Michael J. Hyde's pathbreaking study considers the relationship between the phenomenon of conscience and the practice of rhetoric as it relates to one of the most controversial issues of our time—euthanasia. Hyde investigates how the practice of rhetoric becomes a voice of conscience and influences the moral standards of individuals and communities. In doing so, he offers the first extensive treatment of Martin Heidegger's and Emmanuel Levinas's philosophical investigations of conscience and an in-depth analysis of the justifiability and social acceptability of euthanasia.

Hyde establishes the theoretical basis of his study by discussing and critically assessing the phenomenological theories of conscience set forth in the works of the two philosophers. To illustrate in concrete terms how the relationship between the call of conscience and the practice of rhetoric shows itself in everyday existence, Hyde surveys the moral discourse that informs the ongoing debate in the United States over euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. He focuses on a cluster of related topics that emerge from his discussion of the work of Heidegger and Levinas, including the phenomena of deconstruction and acknowledgment, emotion and the reconstructive power of language, and the discursive creation of heroes. Through these investigations Hyde accounts for some of the key definitions, arguments, and narratives that contribute to the rhetoric of the euthanasia debate, especially as the discussion has evolved since the late 1980s.

About the Author:Michael J. Hyde is the Distinguished University Professor of Communication Ethics at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He has taught at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and at Northwestern University in Chicago and is a fellow of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. The author of articles and critical reviews published in various scholarly journals and texts, Hyde is the editor of Communication Philosophy and the Technological Age, coeditor of Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader, and producer of the documentary film "Negotiating Death: A Rhetorical Perspective on Euthanasia." Hyde lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.