he himself is unskilled; Gorgias’ example is the success of Themistocles and Pericles in persuading the Athenians to build the docks, harbors, and defense works necessary for Athenian imperialism, although they themselves were politicians and neither naval nor military engineers. Socrates inquires whether the orator needs a knowledge of right and wrong, any more than he needs a knowledge of engineering.

Gorgias is not entirely consistent on this point; he appears to suggest that an orator will on occasion need to be a just man, but is vague as to how he may become just. Rhetoric itself he presents as a morally neutral technique which can be used for either right or wrong purposes: to blame a teacher of rhetoric for its misuse by his pupils would be as silly as to blame a teacher of boxing for the uses to which pupils may put their craft afterwards.

The idea that techniques of persuasion are morally neutral is a recurrent one in human society. But in order to hold that such techniques are neutral, it is necessary also to hold that it is morally irrelevant whether a man comes to a given belief by reasoning or in some nonrational way.

And in order to hold that this is morally irrelevant, one would have to hold also that a man’s exercise of his rationality is irrelevant to his standing as a moral agent, irrelevant, that is, to deciding whether he is entitled to be called “responsible” and his actions “voluntary.” Thus different elucidations of the concepts of responsibility and voluntary actions are presupposed by different moral attitudes to the standing of the techniques of persuasion.

The philosophical task of elucidation cannot therefore be morally irrelevant. And one of the more obscurantist features of a sophist like Gorgias-and indeed of his later successors among the electioneering politicians of liberal democracy, the advertising executives, and other open and hidden persuaders-is the willingness to assume a whole philosophical psychology.

It is this which leads Socrates to develop an argument to show that rhetoric is not a genuine art at all but a mere spurious imitation of an art. By this time Gorgias has been replaced in the argument by his pupil Polus. Polus reiterates that the moral point of the use of rhetoric is the acquisition of power. The successful orator can do whatever he wants.