I argue that the rhetoric of prophetic indictment is best understood as a sort of moral chemotherapy, a reaction to a potentially life-threatening distortion in ordinary, day-to-day moral discussion. Deliberative discourse is, in fact, that ordinary form of moral discussion. We reason from premises to conclusions, we analyze actions in terms of immediate goals, motives, and circumstances. In some cases, however, our ordinary form of discussion can be gravely corrupted, perhaps by the incorporation of a false major premise, perhaps because of the dependence on a mistaken minor premise. Such mistakes are made all the time in matters, small and large. In some few cases, however, the mistake is about such a fundamental matter that it threatens to undermine the very possibility of moral and political reasoning within the community. It is in these desperate situations that the stark, harsh focus of prophetic indictment becomes necessary. Prophetic indictment relentlessly–and sometimes ruthlessly–targets the corruption that, left unchecked, would undermine the possibility of sound moral deliberation more generally
Cathleen Kaveny, Prophecy Without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square, 287-288
