One alternative approach for assessing the moral quality of public argument in liberal democracy is narrative ethics, based not in procedural rationality but in narrative, with a concern for character and community. To be intelligible and practicable, such criticism shifts the focus of ethics from discrete decisions and actions to questions of character. In the narrative vision and language of character in community, the ethical dimension of texts can be objects of analysis genuinely open to debate in a way that sustains and extends the community of discourse and its critical capacities to hold texts and the characters they realize accountable. Rhetoric as a practice of accountability is designed to keep the conversation focused, and to keep it continually developing its capacities to give compelling and decisive accounts. This accountability is possible only because of the shift in focus of ethical criticism from procedural rationality to the narratives of vision and character in these communities of discourse. Ethical criticism works from an ethics that makes sense only in a rational world paradigm of communication, where the stories of character are central, and where only in its moral vision could they have their meaning and rationale. (Fifty-eight footnotes are appended.) (MM)