Ethos

The ideas that Wilson presents in the Fourteen Points speech all revolve around fairness and equality between nations. His ethical appeal is based on not playing favorites.

At the beginning of the speech, Wilson gives a version of the Golden Rule: "unless justice be done to others it will not be done to us" (Intro.7). When it comes to determining questions of territory overseas, Wilson pleads for:

A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims. (V.1)

He firmly believed that a long-lasting peace would have to be based on ethical negotiations…but the use of ethos may have been a miscalculation.

Wilson gambled that European leaders, exhausted by the long war, would want to establish new friendships. He appealed to ethics and fairness, but the French and the British were going more for the emotional angle (pathos). As British newspapers declared, they wanted to "Hang the Kaiser!" (source).

Yeah. It was definitely a case of pathos run amok.