Page 115 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

82 Part 1 Foundations

lies ineffective. Consider voting as another example. You might think you don’t
need to vote because your own vote doesn’t make a difference. But imagine that
as a universal rule: “Since individual votes don’t matter, voting is unnecessary.”
If not voting were a universal rule, democracy would collapse. So Kant gives us
a test for specifi c ethical rules. To be an ethical principle, a rule or maxim must
be capable of being applied universally.
One of the most important ethical rules that Kant proposed relates directly to
the public speaker. Kant proposed the maxim “Act in such a way that you always
treat humanity whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as
6
a means, but always at the same time as an end.” One practical implication of this
maxim is that speakers should treat audience members with respect, not sim-
ply as a means of achieving their goals. Conversely, audience members should
respect and treat speakers as fellow human beings, not as objects of derision.
Obviously, then, tactics that deceive or demean either an audience or a speaker
would be unacceptable.
Kant’s categorical imperative is not without drawbacks. Consider truth tell-
ing. If lying is unacceptable in any circumstance, innocent people may suffer
as a consequence. Miep Gies, for example, lied to authorities throughout World
War II to protect the Jews she was hiding from the Nazis, including a young girl
named Anne Frank. But even us common folk sometimes tell “little white lies,”
especially when they are intended to protect the feelings of others. Although we
may be told as children, “honesty is the best policy,” we soon learn not to take
the saying too literally. Thus, we choose to be less than brutally honest when
asked to comment on a friend’s appearance or let our true feelings be known
about the friend’s latest “love interest.” In short, even the most highly ethical
among us are likely to occasionally tell something less than “the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth.”
Of course, one can reformulate Kant’s rule and say people shouldn’t lie except
under certain circumstances, such as when necessary to save lives or prevent
hurt feelings. But that creates another problem: How do we know which actions
fall under these conditions? Rachels points out a key problem with Kant’s uni-
versalism: “For any action a person might contemplate, it is possible to specify
more than one rule that he or she would be following; some of these rules will be
‘universalizable’ and some will not. . . . For we can always get around any such
rule by describing our action in such a way that it does not fall under that rule
but instead comes under a different one.” 7

Does the Good of the Many Outweigh
the Good of the Few?

Another ethical standard, utilitarianism, was proposed by English philosophers
utilitarianism
Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. Utilitarianism is
The philosophy based on
based on the principle that the aim of any action should be to provide the great-
the principle that the aim
est amount of happiness for the greatest number of people. These philosophers
of any action should be
sought the greatest good for the greatest number. And they specifi cally defi ned
to provide the greatest
amount of happiness for the good as that which creates happiness—“not the agent’s own greatest happi-
the greatest number of ness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether.” 8
people. This certainly is a useful standard for the public speaker. Most topics on
which you will speak are about choices and trade-offs. If we trim social spending