Pathos and Ethos and Our Ethics

All parts of the rhetorical triangle are important. I don’t consider then all to be equally important though. Ethos is important because you cannot write a creditable piece without it. The strongest corner of the rhetorical triangle is pathos. Pathos is what will emotionally connect the audience to a piece of writing. This is very important. The pathos geared argument will interact with the audience’s morals and create conflictions within the contradictor. With both corners of the rhetorical triangle we must be trepidatious of their uses though. Ethos must be used in connection with your ethics because how can your audience trust your claims if you do not have credibility in making them. You want to stick to your ethics always because if your reputation for honesty is tarnished your piece will be more easily deflected as false. Pathos is even more important to be used within the standards of ethics. If we “turn the abstractions of logical discourse into a palpable and immediate story” (p75) and it is misleading or based on false “facts” it is completely unethical. Think of politics today. Did you know Bush got Cs in college?

“Confidential college transcripts and test scores obtained by the Washington Post reveal that neither presidential candidate, George W. Bush nor Al Gore, were shining students during their college days at Yale and Harvard, respectively. Although each earned respectable scores on the SAT college admissions test (a total of 1355 of 1600 for Gore and 1206 for Bush), neither did that well in their college courses. Both earned a mix of B and C grades. Bush's lowest marks were a 70 (of 100) in Sociology and a 71 in Economics, while his highest scores were High Passes in History and Japanese”

Bush at Yale
SAT Verbal Score 566 (of 800)
SAT Math Score 640 (of 800)
Undergraduate Transcript
Political Science/Govt classes 73 (of 100) in PS14a
71 (of 100) in PS13b
Pass in PS48


Source: Washington Post
March 19, 2000
http://www.insidepolitics.org/heard/heard32300.html
Unethical pathos arguments are used every day in the news and radio. Pathos is a powerful weapon in an argument, used to mislead is completely unethical and false.