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As we’ve discussed, emotional appeals, when combined with ethos and logos, can be very effective. But emotional appeals can have a dark side, too. If you fail to establish a sound connection between your point and the emotion you are invoking, you may succeed in persuading some of your audience members, but your appeal will not be logical and will certainly not be ethical. This is unacceptable. History is replete with persuaders (witness Adolf Hitler) who used pathos to achieve unethical and even horrific ends. Recall the old adage “With great power comes great responsibility,” and don’t use emotional appeal to manipulate your audience.

Let’s take the HMO example previously discussed. The key to that appeal to pathos was that the speaker used sound reasoning to connect a relatively rare health emergency—a baby born with a damaged heart—with a broader challenge facing many potential patients: access to a wider selection of qualified physicians. If the speaker had failed to make the logical connection between the points, however, she would have been acting unethically. How might that happen? Suppose she could not provide evidence that access to a wide range of doctors would actually help families in Trey’s situation and other health crises as well. In that case, her speech would merely be an emotional ploy to manipulate the audience into accepting her argument.

There are numerous examples of fear appeals that are premised on “facts” that are blatantly untrue. One instance involved an anti-vaccination advocate who contended in 2009 that the H1N1 vaccine was part of an effort by the “global elite” to cut world population, asserting that the vaccine was “an extremely vicious cocktail of avian, swine, and human influenza viruses.”²³ Certain climate scientists lost credibility after inaccurately stating that the Himalayan glaciers, which feed many rivers in Asia, could melt by 2035.²⁴ Fear appeals that exaggerate the health consequences of drug use (such as claims that marijuana use is similar to playing Russian roulette) have rarely succeeded.²⁵ Indeed, poorly substantiated claims may even have a boomerang effect.²⁶ To present a convincing fear appeal and preserve your own ethos, you must substantiate the harmful consequence you predict with credible evidence.

Ethical speakers must also ensure that the language they select accurately describes the ideas they are discussing. Though compelling word choice can be used as an ethical persuasive tool, it can also cross the line into manipulation, exaggeration, or untruth. The loaded language fallacy is committed when emotionally charged words convey meaning that cannot be supported by facts presented by the speaker. For example, a speaker arguing against a proposal to tax sugar-sweetened beverages referred to the plan as a “healthy choice tax” and implied that consumers would pay sales tax on orange, apple, and grape juices, which were included in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recommendations for healthy eating.²⁷ The charge evoked anger in many audience members who agreed with the speaker that taxing such healthy choices would be absurd. The ethical problem was that the actual proposal only applied to sugar-sweetened fruit drinks, not to the 100 percent fruit juices recommended by the USDA.²⁸ Audience members were persuaded by the loaded language that described the proposal inaccurately, not by a credible argument against the true plan.