Explores the inescapable, irreconcilable role of virtue in rhetoric and writing instruction and the (im)possibilities of ethical response to student writing. Considers the place of values instruction in contemporary education by examining its historical precedents in classical rhetoric and its relationship to the liberatory, multicultural mission of contemporary composition studies. Questions postmodern reluctance to confront rhetorics of intolerance, understood as individual world views or competing ideological positions. (SG)