1. What is it?

Ethos is the attempt to persuade others by using an ethical appeal. It is done by making an argument sound fair, morally correct, practical, and credible.

In simple terms, it is the idea that messages work better when the audience admire, respect or like the messenger, or believe the messenger has ethical authority.

2. How is it made?

3. Examples

So, ultimately, we have a choice: we can shut down the site and increase our profits by outsourcing the work, or we can continue with this workforce. I say it is a decision we should make not by thinking with our wallets, but by thinking with our conscience, because this company is more than numbers in an annual report. It stands in the world, visible, respected, growing and changing. And like every soul, it must stand for something. And what that something is should be sticking up for the workers who have got us here and upon whom we rely, because that is the right thing to do.

The ethical discussion of three parent children has been raised increasingly often since the technique was pioneered. People question whether it is right or an instance of science providing the tools to ‘play god’. As a doctor and a representative on the Disabilities Counselling board, I have come into contact with the suffering and, sometimes, grief that comes from genetic concerns and fragilities. Yet I have also seen the strength, positivity and humanity that can grow from adversity. This puts me in a position to describe some of my concerns regarding this technology going forward.

4. Examples in literature

No Logo
by Naomi Klein

Excerpt from Introduction ‘A Web of Brands’:

There was a common element shared by all these scattered issues and campaigns: in each case, the focus of the attack was a brand-name corporation – Nike, Shell, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s (and others: Microsoft, Disney, Starbucks, Monsanto and so on). Before I began writing this book I didn’t know if these pockets of anticorporate resistance had anything in common besides their name-brand focus, but I wanted to find out. This personal quest has taken me to a London courtroom for the handing down of the verdict in the McLibel Trial; to Ken Saro-Wiwa’s friends and family; to anti-sweatshop protests outside Nike Towns in New York and San Francisco; and to union meetings in the food courts of glitzy malls. It took me on the road with an “alternative” billboard salesman and on the prowl with “adjusters” out to “jam” the meaning of those billboards with their own messages. And it brought me, too, to several impromptu street parties whose organizers are determined to briefly liberate public space from its captivity by ads, cars and cops. It took me to clandestine encounters with computer hackers threatening to cripple the systems of American corporations found to be violating human rights in China.
Most memorably, it led me to factories and union squats in Southeast Asia, and to the outskirts of Manila where Filipino workers are making labor history by bringing the first unions to the export processing zones that produce the most recognizable brand-name consumer items on the planet.
Over the course of this journey, I came across an American student group that focuses on multinationals in Burma, pressuring them to pull out because of the regime’s violations of human rights. In their communiqués, the student activists identify themselves as “Spiders” and the image strikes me as a fitting one for this Web-age global activism. Logos, by the force of ubiquity, have become the closest thing we have to an international language, recognized and understood in many more places than English. Activists are now free to swing off this web of logos like spy/spiders – trading information about labor practices, chemical spills, animal cruelty and unethical marketing around the world.
I have become convinced that it is in these logo-forged global links that global citizens will eventually find sustainable solutions for this sold planet. I don’t claim that this book will articulate the full agenda of a global movement that is still in its infancy. My concern has been to track the early stages of resistance and to ask some basic questions. What conditions have set the stage for this backlash? Successful multinational corporations are increasingly finding themselves under attack, whether it is a cream pie in Bill Gates’s face or the incessant parodying of the Nike swoosh – what are the forces pushing more and more people to become suspicious of or even downright enraged at multinational corporations, the very engines of our global growth? Perhaps more pertinently, what is liberating so many people – particularly young people – to act on that rage and suspicion?

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty

Excerpt from Introduction (translated from French):

Compared with previous works, one reason why this book stands out is that I have made an effort to collect as complete and consistent a set of historical sources as possible in order to study the dynamics of income and wealth distribution over the long run. To that end, I had two advantages over previous authors. First, this work benefits, naturally enough, from a longer historical perspective than its predecessors had (and some long-term changes did not emerge clearly until data for the 2000s became available, largely owing to the fact that certain shocks due to the world wars persisted for a very long time). Second, advances in computer technology have made it much easier to collect and process large amounts of historical data.
Although I have no wish to exaggerate the role of technology in the history of ideas, the purely technical issues are worth a moment’s reflection. Objectively speaking, it was far more difficult to deal with large volumes of historical data in Kuznets’s time than it is today. This was true to a large extent as recently as the 1980s. In the 1970s, when Alice Hanson Jones collected US estate inventories from the colonial era and Adeline Daumard worked on French estate records from the nineteenth century, they worked mainly by hand, using index cards. When we reread their remarkable work today, or look at François Siminad’s work on the evolution of wages in the nineteenth century or Ernest Labrousse’s work on the history of prices and incomes in the eighteenth century or Jean Bouvier and François Furet’s work on the variability of profits in the nineteenth century, it is clear that these scholars had to overcome major material difficulties in order to compile and process their data. In many cases, the technical difficulties absorbed much of their energy, taking precedence over analysis and interpretation, especially since the technical problems imposed strict limits on their ability to make international and temporal comparisons. It is much easier to study the history of the distribution of wealth today than in the past. This book is heavily indebted to recent improvements in the technology of research.

5. Tasks

Task 1: Construct a paragraph that establishes ethical credibility and begins an argument based on ethos.
Task 2: Write a short speech on a topic of your choice that uses ethos as its primary method of persuasion. Remember to stress your credibility as a speaker, and to show how this decision would create a common good or is ethically correct.