This study provides composition instructors and their students with a more robust understanding of ethical argument, one that uses a narrative approach in order to make sense of how writers reason and argue by means of values, emotions, and particulars. Introducing the term "deliberative ethical argument," this dissertation argues that such argument merits more attention in composition pedagogy because of its potential to enrich students' argumentative agility and to address some instructors' concerns with argument as reductive, unengaging, dispassionate, or aggressive.

The dissertation draws on scholarship concerning legal narratives ("narrative jurisprudence") because legal narratives function in ways that are analogous to and participate in deliberative ethical arguments. In particular, the study first turns to Bernard Jackson's narrative approach to explain how specific narratives make ethical arguments; how narrative structure influences ethical arguments' plausibility; and how widely circulating narratives can clarify what a writer is arguing and its persuasiveness. The study thus complements argumentative instruction in composition textbooks, which often includes personal essays, judicial opinions, and other readings that make ethical arguments by means of narratives but overlooks these narratives' argumentative import.

Second, the study enhances the Jacksonian narrative approach in order to help students recognize and think through the implications of various argumentative strategies: representations of persons and emotions; strategic employment of multiple models of narrative structure; uses of narrative silence; and drawing on or challenging other popular narratives. Finally, the study considers how a narrative approach complements a common approach to writing instruction on ethical argument—the principles-and-values approach—thereby demonstrating how students might more rigorously and complexly think about and assess values in their own and others' arguments.

In terms of pedagogical applications, the narrative approach can assist students in making greater conceptual sense of specific instances of argument (e.g., details, word choices) and the wider work these instances accomplish (e.g., definitionally). It also can help students be more critical readers: of narratives, of what is implicit or absent in arguments, and of the relationships among multiple arguments. Finally, the narrative approach provides students with additional tools with which to argue with more diverse audiences.