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Definition of Ethos and the Ethos-Ethics Connection

In Aristotle's Rhetoric (1991), ethos is the means of persuasion that receives the briefest treatment, appearing to be the most straightforward of the three pisteis. As Aristotle says, ethos is persuasion through the rhetor's good character and occurs "whenever speech is spoken in such a way as to make the speaker worthy of credence" (1.2.4). Comprised of arête, or virtue; phronesis, or wisdom; and eunoia, or good feeling, ethos is, in Aristotle's words, "the controlling factor in persuasion" (1.2.4). Rhetorical ethos resides in spoken speech, which, at this point of the Rhetoric, refers to thought and content, rather than style and delivery. In spite of this seemingly straightforward account, ethos is perhaps the most mutable proof of all (Baumlin, 1994, pp. xi-xxi).

While Aristotle also says that ethos is a product of speech (and not something that "exists" prior to the speech act), the construction of ethos through speech is thoroughly immersed within ethics and intrinsic to what Richard Lanham (1993) calls the "Q" question: the murky relationship between rhetoric and virtue. Ethos is not produced in an ethical vacuum. Instead, it is intimately linked to ethics. Aristotle highlights the dynamic relationship between ethos and ethics. In Nicomachean Ethics (1984), ethics is a performance, one that alternates between judging and doing. It is a judging in and of the doing, judging as doing. Ethics exist in the activity. A virtuous life involves the performance of virtuous acts (NE 1099a 10), not merely the understanding of virtuous acts. Whereas ethos establishes a credible way of seeing and understanding, ethics acts on that understanding by assessing that action, a double process that embraces understanding (ethos), doing, and judging. Capturing this transactivity of ethics, Aristotle explains that possessing virtue or understanding virtue is inseparable from acting virtuously: "for one who has the activity will of necessity be acting, and acting well" (NE 1099a 3-5). According to Aristotle, one cannot believe in ethics without also acting ethically. The transactive relationship between ethos and ethics emphasizes that one cannot craft an ethos without simultaneously crafting ethics. Such a fusion provides insight, then, not only into the poetics—the making—of the author position in digital poetics but also into the ethics of that making and that position.