pathos and ethos

Blog – What ethical responsibilities does an author have in using ‘ethos’ and ‘pathos’? Does our media, or our government, often live up to those ethical expectations.

As authors we posses the responsibility to use our writing arguments to promote truth through cooperative inquiry. We should not depict things using unreasonable and illogical use of ethos to sway the audience to a point of view to match the authors. Or, worse to do this for money, like a perverse mercenary of arguments who instead of arguing for what is true, only arguing for what pays the most. Another responsibility of the author is that they must not appeal unfairly to the emotions of the people who are their audience. For example bringing out emotions on unrelated topics, and exploiting them by misdirecting them to a different topic. If an argument is supported only by misinformation and emotions that are misplaced then as soon as people look deeper into the argument it will crumble and people will remain suspicious of the authors work in the future. Our media and our politics especially violate these rules. Political ads distorting the evidence are one of the worst sources of this.

I had 5 hours of sleep when i wrote this, so sorry, that will probably explain a bit.