Katz Summary

In his article The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust, Steven B. Katz analyzes ethical aspects of rhetoric. In particular, he performs the rhetorical analysis of a memo written in 1942 by a member of the SS to his superior, arguing that gassing vans needed to be enhanced in order to expedite the extermination of Jews. Katz argues that from the standpoint of technical communication, argumentation, and style the document is logically argued, technically accurate, and efficiently formatted. However, the problem with its rhetoric is that the ethos of expediency, characterizing most technical communication, in this memo is applied to the mass destruction of people (Katz). The author then attempts to show that the ethic of expediency underlying deliberative rhetoric of Western culture was partly responsible for the Holocaust.

According to Katz, the Nazi regime formed the “moral basis” of Holocaust by combining deliberative rhetoric, first systematized by Aristotle, with science and technology. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle views ethos as an essential link between deliberation and action: While logos addresses the means necessary to reach an end, pathos and ethos provide the impetus to act (Katz). Hence all deliberative rhetoric is concerned with decision and action, and technical writing, being embedded in deliberative rhetoric, always leads to action. According to Aristotle, rhetoric embraces both logic and ethics, but logic, i.e. expediency, becomes an ethical end in itself because deliberative rhetoric is just a means to what is most useful to do. Similarly, technical communication embraces the ethic of expediency because it is a technical means to some higher end. In Western culture, Aristotle’s ethics transformed into individual moral authority and utilitarianism (Katz).

Hitler used ethic of expediency to morally justify his actions: expediency is good as long as it serves the State. According to Katz, Hitler combined political expediency with technological one to create a new moral order. Hitler viewed conquering Europe, turning Russia into Germany’s colony, and exterminating Jews both as a political need and practical utility. Holocaust, he thought, would eradicate “social disease” and guarantee the purity, safety, and well-being of the Aryan race (Katz).

Hitler chose science and technology, “the technical instruments of power,” as a rhetorical basis of Nazi spirituality (Katz). Therefore, in Nazi Germany, just as in Western culture in general, science and technology were used as a powerful ethical argument for carrying out any program. Science and technology embody the ethos of objective truth, power, and capability. Hitler’s moral is only an extreme version of this ethics. In the memo under review, technological expediency subsumed political expediency and became an end in itself (Katz). Thus technology becomes political, and both politics and technology lead to power. Hitler believed in the efficacy of science and technology as the basis of ethics and politics (Katz). And Holocaust was the realization of this belief.

Finally, Katz questions whether expediency should be the primary ethical standard in deliberative discourse of Western civilization, deeply rooted in technology, and, therefore, of technical communication. He wonders if ethics should become part of rhetoric and writing courses. Because when expediency becomes an end in itself, and corporate, scientific, or technological goals are not rooted in humanitarian concerns, ethical problems arise (Katz).