{"id":260,"date":"2011-02-04T10:17:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-04T16:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/?p=260"},"modified":"2011-02-04T10:17:00","modified_gmt":"2011-02-04T16:17:00","slug":"ethics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/2011\/02\/04\/ethics\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethics"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The last line of the Toastmasters Promise is “To maintain honest and highly ethical standards during the conduct of all Toastmasters activities<\/em>“.\u00a0 However, for some, ethics may not always be a sharp black-and-white line.<\/p>\n

For example, hopefully no one would forge a VP-Education signature on a project completion page for something that was never done.\u00a0 But what about holding an education award past June 30 “because it won’t help my club’s DCP score”?\u00a0 Or what about claiming credit for club officer training, when you went to training but arrived when it was nearly over?\u00a0 What about being a judge in a speech contest where your spouse is competing?<\/p>\n

We know that in the past, at least one district created “paper clubs” in order to meet their goals and be distinguished (they were disqualified).\u00a0 As the distinguished recognition programs have evolved, we’ve moved towards using easily-verified criteria that are harder to fake, and are less subjective.<\/p>\n

Ethics may not always seem to be black and white, nor does everyone give the same answer to a given situation.\u00a0 The surrounding context is often important as well, and the motivation for the action.\u00a0 There are entire college curricula<\/a> devoted to ethics, and degrees granted in various specialties, like healthcare ethics and business ethics.<\/p>\n

One method I like to use is “How would you feel if your actions were on the front page of the newspaper?”\u00a0 Would you feel a need to explain them?\u00a0 Would you be ashamed?\u00a0 If so, then you should reconsider.<\/p>\n

There’s also merely the appearance <\/em>of unethical behavior — appearances can be just as bad as actually being guilty of whatever is charged.\u00a0 It may be impossible to prove your innocence (or motivation), so you never want to have the question raised in the first place.<\/p>\n

I’m glad that ethical behavior is very rarely a problem in Toastmasters, but even one time is too much.\u00a0 Consider what you would do in a hypothetical situation before the real one comes up, so you can objectively consider your response.\u00a0 Feel free to answer the poll below, it’s as anonymous as I can make it, though your IP address is logged.\u00a0 Add your own experiences in the comments.<\/p>\n

[poll id=”6″]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The last line of the Toastmasters Promise is “To maintain honest and highly ethical standards during the conduct of all Toastmasters activities“.\u00a0 However, for some, ethics may not always be a sharp black-and-white line. For example, hopefully no one would forge a VP-Education signature on a project completion page for something that was never done.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[116,14],"class_list":["post-260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous-toastmasters","tag-ethics","tag-toastmasters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":657,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions\/657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}