SAINT JOHNcredible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others...his
character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses.
Secondly, persuasion may come through the hearers, when the speech stirs their
emotions [pathos]....Itistowards producing these effects, as we maintain, that
present-day writers on rhetoric direct the whole of their efforts.... Thirdly, persua-
sion is effected through the speech itself when we have proved a truth or an apparent
truth by means of the persuasive arguments suitable to the case in question [logos].^37Commentaries on Rawls’s work have consistently avoided the first two modes of persua-
sion identified by Aristotle,ethosandpathos, taking his work to be purely argumentative
and focusing exclusively on the third mode,logos. This is hardly surprising: what consti-
tutes the remarkable power of the character Rawls projects and the emotional appeal he
makes is also what renders these dimensions virtually invisible. That character and those
emotions are perfectly congruent with the arguments made: in other words, the propo-
nent of a politics based in reasonable conduct inflects his arguments with the force of his
own exemplary reasonableness so as to induce in his audience the desired form of reason-
able response. In the form of the prose, one finds projected what William James calls the
philosopher’s ‘‘essential personal flavor’’ or ‘‘philosophical temperament,’’ or what Stan-
ley Cavell designates the achievement of a distinctive ‘‘personal voice.’’ A large part of
Rawls’s saintly measure inheres in the force of his personal character and the power of
his emotional appeals to inspire conviction in a reader who would otherwise be unpre-
pared for it, thus producing a conversion of interest that cannot be explained with refer-
ence to argumentative force alone. In what follows, we will consider in turn examples of
the appeal of character and the appeal of emotion.
To begin with, the essential outlines of Rawls’s philosophical character can be speci-
fied rather easily. The foremost quality of his writing is to establish Rawls as a judicious
speaker with eminent good will and abundant common sense: (1) he constantly calls to
attention, explains, and duly weighs what he considers to be the most salient of opposing
viewpoints; (2) he is punctilious almost to the point of fault in crediting others for their
corrections of his errors and contributions to his understandings; and (3) he is painstak-
ing in giving the reader his own arguments and ideas in thoroughly analyzed form, couch-
ing them in brief sentences and short subsections that can be immediately grasped and
easily digested. This mixture of judiciousness, good will, and common sense is tempered
by a pronounced humility. Rawls even goes so far as to disavow any claim for originality
in his work, preferring that we see him only to be setting in order and clarifying certain
prominent elements of our tradition. ‘‘Indeed,’’ he writes in a striking moment of self-
effacement, ‘‘I must disclaim any originality for the views I put forward. The leading ideas
are classical and well known. My intention has been to organize them into a general
framework by using certain simplifying devices so that their full force can be appreci-
ated.’’^38 In the place of bold assertion, apt metaphor, piercing depth of vision, or fine
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