Concern for the Consequences of Your
Speech
Recognizing that your speech has consequences is another important
ethical responsibility. You cannot be indifferent to how your
speech may affect others, even though you may not know what all
the effects will be. A listener might repeat an amusing anecdote you
told, might feel more closely connected to someone whose life you
celebrated, might get a psychological lift from your upbeat tone,
or might change health insurance based on the reasoning in your
speech. The fact that others may repeat what you said in the speech
is all the more reason to be sure that what you have said is true! You
cannot be held legally responsible for such effects, of course, but high ethical standards
should lead you at least to think about how your speech might affect listeners.
Moreover, in any rhetorical situation, speakers and listeners together make up
a community united by experience, interests, and values. Speech is the glue that
holds a community together by making us aware of our common bonds and by
giving us a vision to which we might aspire. Ethical public speakers take their
membership in this community seriously, and they accept
their responsibility to
sustain the community by adhering to high ethical standards.11
It is easy to state general ethical standards such as these, but ethical issues
present themselves in almost every aspect of the speech. Often these are matters
involving
choices between competing ethical standards, and they often
have to be
resolved in the context of the specific case rather than by invoking
general principles.
For this reason, each chapter includes the feature “A Question of Ethics” to
help you recognize ethical issues throughout the speech process.